d+a | Issue 116 • Jun/July 2020

/ COMMERCIAL / 24 WITH ITS EXPRESSIVE SILHOUETTE, THE NEW EXTENSION OF THE BOH TEA CENTRE BRINGS IMAGINATION AND CHARACTER TO THE LARGEST TEA PLANTATION IN MALAYSIA. JEWEL ON THE HILL WORDS NIZAR MUSA / PHOTOGRAPHY LIN HO (H.LIN HO PHOTOGRAPHY), LAWRENCE CHOO JUN SHING (PIXELAW PHOTOGRAPHY) O verlooking the verdant Sungei Palas valley, the BOH Tea Centre has, for well over a decade, been a favourite attraction in Cameron Highlands. Drawing visitors and tea lovers near and far, the acclaimed 145m-by-9m-long building of concrete, steel, glass and timbre remains to this day a delicately-balanced architecture of unapologetic materiality and considered flourishes. The Centre’s design has since been revisited, expanded to meet new requirements. Where a legacy vocabulary could have been persistent, there was an opportunity for a trajectory shift. And seize it, the architects did. 1. Constructed perpendicular to the original building, the BOH Tea Centre extension interprets the undulation of the surrounding hills through its irregular folded roof structures. THE CHALLENGE OF SUCCESS Both the award-winning Phase 1 building and its Phase 2 extension were designed by renowned local practice ZLG. “It’s a very linear building, based on a simple concept of sustainability, no cut-and- fill, and elevated,” describes Susanne Zeidler, Partner at ZLG, of their original piece. “It was very site-specific, (we knew) where we wanted to have the views, where we wanted to have the main cafeteria, all connected back to the existing offices.” The request to enlarge the centre would come 10 years later, finally completing in 2018. But adding to such a successful and much-lauded icon posed its own concern; the 1