在工業場域展開第三種想像！CKHO Architect 結合科技、土地意識與集體文化，打造未來公共生活的實驗性場域：The Bayana
Bayana Parc．The calming water feature and lush landscaping create a serene pocket of nature within the industrial setting. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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In Penang’s Bayan Lepas Free Trade Zone, a district shaped by factories and semiconductor industries, spaces for leisure and dining have long been absent. To address this gap, the Penang Development Corporation released three narrow strips of reserved land for adaptive reuse. The commission was awarded to Pentamaster Group, a company rooted in automation technology, which set out to venture beyond infrastructure into the realm of spatial and lifestyle development.
The result was Bayana—a five-year initiative comprising three distinct but connected projects: Food Bayana, a hawker-inspired food hub; Bayana Parc, a single-tenant restaurant pavilion; and the upcoming Bayana Hub, a multi-storey complex scheduled for completion in 2025.
Together, they form a new public axis within the industrial zone, offering spaces that merge commerce, culture, and daily life.
Food Bayana & Bayana Parc．Bird Eye View (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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The first challenge lay in the site itself. Once reserved for road expansion, the land was narrow and elongated, lined with mature trees and cut through by underground utilities. “Standing there on the first visit, we asked ourselves: what can this odd, leftover strip of land become?” recalls Ho Chin Keng, principal of CKHO Architect. “The challenge was how to transform a difficult site into something meaningful — to make the limitations themselves a design driver rather than an obstacle.”
Rather than clearing the ground, CKHO chose to work with its irregularities, treating the trees and proportions as the project’s starting point. This philosophy became the foundation of the Bayana series: to reframe constraints as opportunities, and to reconstruct the relationship between people, nature, and space within an industrial environment.
Food Bayana．Main Entrance Door：Façade Expression — an interplay of brick, steel, and glass louver windows that balance transparency and shading. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
Bayana Parc．Framing Nature (Photo by CKHO Architect)
Food Bayana．East Entrance Statement (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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Food Bayana occupies an unusually narrow site, stretching 243 meters in length but only 15 meters wide, flanked on both sides by mature trees. What might have been seen as an awkward remnant of land revealed instead an overlooked sense of nature. For CKHO Architect, the task was not to impose on the site but to respond to it. “Rather than seeing these trees as obstacles, we treated them as the defining identity of the project,” says Ho.
The first step was what became the largest tree transplanting exercise in Penang at the time. Over six months, 38 mature trees were carefully relocated and reorganized, turning them into anchors for the entire scheme. More than a food court, the project was conceived as a shaded street, a linear promenade where dining unfolds under the canopy of trees.
The plan divided the site into two ends with a central open atrium that rises in double height. This node breaks up the long distance of circulation, transforming the walk into a sequence of pauses and gatherings, while also establishing a system of natural ventilation and shading guided by the trees themselves.
The Largest Tree Transplanting Project at Penang (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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On the ground floor, the layout accommodates hawker-style food stalls, service, and back-of-house functions, with a central double-height atrium acting as the main ventilation spine. Dining areas are placed on the upper floor, creating a vertical separation that demanded careful planning. In response to Penang’s multicultural food culture, the stalls were organized into two distinct clusters—halal on one side and non-halal on the other—ensuring smooth operations without interference between the two systems.
The decision to locate seating upstairs introduced a new challenge: how to deliver food from ground-floor stalls efficiently and accurately without disrupting circulation. This became the catalyst for technology to play a key role.
Food Bayana was thus conceived as Penang’s first semi-automated food centre. Developed with the client’s expertise in the automotive sector, the system integrates robotic runners, overhead tracks, vertical lifts, and heated lockers. Orders are collected at the stalls, travel along dedicated tracks, and are lifted to the upper level, where meals are deposited into warming pigeonholes for diners to retrieve.
“The robotic delivery system not only solved the logistical challenge of the building’s long, narrow footprint,” Ho explains, “but also turned Food Bayana into a living machine, where architecture and technology work seamlessly together.”
Food Bayana．A dynamic interplay of structure, light, and movement created within the communal heart of the building. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
Seatings & Food Warmer (Photo by Hey!Cheese)
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Technology here is not a spectacle. It acts as an enabler, supporting operations, reinforcing cultural continuity, and shaping the patterns of everyday life.
Rather than traditional fit-outs, the interior design focuses on creating functional spaces that address the site’s elongation and seamlessly incorporate natural elements into the core design language. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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On the other side of the site lies Bayana Parc, conceived as a quieter, more distilled counterpart to Food Bayana. Occupying an elongated plot of 80 by 15 meters, it differs from the hawker-style food court by housing a single operator within a stand-alone restaurant pavilion. Here, the focus shifted toward atmosphere, carving out a softer architectural frame against the hard industrial backdrop of the Free Trade Zone.
The design continues CKHO’s exploration of linear sites by placing a central courtyard through the heart of the building. This spine not only organizes circulation but also moderates ventilation, daylight, and greenery. Crossing the interior, the courtyard draws in plants and natural light, disperses heat, and encourages cross-ventilation, creating a passive cooling system that responds to the tropical climate. “From Penang’s traditional architecture we learned that a courtyard is never merely ornamental. It is a structure that carries the climate wisdom of place,” notes Ho.
Though expressed in a modern architectural language, Bayana Parc is rooted in this local precedent, translating the heritage logic of the courtyard into a contemporary industrial context.
Bayana Park．The interplay of brick, concrete, and steel, left in their honest state, creates an industrial yet grounded architecture where material authenticity defines the building’s identity. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
Bayana Parc．The integration of nature with brick and steel elements fosters a sense of tranquillity and connection to the environment. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
Bayana Parc．Courtyard Oasis (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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The architecture remains deliberately simple and adaptable, offering a clear framework without prescribing a fixed identity. What is emphasized instead are climate, materiality, and scale, shaping an open atmosphere that invites future tenants to interpret the space while quietly engaging with its industrial surroundings.
Photo by Hey!Cheese
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From the outset, sustainability was embedded as a core principle of Food Bayana’s design. It was not treated as an afterthought but as the foundation for how the building would operate and adapt to its challenging conditions. “One of our key objectives was to pursue Malaysia’s Green Building Index (GBI) Gold certification, making Food Bayana the first commercial food centre in the country to aim for this target,” says Ho.
The strategy encompassed a wide spectrum: site conservation, energy efficiency, water management, material selection, and the integration of technology. Standard measures such as solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and high-efficiency systems were included, but the most symbolic gesture lay in the relocation of 38 mature trees. Over six months, these trees were carefully transplanted and reorganized, becoming part of the shading system while also restoring ecological continuity to a strip of land that had long been overlooked.
Food Bayana．Facade：The facade serves as a backdrop to lush greenery, enhanced by textural details. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
Bayana Parc．Seamless Threshold：Dining space flows alongside planted courtyards, blurring the line between interior and exterior. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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CKHO approached energy efficiency by returning to first principles. The 60,000-square-foot building is cooled by a single 20hp mini chiller, paired with an evaporative cooling system, large mechanical fans, and operable glass louvers. This hybrid network of natural and mechanical ventilation drastically reduces energy use while maintaining the comfort required in a tropical climate. The approach demonstrated that simple system integration can often prove more effective than technical complexity.
Another distinctive experiment came in the form of the semi-automated food delivery system, developed by the client and integrated by the design team. Incorporating overhead tracks, vertical lifts, heated lockers, and robotic distribution, the system minimizes disruption across floors while maximizing operational efficiency. Although not part of standard green building criteria, it reflects another dimension of sustainability: reducing labor demands and enabling the building to perform as an intelligent, efficient public machine.
For CKHO, sustainability was never about achieving points or labels. “It should not be reduced to a checklist of regulations, but understood as a condition of daily life that people can feel and intuitively recognize,” says Ho. In this sense, sustainability is not abstract—it is experienced when people eat, walk, or rest under the shade of trees within the building.
Photo by Hey!Cheese
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Public buildings inevitably serve a diverse and complex community of users. Architects cannot predetermine how such spaces will be used, nor can they control every detail of behavior. The challenge lies in shaping strategies of layout, circulation, and atmosphere so that the building becomes an open container—functional enough to support daily needs, yet flexible enough to invite participation, foster long-term connections, and enable a shared everyday life.
Raw concrete and brick define the dining area, balanced by openness, greenery, and communal vibrancy. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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Food Bayana functions as more than a place to eat. It extends dining into a shaded, open-air street, where circulation, sightlines, and seating arrangements encourage encounters that would otherwise remain separate. The upper-level dining platforms add another dimension, creating vertical layers of interaction and observation. In this way, architecture becomes an active participant in shaping social exchange.
On a broader level, Food Bayana represents CKHO’s redefinition of what public dining architecture can be in the city. It interweaves local cultural practices and climatic responses with innovation and sustainability, merging function and meaning into a cohesive whole that contributes to a new kind of urban culture.
This is a building in constant use, a living space that is continuously shaping the everyday landscape of Penang’s future.
The open design, combined with natural ventilation, creates a comfortable and engaging dining atmosphere. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
The courtyard greenery harvests natural daylight into the spaces. (Photo by CKHO Architect)
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For CKHO Architect, the challenge of Bayana was never limited to the constraints of its site. The greater uncertainty lay in how the projects would ultimately be used, and whether they could forge a genuine connection with daily life, questions that no drawing could fully answer.
Over time, the response has come from the community itself. Since opening, Food Bayana has been embraced by office workers from the Free Trade Zone and residents from nearby neighborhoods, each finding a new rhythm of everyday life within its shaded spaces. People move through, linger, dine, and interact, turning the original intent of the design into lived experience.
Bayana has therefore become an experiment with lasting resonance. It shows that even in the most unpromising conditions, design can transform a site into a public setting rich in social and ecological value, as long as it begins with the ground, engages with culture, and accepts uncertainty. For CKHO, the lesson is clear: architecture does not end at completion. Its true strength lies not in being sealed as a finished object, nor in how polished or innovative it appears, but in whether it retains enough openness and elasticity to remain a story in continuous development.
Photo by Hey!Cheese
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