In Search of the Generic: Kuala Lumpur is a city experienced from the car, windows rolled up with the AC blasting. From the crawl of a sixteen lane traffic jam you have time to see, and appreciate, the buildings on show. Columnar buildings clad in reflective glass, barrel vaulted hawker stalls, and forty story condos topped with electric blue mansard roofs. A formal playground, a local application of architectural elements so earnest it could almost be mistaken for irony. Instead, executed with a sincerity bordering on naiveté, these signifiers and architectural shorthands have been liberated from the tongue-in-cheek quips of the Postmodern projects and given a new life in KL.