Abstracts

“There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.”

Winston Churchill

. This study embarked upon a premise that considers architecture of building as a dynamic phenomenon. A building from its conception is susceptible to change due to various reasons. An historical building that is several hundred years old must have undergone through changes due to political, social, religious and most importantly functional reasons. Hence capturing building and its dynamic evolution is necessary to appreciate its architecture as well as its heritage value. Whereas the conventional method of fact based historiography only captures the building in particular moment. Hence it makes architectural historians to become perplexed over to which particular moment to be documented. It is a great challenge for the architectural historians to bring back this dynamic characters of the building that are mostly inconspicuous in nature from this point of time. In this situation the concept of digitizing the historical data and 4D capturing emerged. The current research would venture into this emerging idea to record the architecture of the early period. This paper highlights mainly on historical lacunae and anomalies demonstrated by different historical narratives regarding the earlier state of the Istana Jahar a Malay Royal palace, in Kota Bharu, Kelantan. Being a monument that belongs to the flourishing phase of a society, traditionally this palace architecture certainly played a role as a stage for religious and political pageantry as well as different royal performances. As architecture it works as complex process of interaction of different layers of ideas, agendas and authorship through time. This necessitates a proper a tool for historians to capture this process of interaction and preserving/ conserving the memories of this building. By citing the case study of Istana Jahar, this paper thus argues for the need of digital capturing of the chronological narrative of a historical building along with the facts to get a complete picture of its architecture.