Daliana Suryawinata and Florian Heinzelmann

HB: What led you to set up a SHAU office in Indonesia?

DS: We actually got our first projects in Indonesia through exhibitions. After the IABR in 2009, we continued exhibiting other urban architecture ideas, which got the attention of the Indonesian Diaspora Network. They put us in touch with several ministers, which led to meeting Joko Widodo, then governor of Jakarta. Indonesia is in need of development, and several key people are interested in new ideas, so we met them, which led to some key projects, and that was the beginning.

FH: We were first commissioned to work on a social housing project in Muara Angke, a fishing village in the north of Jakarta, which led us to set up a branch office in 2012 in Jakarta. After working on that for two and a half years, Indonesia has become an important market for us, so we decided to base ourselves there from March 2015.

DS: So that we could be there to nurture the projects, and make sure they are being built according to how we want it.

FH: The Indonesian context is much less formal than Singapore or Europe. It’s much more about negotiation. Trust is not based on a contract; it’s based on meeting each other, talking with each other, and if the chemistry
is right, you do a project together.

HB: So would you say there is a lot of interest in the Indonesian government in developing sustainably or in recruiting good architects?

DS: Not in either, yet, unfortunately, but I hope it’s coming soon. But the Asia-Pacific region has a lot of development going on without architects, so architects see it as a chance to also help shape development. Then when we get to one or two key people who understand our ideas, we can go along with the team to introduce a new idea or design direction.

FH: Let’s put it this way. For us, there are two things you can talk about with sustainable architecture. One is regulation based, which is very much happening in Europe and Singapore, and this is technologically driven. In
Indonesia, which is not very regulated at all, it’s much more low-tech or passive. So where you, as an architect, can have an impact is in terms of designing—better design intelligence, building layout, orientation to get cross ventilation, green roofs, planted courtyards—basically improving microclimate and liveability without having any technology-driven  approaches. If we’re working on a low- to mid-end apartment project, for example, as architects we cannot tell the owners they are not allowed to have air-conditioning, but we can design an intelligent building layout and shading, so that we provide a liveable environment without it.

DS: Referring back to your question on whether there is a centralised desire to go sustainable, the answer is not yet. The role of the architect is to fulfil market demands, but we are trying to break a bit of that role and offer something else.

FH: This actually brings us to the core statement of our company—we want to fulfil environmental and social requirements, even if neither is necessarily requested by the client. For instance, we’re currently working with a developer on a high-rise residence in Bandung. We have a very specific typology, the H floor plan. Each tower has a central lift core that opens onto bridges with a great view, leading to a double-loaded corridor on either side. By using the bridge to break the double-loaded corridor, we hope that people will start engaging with each other and the corridor becomes a friendlier, more inhabitable space. Then, we have sky gardens or public balconies on every fifth floor, along with other non-rentable functions, like a day-care centre and so forth. So that is how we try to bring these societal needs into a building, where it was not in the original brief of the developer. Of course, we need to sell it to the developer—so we explain that maybe they don’t make money directly as it’s not a rentable surface, but it makes for a more attractive building, which sells better.

HB: So essentially, you need to frame it differently for difference audiences.

DS: That’s right, and to keep our idealism. We don’t force our idealism onto developers whose target is to make money, we present it to them as a sales benefit—something unique.

HB: Your projects all have that underlying social dimension, but vary in scale from microlibraries to condos and master plans. How do you translate that social generosity from a smaller project that is really focused on serving a community to a larger, more complex scope?

DS: We try not to fall into a certain typology, and therefore always try to do different types and scales. In terms of the Green agenda and the social agenda, there’s no difficulty as it is just applied differently in every project.
I would also argue that since we are always thinking about an urban agenda for every project, we are always doing urban projects, no matter the scale. So the micro library is an example of how a building could serve the
needs of reading, but at the same time be energy efficient while testing new materials. And this is linked to the greater urban agenda, the idea that cities should have more buildings like that.

HB: Jumping scales a little, let’s talk about your Jakarta master plan, the Green Manhattan (see project profile in this issue), for which you’ve won an award in the Smart Cities category of the World Architecture Festival awards.

FH: Jakarta is essentially sinking, and it floods every rainy season. So, to pump out the water and at the same time protect the city from flooding, they are proposing to build a giant sea wall. There is a Dutch initiative
bidding to build this sea wall, and to finance it, they are proposing this island with new real estate—that’s where we came in. Our client is Jesse Kuijper of the Borneo Initiative; he’s always very interested in sustainability and so he brought us on board with the Jakarta Jaya Foundation.

DS: This project is still in the acquisition phase. It is a reclamation proposal that accompanies a giant sea wall. Since it is such a large-scale master plan of 58 square kilometres, we want this plan to be an example of a Green integrated city, which is designed for diversity from the very beginning, as it is solving multiple problems at the same time. Jakarta is facing flooding from rain, and will soon also flood due to sea level rise as well as the very high gap between the rich and the poor; these go hand-in-hand with traffic, land subsidence, pollution, no proper sewage, etc.

HB: So essentially, any of the common problems in Asian cities today can be found in Jakarta? 

DS: Indeed, it’s a complete set of problems. So the ambition of this plan is to be more than sea flooding infrastructure—we would like to bring in solutions to improve this situation in a master plan.

FH: It’s not an end product; it’s the starting point—like an urban design brief. It’s about the realisation of a
vision—what do we want to achieve, and how could we potentially achieve it?