Slowing down to see the towers in Southeast Asia

Slowing down to see the towers in Southeast Asia

By Victor Wongso

JAKARTA (JP): There are two schools of architecture. The first is a group of architects who look to the past for inspiration and the other camp comprises several diverse sub-groups who are moving away from this first backward-looking group.

Architecture is thriving in Southeast Asia. The Pacific Rim is currently enjoying such steady economic growth that The Economist says it is the most earth-shaking public event in the lifetime of those living today. In such a pluralistic era of corporate capitalism, architecture is silently fighting the pressure of commercial economic demand and its attitudes.

Building booms are happening in Indonesia, Malaysia, and others countries in the region. The skylines in these modernizing countries is punctuated by slick and flashy buildings. The building projects can be ranked among the most ambitious undertakings the region has undertaken. After Malaysia's Petronas Tower is completed, it will be the first time in history that the world's tallest building is outside the West.

Architecture is mainly driven by the three M's -- the Market, Media, Megalomania, according to IQ Magazine, A Material World. Architecture has become nothing more than the exterior styling of a building; a mere container for consumer products. This is clearly evident in the constant use of disposable architecture, especially in restaurants, fashion shops, boutiques, galleries and temporary exhibition designs.

Discussions on architecture center around the labeling of certain styles and phrases like Post-Modernism, High-Tech, or Neo-Classical. The media enhances this view by blindly publishing press releases that wax lyrical about construction projects.

James Stirling, a late British architect, once said that, "These labeling and phrases are cheap journalism. I think there's only good architecture, boring architecture, and bad architecture." Although it seems journalists simply couldn't write something with these labels, the labels are informative. Architecture, however, is surely far deeper than these phrases and labels.

Media, Money and Megalomania-driven attitudes will further push architecture toward mere amusement. Hegel predicted this in his thesis about the end of art. Hegel didn't go as far as stating that art was dead in modern society, but he illustrated a decisive quality of modern art: It would no longer be regarded as a sufficient articulation of a cultural pattern of human identity. Instead, it would have to indicate concepts of human identity which could be no longer positively depicted by art itself (Prof. Jorn Rusen, Cultural Identity and the Future of Art).

The danger is that rapid development is beyond the control of sensible planning. According to architect Tay Kheng Soon, the pace of transformation in everyday life has become the single most devastating effect on design. Society is impatient for the goods and services that modernization promises. Third world societies are exposed to the high-standard of living enjoyed in developed countries and they want all the good things too -- right now.

Speed causes the main design problems in rapidly developing countries. Modernization, industrialization and rapid progress are inevitable, and our society had better learn to adjust to them. Because we are impatient for a higher material standard of living, we adopt modern production techniques, organization and administration. These will fundamentally affect our traditional ways because the characteristics of culture lie in the way all these elements are combined.

Urban growth with its dense and dynamic activities needs to be planned and controlled. Buildings need to be properly designed with depth and vision. Urban growth is an opportunity to create a new environment connected to place and time.

Asian cities, according to Ken Yeang (Tropical Urban Regionalism, Ken Yeang, 1987), are not 20th century inventions. Asian cities traverse a vast mosaic of different communities confronted by a number of conflicting problems. Asian cities embody a village environment with its limited infrastructure. Every architectural monument is developed by molding general attitudes. In traditional architecture this molding has been regulated by a set of rules. Usually form is adapted intuitively to many traditional rural conditions.

But the form is not readily adaptable to the contemporary urban condition. Traditional form is disconnected to intense urban settings because the traditional forms immediately lose their original fineness of scale. Industrialization and wage- labor construction combine to produce a crudeness that the careful attention to workmanship, proportion and detail of traditional forms would not have allowed. The timber house, for example, which is very common in Indonesia, provides a concept applicable in low and medium-rise structures.

Many architects respond by creating patische by adding a pitched-roof to the high rise urban configuration. The legitimacy is questionable, because no one is satisfied having a traditional art form crudely grafted onto a building for the sake of convenience or politics. This is why traditional forms and design must be creatively transformed instead of simply transferred or reconstructed.

Architects must realize their role in developing architecture that responds to the essence of society. Society needs architecture that is a true manifestation of place. Architecture can play a part in the national development. Architecture is integral in cultural identity and the expectation of progress. It can serve as a criteria for the historical reconstruction of the past in which the past and future are not disconnected and the cultural identity of a society is not threatened by a rupture between past and future.

There is nothing more uncomfortable than feeling overwhelmed by your environment. Architecture can help Indonesian society, dazed by today's rapid and dynamic life, adjust. Architects can decide not to follow the attitudes present in industrial societies.

Critic Herbert Muschamp puts it most succinctly when he asserts that "past is invoked as an escape from the need to think about the present... history is the story of how we got the place, where history cannot help us, invention must take over or else history stops."

Victor Wongso is an architecture student at Parahyangan Catholic University in Bandung.