Indonesia has no seasons. So how should it build? We talked to a “mysterious” Indonesian architect

Well known at home but little seen outside Indonesia, Andra Matin has been called “Southeast Asia's best-kept secret.” He was recently invited to Design Republic's cross-disciplinary “Design Carnival” exhibition in Shanghai (March 7 to April 9, 2017), where he gave a talk, and QDaily interviewed him.

Andra Matin's own house has no living room. He didn't want the formality. The usual ritual — open the door, change your shoes, take off your coat — doesn't apply to this house on the outskirts of Jakarta.

Building it was just as unconventional. He drew one sketch and kept every detail in his head, then stood on site directing the workers step by step, putting up the house he wanted piece by piece. It went extremely slowly, like a craftsman polishing an object.

Of the more than 100 buildings he has completed since entering Indonesian architecture in 1990, this house comes closest to what he had imagined.

Unlike most modern homes, his is not a house plus a courtyard, and the layout is not straightforward either. First-time visitors find it a little mysterious.

You walk in through two large wooden doors into the first level, which holds a row of cat nests and a study. The ceiling is low and the ground is cut into sections — concrete on one side, gravel on the other — with the walkway to the study laid in wide wooden planks. The study is Japanese in style, books on three walls, room to sit on the floor around the table. Looking out from it, you see a small pond full of fish and a tree growing beside it.

Follow the ramp up one side of the study and you reach the second level, where the view suddenly opens out. Nothing separates the pond, the lawn, the planted wall, the dining table, the lounge chairs and the kitchen. Matin and his family walk barefoot on the wooden deck and rest there in the afternoons. A path off the deck leads to a small hut pitched in the lawn — the bedroom Matin shares with his wife. When it rains, they carry umbrellas in and out.

The square block held up on a few concrete columns is the children's study and bedrooms. The whole level is open and dim; three bedrooms are boxed off, separated by a wide gap from the deck the three children share, and through the glass windows you can see the pond and the tree below. The children, of course, have to jump up and down to get from one deck to the other.

Why not pack the functions together more tightly? Why not use a stair, which saves space, instead of a long ramp? Why not roof the path between the main bedroom and the deck, or simply tuck the bedroom into the main building? Why not make the children's rooms brighter and safer?

……

Almost everyone who visits asks these questions. Next to most modern homes, Matin's design really is odd. But he has his reasons.

“I wanted the indoor space to have more connection with the outdoors — outdoor space can become part of the indoor space, so there's no need to cluster all the functions together,” he told QDaily.

The long ramps and open-air passages are how he experiences nature. Walking slowly up from the darker ground floor, you watch the light grow. At different hours the shadows of the trees shift across the lawn and the walls. The open pond mirrors the clouds on a clear day and fills with rings of rain on a wet one.

He deliberately hung an umbrella with a clear canopy outside his bedroom door. When it rains he opens it and walks from the bedroom into the open air — “to me, that's a fairly poetic way of feeling the outside world.”

He also wants a building to be fun. His children can ride bicycles up the ramps, or take on the challenge of moving between the different corridors, where the light keeps changing, bright one moment and dim the next, much like the jazz he loves, with a touch of improvisation. “Just as every jazz player can express himself, to me every space has a soul of its own,” he told QDaily.

It is never as satisfying as designing his own house, but Matin now works more and more of these playful ideas into his other projects. On one house site covered in palm trees, he kept every tree and let the building “grow” between them, cutting round holes through the parts of the structure that could not dodge a trunk. On the facade of another house, he draped a mesh like a bamboo sieve; the light coming through leaves handsome patches on the floor and walls.

Unlike in his firm's early days, clients no longer turn up holding a book and ask him to “copy” some building in it. They simply say which functions the building has to contain and leave the rest to him — “right now about 90% of the work is mine to decide.”

That freedom was hard to imagine in Indonesia in the 1990s.

After graduating from the architecture department of Parahyangan University Bandung, Andra Matin joined Grahacipta Hadiprana, then a well-known Indonesian architecture firm, in 1990. Indonesia was still ruled by Suharto, and the centralized government kept a tight grip on the profession: the president dictated building styles, personal expression was not allowed, nobody could open a firm under his own name, and because corruption was rampant, even the use of building materials was restricted.

Inside those bloated firms of a hundred-odd employees, architects had no say over their designs — they were “always limited by what the boss wanted.” And since a firm could not carry a person's name, people had an excuse to shrug off responsibility.

Only when Suharto fell in 1998 did this begin to change. The new president, Habibie, started reforms and the political climate loosened. For architects, it meant a chance to open design offices of their own.

Not everyone had the nerve to go independent. Indonesian politics were still unsettled, the economy had not recovered from the Asian financial crisis, and the uncertainty made many architects wonder whether they could survive after giving up a secure job.

Andra Matin quit the same year Suharto fell and set up his own practice, joining Indonesia's first generation of independent architects. His logic was unusual: “I thought, if I can survive under conditions that bad, then it can only get better from here.”

While running the firm, he also helped run an architects' group, Arsitek Muda Indonesia (Young Indonesian Architects), with six or seven others. It was a forum for the future of Indonesian architecture and how to develop an Indonesian design language. Members met often to go through each other's work and criticize it. “Very free — people would question you straight out, ask why you did it this way, say they didn't think it was good, and so on,” he recalled. Now and then they travelled together, to Europe or Japan, visiting famous buildings and arguing and learning as they went.

Clients, though, were not yet ready to embrace architects with ideas of their own.

In his interview with QDaily, Andra Matin joked: “There are four kinds of clients — money and taste, money and no taste, taste and no money, and neither.” Back then the second kind was the majority. Plenty of people who had grown rich on oil were looking for an outlet for their power, and asked architects to build them European castles.

The first five years of his practice were Andra Matin's hardest. He turned down plenty of newly rich clients who could pay his fee but wanted a “castle,” and worked to find clients who thought as he did: “That way there's less conflict, and what comes out looks like my work, which is how I build a portfolio. I care more about the result than the fee.”

He started with interior renovations and slowly got the chance to design buildings. By 2011 he had won five awards from the Indonesian Institute of Architects, and in 2012 he became the first Indonesian architect invited to the Houses Projects exhibition at the GA Gallery in Tokyo. He has been invited back every year since, showing his newest work alongside fifty or sixty architects from around the world.

Every time he comes home from Japan he thinks about it for a long while: “Japanese architecture, traditional or modern, may be by different architects, in different places, even in different materials — but you can just feel that it is Japanese architecture.”

Building an architectural language that carries an Indonesian identity became a direction he wanted to explore: “I often tell people you have to have your own character. You have to be like Japan — you can't lose your identity.”

That, of course, is hard to do.

Climate comes first. Indonesia sits in the tropics: hot all year, no seasons. The hot, wet climate has bred abundant natural resources, but the heat also keeps people indoors under air conditioning, shut off from the nature outside.

Then culture. Indonesia is a country of thousands of islands, and different islands have bred different cultures and building styles. Roofs show this most clearly. At the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Andra Matin found that 70% of the roof designs on show came from Indonesia. Working a single shared language out of that variety is close to impossible.

Matin believes design in the tropics should be distinct from design where the seasons are sharp. Steady temperatures and rich species are, to him, an advantage for open buildings. The heat means air conditioning can't be avoided altogether, but better indoor ventilation and as much daylight as possible cut the waste of energy. He did exactly this in the open second level of his own house: fans along one side of the eaves speed up the air, the lawn and the pond lower the temperature around them, and wind crossing the water brings some coolness with it.

As for Indonesian character, he does not want to read the idea narrowly, as a matter of traditional culture. For Banyuwangi Airport, now near completion, Matin made a roof with a gentle slope and deep eaves, planted over with greenery. He deliberately flattened the sharp triangular peak of the local style; from the side, the roof, trimmed in long wooden strips, looks as though it is crouching over a stretch of green, its geometry clear but not sharp, like a village house.

That design sits closer to the minimalism of Japanese and Nordic modern architecture than to the bright colors and dense carving of traditional Indonesian building. “It's a bit hard to get Indonesians to feel a minimalist style,” Matin says — but he thinks wood or concrete left unadorned “has a feeling of sincerity,” and sincerity, to him, is beautiful in itself.

“I don't want so-called Indonesian character to become a formula. It should be something more like a soul,” Matin told QDaily.

In the end he hopes every Indonesian architect will build a character of his own, as boldly as the Japanese do: “If each of us can establish an individual identity, then Indonesian architecture as a whole will be that much richer.”

Cover image from bimaa, photo by Paul Kadarisman

In-text images from manual, uncubemagazine, bmiaa, detik