A Truly Asian Home: Accommodation of Traditional Domestic Culture within the Modern Apartment Housing

In many fast-growing Asian cities, modern collective housing has become a fittest house prototype to meet the increasing demand. The transition from the traditional detached house to multi-story apartments has changed not only the housing form but the local people’s domestic living pattern. Modern dwellers use more furniture than before and domestic activities rely more on home appliances. On the surface, all these changes seem to have been accepted and settled as a new life style. However, it is still found that there exists the inherited customs of spatial behaviour that counteract these modern effects. This paper takes three fast-grown Asian cities, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, and Seoul as examples to illuminate this tension between the old and new life styles. It is suggested that more careful consideration should be given to the planning of collective housing for the sustainable domestic environment for Asian citizens.