Ipoh market hall makes a bold and courageous statement of creating a powerful place within the city. Ipoh market hall aims to be a platform for diverse cultural art and local market to meet as well as for dialogue between local community and public. The design engages the city fabric as its primarily concept. The market hall is the heart of the marketplace in linking the old town and traversing alleyways, thereby inviting the public to 'simply stroll in' and provide a delightful place of interaction between public and the local community. The design may provides many platform for interaction and inspiration with dynamic layers of public engagement.
IPOH market hall also acts as a node, a natural confluence – an agora – along the linear city connector from the old town to the Jalan Yau Tet Shin. In creating this market place, IPOH market hall was a brilliant ‘party’ integrating and co-existing immediately with the existing urban grain, streets and pedestrian patterns as well as the life of the place – a convivial connectivity with its community-at-large. The IPOH market hall to emanates from its sensitive integration with the established pedestrian networks in its urban neighbourhood. Ground level is completely accessible to the pedestrians from all directions and it welcomes the public to use it as connections to the inveterate and enduring pedestrianised. The interfaces at ground level establish programmatic and visual links between these two entities. Split over the ground and lower ground levels, define a thickened ground zone, where public activities of the market and the town can take place.
The IPOH market hall has fashioned a noble space for the celebration of local market and cultural event. The architecture for the market hall presents a big paradigm shift and a milestone in how an market hall can engage the community. As one of the market situated in the Arts, Culture, Learning and Entertainment hub in the IPOH town, cultural district, the market has defined the country’s emergence as a global city of the cultural arts.
