Insertion / Juxtaposition / Reinvention

Amanda Achmadi

What is the role of contemporary architecture in a historic urban setting?

Can contemporary architecture mediate a meaningful encounter with a historic urban setting?

How do we design a meaningful contemporary space in a historic setting characterised by contrasting urban conditions?

Studio Outline:

The urban and historical contexts explored in this studio is the old town district of Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia and the largest megacities in the Southeast Asia region. The city’s long history, dating back to 1527, entails contestation between diverse indigenous states and their subsequent encounters with diverse European colonial empires. Today, the sprawling metropolitan Jakarta is a home of a socially and ethnically diverse population of around 22 million people. The old town district has been in a stage of decay for most of part of the recent decades and dominated by urban informality. Since 2014, the district has been subjected to a collaborative design intervention involving leading international architects such as MVRDV and OMA and leading Indonesian architects, such as Andra Matin and Han Awal & Partners.

Studio Leaders

DR. AMANDA ACHMADI is a lecturer in architectural design at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. She holds a Bachelor degree in Architecture and a PhD in Architectural history and Asian Studies. Her research works explore the interaction between identity politics and architectural discourses with a particular focus on postcolonial Southeast Asia. Her reviews of contemporary architectural designs from Southeast Asia region have been published in Architecture Asia, T+A, and Architectural Review (Australia). She is one of the contributors to Houses for the 21st Century (edited by Geoffrey London), New Directions in Tropical Asian Architecture (edited by Philip Goad and Anoma Pieris), and The Past in the Present: Architecture in Indonesia (edited by Peter Nas). She has also published her research works in academic journals such as Fabrication (Journal of the Societies of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand) and JSEAA (Journal of Southeast Asian Architecture).

Learning Outcomes:

Through the semester you will undertake research on relevant topics such as urban heritage and change in Asia, colonial architectural history in Asia, postcolonial urbanism, and urban informality. You will consider their spatial implications and how architecture might contribute to addressing some of the issues and complexities that the topics entail. You will produce site analysis and develop a reflection of design methodology based on relevant and comparable architectural precedence. You will be experimenting on different modes of architectural interventions to the site. Your final project will deliver an argument on the role that architecture can play in mediating the rapid process of urban transformation and the conservation of urban built heritage in Southeast Asian context.

Reading and Reference:

A comprehensive list of readings as well as site-specific visual data and drawings has been compiled for this studio to ensure that you can make a grounded and informed design exploration. An extended list of references will be introduced in Week 1.

• Beynon, D. (2010) ‘Architecture, Identity and Cultural Sustainability in Southeast Asian Cities, in RIMA (Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs), Vol 44. No. 2, Association for the Publication of Indonesian and Malaysian Studies Inc.
• Kusno, A. (2010) The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urbanism in Indonesia, Durham: Duke University Press.
• Labadi, S. and Long, C. (2010) Heritage and Globalisation, Oxon and New York: Routledge.
  Logan, W. (ed.) (2002) The Disappearing Asian City: Protecting Asia’s Urban Heritage in a Globalizing World, New York: Oxford University Press.

ST1/10 Thursday 9:00am - 12:00pm, MSD Room 216
ST2/10 Thursday 1:00pm - 4:00pm, MSD Room 139

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