most schools have online application now. please visit the respective postgraduate section on their websites.

since UTM is highly competitive, applicants needed to apply early. at the moment, the september intake is full, while feb 2017 is filling up fast. i cant say for the other universities, but i imagine similar competitions all over.

for sept 2016, yes.

please note that we dont usually close applications. UTM normally let the application open all year round. however, this time we had to close it due to an unusually high number of applicants, it's quite impossible to process them all.

I'd like to add. The primary driving force is, as evil as it sounds, money.

This is gonna be involving so many aspects of the 'system' including the construction industry, money game, politics, human factor, population etc, I'm not sure I could make myself clear so, let's start.

First off, Malaysia is still demanding a lot of affordable housing. Like many Asian countries, population growth is very rapid due to ethnic and religious reasons. For some, contraception for some reason is forbidden; then there are some family insist they have at least a boy or keep on trying. Seemingly most of the modern problems are due to uncontrollable population growth and ineffective means to cope with it. Then the deep-rooted thought of owning a house (at least for Chinese) is a primary life goal has keep the demand for real estate growing.

In a market where the demand forces are strong, with scarce supply (of land and units), real estate prices goes up. This presents a very profitable business opportunity for many people. As an essential of life, someone's going to pay for it no matter how expensive it got. In order to squeeze the opportunity and money from an average citizen's account, and the governments attempt to house more people in urbanised area where land are limited, the option is go high-rise. The capitalists with financial capability are able to initiate projects and became property developer.

In a country where the government policy is to ensure citizen are not well-educated and not well-informed (so they could carry on being deceived and vote for the ruling party) has resulted in a very dumb population, being unable to progress civilisation up to pace with our neighbouring countries like Singapore and Japan. Hence Malaysia is still stuck in an era whereby workforce are cheaply paid and no respect given. This translates to a labour-intensive culture, which applies to the foreign construction workers and professional consultants. In a market which is primarily dominated by developer corporations, their interest lies only in profit they get from selling real estates.

For a typical project, in order to maximise profit, they start the projects by taking the architect with the lowest fee and team of consultants regardless of their competency. Although there is a scale of minimum fees, many disgraceful architects in Malaysia however decided to charge ridiculously low fees on projects in order to cash in more projects. In order to save costs running the practice, usually it is the lowly paid graduates or interns doing all the works with unpaid overtime to get the job done. The workload and the stress associated with meeting deadlines and complying to building codes and hundreds of requirements from some council departments which you may never heard of, ultimately resulted in time-saving measures, which in-turn discourages innovation in practice.

In addition to more time (money), expertise of knowledge (money) and effort (money) to produce, innovation or bold design decisions requires risk-taking. On risk, property developers in Malaysia are always conservative as they need to make sure their pigeon-holes sells (money). It is the consultants who certify a building fit for occupancy, whereas local council and the developer are completely not liable. To architects and engineers, the risk lies not just in practicality and aesthetics but also in liability (money, license and jobs that are lost when you lost your license and/or engaged in an extended lawsuit, which drains money). Hence, the consultants will/can only rely on the done-and-tested way of doing things. And the architect became mere facade decorator.

You mentioned competition? How often do you see a major project in Malaysia has carried out an architectural competition? There is only financial competition whereby you bid lower than your fellow contemporaries, if the project is not awarded to cronies of the owner.

It all boils down to money. Everyone seemed to be happy with this outcome. Architects are happily undertaking jobs at record low fees. Client's are either delaying the already low payments (if they are paying at all). Architecture schools happily taking students (and fees) turning them into graduates which feeds into a vicious circle. LAM and PAM appears to be content with the current situation (if they are actually aware of it otherwise being too busy having dinner parties ...to a point that, I wonder why do local universities conduct architecture courses anyway?