From 6 to 11 November 2026, Kuala Lumpur-based PAB Architecture joins nine fellow Malaysian practices at KOCA in Kamata, Tokyo, for Kata-Kata カタカタ: Form. Way. Story (型・方・語) of Tropical Malaysian Architecture, part of Malaysian Architecture Week (MAW) Tokyo.
One word, two languages
In Malay, kata-kata means words: the stories passed between people. In Japanese, the same sound can be written three ways: 語, story; 方, way; and 型, form. The exhibition reads them in the order a building comes into being. First the story of where an architect comes from, then the way they practise, and finally the form they build.
Each participating practice brings two things to Tokyo: an origin story, told in its own words, and a single work, presented as a physical model. In Japanese, an architectural model is 模型 (mokei). The character for form sits inside the word itself.
Ten practices take part: BEu Tan Architect, O2DA Architect, DEKODA Architects, DRTAN LM Architect, Firadaus Khazis Architect, Razin Architects, LCSC Architects, mentahmatter design, MJ Kanny Architect and PAB Architecture. Together they span generations, from established names to emerging studios, and every corner of how Malaysians build in the tropics.
Words for the exhibition
The title and theme for the exhibition were mooted by our Director, Ar. David Teoh, who has been Editor-in-Chief of Architecture Malaysia since 2023. He proposed Kata-Kata (カタ・カタ) as a play on words common to both languages, and went on to write the exhibition’s introduction and its principal narrative framework: story, way and form. As he puts it, Malaysia has no single architectural identity. Its strongest shared identity lies in individual architects, each resolving the same problem: how to build in the tropics.
Antara アンタラ: a tropical building with two roofs
PAB presents Antara, an unbuilt clubhouse beside the water, designed in 2023 as an exercise in tropicality. Antara is Malay for “between”. In his exhibition text, David describes the design:
The setting is a golf landscape. The manicured lawn is alien to the tropics: a Scottish idea of landscape, cut into tropical ground and kept green by constant work. Mature trees and a water inlet complete the picture. It is beautiful, and it is borrowed.
The clubhouse had to be two things at once: a place to inhabit and look out from, and a building worth looking at. The landscape was borrowed from Scotland; the building borrows it again, as a view. So we drew a roof, a refuge overlooking the prospect of the greens. It is large and low, with deep overhangs and an edge as thin as we could make it. From across the course, the gesture is dramatic, yet appropriate.
Up close, however, the tropics test it. Rain here rarely falls straight down; driven by the wind, it reaches deep beneath even the most generous eave. So we introduced a second, lower roof beneath the first. Japanese temples know this device as 裳階 (mokoshi), the lower skirt roof that gives the East Pagoda at Yakushi-ji its layered silhouette. What began as a correction turned out to have a lineage. It keeps the rain out and lets the light in. Between the two roofs is where the building breathes.
Beneath them, two climates live side by side. An air-conditioned hall holds weddings of every community, for two hundred guests. A naturally ventilated café, closer to a kopitiam than a country club, holds golfers and the people waiting for them.
The first roof was a gesture. The second was a conversation with the weather. In the space between the two roofs, I recognise the Malaysia I grew up in.
— Ar. David Teoh, Director, PAB Architecture
The model at KOCA makes that gap between the two roofs its subject.
Fifty years of healthier architecture
Since 1974, PAB has shaped how Malaysia builds for health. Our work includes the National Heart Institute (IJN), the first hospital in Malaysia fully designed by a Malaysian health facility planning team; the National Cancer Institute in Putrajaya; and Cyberjaya Hospital, Malaysia’s first GBI Platinum-rated public hospital and a winner at the Design & Health International Academy Awards 2026. Public healthcare on public budgets has taught us to do more with less, and to give every building generosity, delight and meaning beyond its brief.
Antara carries that thinking to a new audience in Tokyo, a city whose architecture has long shaped ours. In the 1990s, PAB collaborated with the eminent Tokyo architect Kisho Kurokawa on the masterplan and station at KL Sentral. That work grew into expertise in public transport: in the last decade, PAB has worked on MRT stations (Sungai Buloh to Semantan) and designed two major MRT depots at Sungai Buloh and Kajang.
A talk at Nihon University
On Monday 9 November, David will speak at Nihon University. He will share his thoughts on healthier ecologies, the tropical climate and the Malaysian architectural context, through Antara アンタラ and other work by PAB.
Visit
- Where: KOCA, Kamata, Ōta City, Tokyo
- When: 6–11 November 2026
- Opening, Friday 6 November: press preview 5 pm, lecture and talk 6 pm, official launch by the Malaysian Ambassador to Japan, H.E. Dato’ Ahmad Rozian Abd Ghani, 7 pm, followed by a reception
If you are in Tokyo, we would be glad to see you there. Programme details are on the Malaysian Architecture Week portal. Follow along on Instagram at @pab.my and @ar.davidteoh.
日本語の概要
マレーシア建築ウィーク東京の展覧会「カタカタ ― 型・方・語」が、2026年11月6日から11日まで蒲田のKOCAで開催されます。PABアーキテクチャーは、熱帯の気候と向き合う二つの屋根をもつクラブハウス「アンタラ」の模型を出展します。11月9日には、ディレクターのデイビッド・テオが日本大学で講演します。
Work with us
Planning a healthcare, public or civic project? PAB’s architects, health facility planners, town planners, landscape architects and interior designers work as one transdisciplinary team. We would be glad to talk. Contact us.
About Ar. David Teoh
Ar. David Teoh Wui Leng is a Director of PAB Architecture, where he leads the practice’s mission of Healthier Ecologies. Born in George Town in 1984, he studied architecture at the University of Melbourne, receiving the People’s Choice Award of the 2008 Glenn Murcutt Student Prize. He practised with COX Architecture in Melbourne before joining PAB in 2013, and became a Director in 2021.
Alongside practice, Teoh writes, curates and speaks widely on architecture. He is Editor-in-Chief of Architecture Malaysia, where he champions emerging and lesser-known architects, and Honorary Secretary of the Malaysian Institute of Architects (PAM), which named him one of its 40 Under 40 Emerging Architects in 2023. In 2026 he served on the juries of the INDE.Awards, the FIABCI Malaysia Property Award and the Malaysian Landscape Architecture Awards (MLAA).
His work and writing return to one question: how Malaysians can build healthier, more generous places in the tropics.