Journal of Architectural Education

ISSN: 1046-4883 (Print) 1531-314X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjae20

The past in the Present: Architecture in Indonesia

Chee-Kien Lai

To cite this article: Chee-Kien Lai (2010) The past in the Present: Architecture in Indonesia,
Journal of Architectural Education, 63:2, 171-172, DOI: 10.1111/j.1531-314X.2010.01084.x
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1531-314X.2010.01084.x

Published online: 05 Mar 2013.

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educators and students of architecture and organized into two parts dealing, respectively, with have appeared. These include books on colonial
urbanism who seek to expand their knowledge the present and the past and attempting, as the expositions, post-colonial architecture, and public
beyond the predominantly Western-centric preface states, ‘‘to document and discuss particular works which have the luxury of comprehensiveness
curriculum. The extensive bibliographies and aspects of the history of Indonesian architecture.’’ and the elucidation of research methods and
endnotes will direct interested scholars to further The past is examined principally in the book’s theoretical frameworks. The essays of The Past in
reading. second part, which presents a century of the Present stand somewhere in between these two
architectural production in Indonesia between 1850 scholarly extremes.
Mohamed Elshahed
and 1950. It includes over one hundred architectural The ‘‘past’’ and the ‘‘present’’ are intended as
sketches, drawings, renderings, and photographs polar dialectics through which the contributing
The Past in the Present: Architecture in
that were shown in the NAi’s 2007 ‘‘Modernity in authors may find a loose commonality to discuss
Indonesia
the Tropics’’ exhibition in 2007. Apart from the ‘‘architecture in Indonesia.’’ But a number of other
PETER J. M. NAS AND MARTIEN DE VLETTER,
work of Liem Bwan Tjie, which extends from the dialectics also emerge in the essays, with tradition-
editors
1930s to the 1960s, the work shown here is from modernity, metropole-colony, and east-west chief
NAi Publishers, 2007
before World War II, effectively documenting among them. As may be expected, they are dealt
286 pages, illustrated
architecture in Indonesia during the colonial period with unevenly in the individual texts due to distinct
$48.00 (cloth)
of the ‘‘Dutch East Indies.’’ The work, arranged by authorial positions.
building type, including offices, villas and housing, As a group they fall into two main categories:
churches, schools, as well as hotels and shops, essays that offer surveys and documentation, and
provides a fine visual resource for architects, essays that cast a more critical lens on their topics
scholars, and students interested in architectural and discourses. Those in the first category generally
representations of this period. focus on a constellation of assigned built structures
The first part of the book, ‘‘Variety in or spaces for which the frameworks and histories are
Indonesian Architecture,’’ consists of eleven essays duly aligned. Topics that fall in this category include
originally presented as papers at a 2005 the architecture of mosques, architecture of the
symposium on architecture in contemporary colonial period, diasporic Chinese architecture, and
Indonesia. Peter Nas, a participant in that ‘‘modern Indonesian’’ architecture, as well as traces
symposium and an editor of the present volume, of ‘‘Indonesian’’ and ‘‘colonial’’ architecture in the
has organized several notable books on Netherlands.
Indonesian urbanism and housing featuring Among the more critical essays are those by
principally the work of Western scholars, especially Amanda Achmadi, Martien de Vletter, Madelon
those based in the Netherlands. The Past in the Djajadiningrat, and Abidin Kusno, who examine the
Present may thus be seen as a corrective to what issues of memory, displacement, replacement,
might be termed the colonizer’s perspective of contestations, and identity brought about by
these earlier volumes since it contains an even historical processes, imaginings, and inscriptions in
representation of scholarship of non-Western space.These are suggested as problematic and
perspectives. Not since Gunawan Tjahjono’s 1998 complex, the engagement of which requires
contribution to the Indonesian Heritage sustained and skillful interpretation, and a willingness
encyclopedia series has an edited volume on to discuss architecture rather than describing it using
architecture achieved such a balanced perspective. mainly tools and methods of the social sciences.
The Past in the Present resulted from a Since the appearance of Tjahjono’s While the first group of essays uses broad time
collaboration between the Netherland Architecture volume—the encyclopedic nature of which required frames and sets of architectural structures to build a
Institute and the KITLV ⁄ Royal Netherlands Institute its contributors to be brief and concise—many full- scaffolding for understanding architecture in
of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. It is length, in-depth works on Indonesian architecture Indonesia, the second group of essays details this

171 REVIEWS | BOOKS

scaffolding at significant junctures. The reader of the
anthology will come away with a good image of this
scaffolding, but will also realize that the project to
understand both the past and present of architecture
in Indonesia is far from clarity or completion.
Notwithstanding the difficulties of defining
Indonesia concentrically and contiguously, as
constitutive islands, colonial or nation states, or as
part of the larger space of Southeast Asia and the
world, writing the architectural history of Indonesia
requires this scaffolding to be continually delineated
and strengthened. The Past in the Present yields
potentials for pursuing academic collaboration and
focus, but also exposes many longstanding
academic issues that must be addressed collectively
by those involved in this project.
Chee-Kien Lai

Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural

Malaysia
ERIC C. THOMPSON
NUS Press, 2007
255 pages, illustrated
$30.00 (paper)
of agriculture and into forms of livelihood that are essence, tell very different stories, they are nicely
Malaysia, Modernity and the Multimedia Super more conventionally understood to be urban. Such complementary in articulating the complex
Corridor: A Critical Geography of Intelligent consequential shifts also imply challenges to intertwining of state policy with urban socio-spatial
Landscapes fundamentally held notions of identity, as over- change.
TIM BUNNELL layered discourses of modernity and urbanity are Eric Thompson’s central purpose in Unsettling
Routledge, 2004 advanced for a range of political and commercial Absences is to lay out a fundamental challenge to
203 pages, illustrated purposes. Thus, both the materiality and the the conventional view of urbanization as a spatial
$180.00 (cloth) discursive representation of urbanization are utilized shift from the village to the city, the so-called
as components of nation-building, as strategies for ‘‘two-sector model,’’ by stressing the processes by
The ongoing urban transitions across much of Asia creating what might be considered ‘‘imagined which urbanism (urban social and economic
provide social scientists with particularly fruitful (urban) communities.’’ relations, urban cultural forms and practices) can
frameworks for the analysis of societal and spatial Two recent books engage these issues in the penetrate deeply and thoroughly into putatively
change, as questions of urbanization and urbanism setting of Malaysia in the 1990s, one by an rural settings, in this case the Malay kampung of
are so central to understanding the economic, American sociologist and the other by a British Sungai Siputeh, located some 350 km from the
socio-cultural and political shifts that are currently geographer, both of whom are faculty members at national capital of Kuala Lumpur (KL) and 50 km
reshaping the region. The shifting bases of national the National University of Singapore. Though the from the closest city of Taiping. (Here the critical
economies are certainly reflected in urbanization two books use markedly different starting points for distinction between urbanization, understood to be
statistics, as increasing numbers of people move out thinking about Malaysia’s urbanization and, in a spatial phenomenon, and urbanism, as an aspatial,

REVIEWS | BOOKS 172