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.