Hijjas Kasturi

Hijjas bin Kasturi (born 1936) is a Kuala Lumpur-based architect. Active for more than fifty years, he has been responsible for some of the most significant buildings in South East Asia, in the modern, postmodern, and deconstructivist styles. He is considered the father of Malaysian architecture of the second half of the twentieth century.

Hijjas was born in Singapore in 1936. His Chinese mother was raised in Indonesia and then married a Singaporean Javanese. He and went to Raffles Institute to continue his secondary education, and he was then granted a scholarship by the Australian Government to study at the University of Adelaide; he eventually graduated from the University of Melbourne. He moved to Malaysia in 1967 and founded the first professional degree program in Malaysia, The School of Art and Architecture at MARA Institute of Technology. In 1977, he founded his own practice, Hijjas Kasturi Associates Sdn (HKAS).

Hijjas was the architect of Wisma Equity one of the most prominent brutalist buildings constructed in Malaysia. Located at 150, Jalan Ampang, 50450, Kuala Lumpur, it is on a prominent site and was completed in 1982. It was officially opened in 1983 by Dato Elyasbin Omar. Wisma Equity is an 11 floors office building including a lower ground. It is made of exposed concrete, and the building appears to defy gravity and structure by becoming larger as it rises. In this regard, it bears a formal similarity to Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York City.

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