On a random drive through the metropolis of Jakarta you can encounter structures ranging from houses built by their owners to shopping malls, to neo-Victorian villas, to skyscrapers, all in close proximity and seemingly, all the result of an absence of urban planning. The urban and architectural transformation of the Indonesian capital, whose population has grown from 4.8 million in 1975 to
a projected 17.5 million by 2015, gives the impression that when it comes to architecture, anything goes. Given Jakarta? closeness to the Equator, architects have had to react to its hot and humid tropical climate - the daily temperature ranges from 25-38°C - by internalizing living, leisure, and work, with shopping malls as the epicentres of urban life and interior design ingenuity. Yet, the first signs of a more sustainable and contemporary approach to architecture are beginning to show through.
That shift in approach has been recently recognized by the jury of the Indonesian Architecture Institute (IAI) 2008 Awards, a triennial prize for Indonesia? finest architecture, and of which I was part. The jury was headed by Andra Matin, founder and principal of Andra Matin Architects, recently featured in Wallpaper as one of the ?01 most exciting new architects in the world? To Matin, ?ropical design is more like an experimental field rather than an established style, leading to an architecture that tries to find the best answer to ever-varying questions. On being an architect in Indonesia, Matin declares, Our culture is like an unpolished diamond, and I believe this allows too many possibilities. Because building regulations aren? strict and the Indonesian culture is so diverse and rich, one has the freedom to put one? inspiration to work. Contemporary Indonesian architecture, reflecting the hundreds of cultures and the thousands of islands in the archipelago, balances attention to local conditions and global inspiration.
This year's IAI Gold Medal Award was granted to Adi Purnomo, who represents a new generation of Indonesian architects. His studio, mamostudio, is a deliberately low-staffed practice: small studio is like a mosquito that touches the surface of water without being immersed in it, the architect, who is also a writer, tells, but on the other hand, its level of professionalism could be questioned. Therefore, I am experimenting with the productivity of this kind of studio model. During the past decade, his office has been active in designing villas in Indonesia ranging in scale and budget, but being part of the ORDOS100- project in China he grasps the opportunity to test his ideas in other contexts. His work is centered around the desire to counteract the questionable architectural and urban development of Jakarta, thereby exploring the limits of the climatic constraints. A lot of the villas built by mamostudio in Jakarta are based on the concept of ?he single cell.?As Adi Purnomo explains, ?very building of every size is an idiom for the single cell with a chance to mutate as a green space generator. Landscape is an important tool to merge with the architecture it creates open possibilities. Recently the Puri Buana, located in one of Jakarta? neo-Victorian housing enclaves, was finished, and is emblematic for his philosophy; designed as a spatial merger of vegetation and habitation, the villa pushes the boundaries and challenges the notions of what we understand today by sustainable or green architecture.
The following four recent projects, all located in Jakarta, showcase the diversity of styles being explored by a generation of young and contemporary Indonesian architects. A low-budget house, an office based on the principles of modernist architecture, an office organized around a sustainable slope, and a villa/studio/gallery for a photographer are some of the recent contributions to the concept of tropical design.
Wisnu House by Ahmad Djuhara _ Ahmad Djuhara, partner in Djuhara+Djuhara, established his renown as an architect a couple of years ago with the design of the Steel House, which became an icon for a new generation of Indonesian architects. The project is
an industrial-looking three-story house in a housing complex in North Jakarta, and stands on a plot of land that was raised about 70 cm higher than the street level. To provide balance for its elevated appearance, the architect designed a front staircase, which is also the main entrance, with a rich-toned wooden shield made of bars and arranged horizontally. One of the architect? ambitions was to provide all rooms with natural light during the day, and with good air circulation. In an interview in 2002, the architect stated that he had "designed the house to provide a cheap solution for the middle class living in the capital? urban areas. Equally intriguing is one of Ahmad Djuhara? most recent buildings, for a client seemingly positioned at the opposite end of the urban society of Jakarta. This time, the architect was again asked for a cheap solution. Ruma Baja Wisnu is a 176m2, low-budget house designed on a tiny L-shaped, sloped plot on the capital? outskirts. The architect has turned the disadvantage of the plot into a spatial advantage. The house is 4m-wide and upon entering it, one is immediately faced with a slope. The visitor walks via the slope from the public to the private areas of the house. A carport, the guest room, the living room, and the dining room are on the ground floor, leading up to a garden on the shorter side of L-shaped plot. From here, a metal bridge leads to the second floor, which houses two bedrooms and a bathroom. The house offers a rich spatial experience of continuity, and it relates well to the surrounding neighborhood through a series of sliding wooden and glass panels. The simple mechanism of opening the carport connects the living room directly with a nearby square, extending civic life and turning the living room into a public auditorium.
Trafacon Office by 12Akitek _ The Trafacon Environmental Office, located on a large plot near the Jakarta? Zoo, has a recognizable style to those familiar with Dutch practice, the UNstudio, and with the concept of the fold. But the building aspires to solve one problem of the tropical climate: the seasonal floods that occur every rainy season. The young architects aspired to provide in one building a solution for a larger urban problem: the incapability of the drainage system in Jakarta to manage the heavy rain. They explain: ?lots in the city are built mostly in maximum allowed coverage areas, and often more, regardless of the building regulations, thus reducing the green area to almost none. When asked by the client ?o do something different and asymmetrical, the architects came up with a design based on a continuous loop, a green roof, large glass panels, and exposed concrete ? all very uncommon in Jakarta. The office offers an alternative and blurs the boundary between architecture and the environment, and thus embodies their ambition to ?emonstrates the capacity of contemporary architecture techniques to respond to today? needs and wants, while maintaining the buildings?functional purposes and local environmental integrity. The roof serves as a collector and filter of rainwater, providing water for the building; through the organization of the building and materials used, the use of air-conditioners is reduced to a minimum: Only air-conditioning equipment is used in the working areas; everywhere else, there is the use of natural air ventilation. Transparent glass is used on the north-south axis to avoid direct sunlight, to minimize the radiation effect from the direct sunlight, and to minimize the room temperature. Next to this, a large roof cantilever provides shading. Cooling is provided by the green roof, water fountains, and planted tree. All programs inside the building are directly accessible from the outside, either from the ground floor or from the roof, limiting the corridor space inside the building and thereby enhancing social interaction and professional performance within the office environment.
Studi-O Cahaya by mamostudio _ The Puri Indah House is Adi Purnomo? most recently-built project. The basic concept is ?o let light in the design, and it can be seen as an evolution of the architects?thinking, which he explains as follows: This is an example of a period when I questioned a purposed rationality in a design: I questioned whether rationality was hampering or promoting a creative process. Being a studio, gallery, and house for a photographer and a painter, the space needs light to be the component that shapes the space. The architect provides the following background to his design decisions: ?t first, I studied how the sun moves at latitude 06"11'5 S and longitude 106"44'2 E during a day and throughout the year on a site that will be enclosed with a 10m-high wall - the one thing that will almost always be certain to happen in a neighborhood such as this. When I started to extract the data and translate it into a diagram, I was able to read beauty in its form. Modeling his design on the movement of the sun, the architect found poetry in rationality: ?umbers and diagrams became a poetry that emerged from the prose of rationality - the thing that I thought all this time was hampering the courage to spontaneously feel beauty. The whole structure is set-up as a series of slanting walls, with the basic premise to catch and redistribute sunlight at certain hours of the day. The top floor is the gallery, receiving the most amount of light and least amount of humidity; the middle floor is for dwelling; and the ground floor is for public use. Circulation was placed in the sides, so that public access to the roof doesn? interrupt the privacy of the middle floors.
Architectural Office by Studio TonTon _ Studio TonTon's architecture has a clear signature, following detail and spatial organization, as well as the sobriety of the masters of modernist architecture and minimalism. Antony Liu, one of the principals of Studio TonTon (alongside Ferry Ridwan), explains, before 1998, architects in Jakarta didn't think much about minimalist architecture. It is a tough job to educate clients in this concept, as there is a common misperception about what minimalism means. People think it is about style, but not us. To us, it is way of living and thinking. Most of the clients with money want their houses to look big: The more expensive the materials, the better the architecture, they think. The architects have a broad portfolio of houses, interior designs, resorts, a wedding chapel, and even The Bale, which has received in 2002 the IAI Award and was listed in 2003 on the ?onde Nast Traveler? 80 Best New Hotels in the World?Hot List. This villa luxury resort consists of 20 private villas, each with individual lap pools, gardens and outside resting areas, realized in local limestone, white concrete, and polished dark-wood panels. The principals see minimalism as an answer to some of the problems posed by the climate, and their own studio - completed in December 2007 and positioned between a highway and a golf course - is an example of this. They explain that the long-stretching, overhanging ceiling and corridor are intended to avoid excessive sun, light, and rain and act as a basic element in their exploration of tropical architecture. Three connected buildings take up 235m2 of the 800m2 plot, and are positioned so that they blend architecturally with the landscape and blur the borders with the golf course. The architects?and principals?studios use clear glass and are supported by steel columns, 10cm in diameter, based on a 3.9m by 7.5m module. It is in this environment that both architects work, move from their glass office box to the construction sites, or cross the garden to an outdoor meeting place. From here, the architects explore architecture: think that our architecture is basic, Antony Liu explains. "We want to find purity, we avoid traditional and cosmetic architectural accessories, and we try to have some calm, relaxed, pure, and modern architecture. For us, architecture doesn't have to be radically different from one project to the other, but more refined, so as to make it stronger, so people can think our way: that this is our design, a light structure. A careful selection of natural materials such as bamboo trees, the incorporation of an existing tree, and a solid round white Carrera stone make this office a strange island of serenity and creativity. Studio TonTon was built according to the architect-as-contractor model, with tight control over the precise details of the construction.
The diversity of its architectural language is one of the basic characteristics of Jakarta. It has led to a market-led, neo-Victorian pastiche, Roman and Greek villas, and the classic corporate architecture of skyscrapers. These form the majority of Jakarta's urban substance, a form of architecture that avoids connections to its tropicality, but seemingly wants to exclude the climate out of the construction methods. Amir Sidharta, Curator/Director of the Museum Universitas Pelita Harapan and a lecturer of architecture, has recently stated that until the 1980s few notable works of architecture had been realized. He provides a short background to the establishment of the aforementioned architects: unhappy with this development, in the late 1980s a number of young architects of the Forum Arsitek Muda Indonesia started engaging in discussions and emerged through a series of exhibitions. Gradually, their works, which placed emphasis on the visual appearance and on the design individuality, became accepted by upper-middle-class patrons. Sardjono Sani's house in Pondok Indah, Andra Matin? Gedung Dua Delapan, and Ahmad Djuhara's Steel House became icons for this new generation of architects."It is these architects that are today refining their style, and provide even better and intriguing responses to the climate of Jakarta. They might not share a common architectural language, but they surely share a common concern. It is this spirit that is reinterpreted by a younger generation today. Although different in styles and forms, the projects presented here share similarities in their approach to the common factors of heat, wind, and rain. The quest to build structures that blur the boundary between the outside and inside spaces has stimulated a local contemporary tropical architecture. Emerging from a small but vibrant architectural community is design that balances local responsibility and global creativity. Mamostudio? desire to avoid air-conditioners matches the concerns of many architects in Indonesia. And it answers a question that is not only relevant for Jakarta.
Critique by Bert de Muynck
Bert de Muynck is an architect, writer and co-director of MovingCities. Since 2006 he lives and works in Beijing, China. He is a frequent contributor to several international architecture magazines in Asia and Europe and with MovingCities is establishing an urban think-thank dedicated to investigating the role that architecture plays in shaping the development of the contemporary city.
|
