Words of gratitude for the granting of The Ruth and Ralph Erskine Award 1995

Words of gratitude for the granting of The Ruth and Ralph Erskine Award 1995

Mangunwijaya

Seorang teman bingung menjawab saat mendapat pertanyaan tentang asal-usul kutipan Romo Mangun yang tertulis di tas jinjingnya, yg berbunyi begini : “yet the whole direction of the study of architecture in Indonesia had to be readjusted to solve the real problems of our country.” 

Saya sendiri pernah mengutip kalimat itu sama persis untuk keperluan pengantar sinopsis tugas Proyek Akhir Arsitektur saya dulu dan lupa juga mendapat kutipan itu persisnya darimana, sehingga seolah-olah pertanyaan yg sama ditujukan juga kepada saya.

Seingat saya kutipan itu memang berasal dari sambutan Romo Mangun saat menerima penghargaan The Ruth and Ralph Erskine Award di Stockholm tahun 1995 (yang diwakilkan kehadirannya oleh Eko Prawoto), sebuah penghargaan arsitektur yang ditujukan sebagai penghargaan terhadap usaha-usaha arsitektur yang memberi dampak baik kepada kaum yang terpinggirkan. Dulu saya menuliskan kutipan itu setelah membaca beberapa buku referensi di perpustakaan kampus. Berhubung saya belum bisa melacak asal-usul bukunya kembali, bagian berikut ini adalah hasil saduran dari sebuah blog yang ditulis oleh M. Nanda Widyarta yang berisi pidato lengkap Romo Mangun tersebut.

Semata-mata sebagai perawat ingatan dan peringatan.

Dear honourable and beloved friends, Chairperson and Board-members of The Ruth Ralph Erskine Foundation. All distinguished guests, architects and friends of architecture.

Sweden and Stokholm was know to me in my childhood, through images of pure white ice-cream pouring down from heaven and happy children riding in sleighs pulled by horses, with bells that jingled sweetly; a region very close to the North Pole far away from our tropical homeland, where snow never fell.

Later, during my study-years in Germany, I unfortunately was not blessed by the good opportunity to visit your country, which is famous for the Nobel-Price Foundation, a noble institution that grants its invaluable awards to scholars with outstanding achievements in science, literature and peace-movements.

And now, beyond the slightest expectations I am granted the honour to receive your prestigious Ruth and Ralph Erskine Fellowship of 1995. I am grateful to finally be blessed with the rare chance of seeing with my own eyes the beautiful land of my childhood dreams, the land from which so many pure images have come to my younger mind. It is all the more very pleasing for me, to think that I will meet all of you and many distinguished architects face to face, here in Stockhlolm. But alas, it is very unfortunate for me, that my physicians deem that my poorly pounding heart would not be strong enough for a journey abroad.

So I ask you for your forgiveness for this inconvenience; and I also ask for your benevolence to receive a good friend of mine, Mr. Eko Prawoto, who is so noble to sacrifice his time to represent me at this ceremony of the granting the Ruth and Ralph Erskin Fellowship Award

With a heart full of gratitude and feelings of unworthiness, I happily welcome your respectable award. I know that my works do not deserve such a great honour adhering to your widely respected Fellowship Award. Receiving the Ruth and Ralph Erskin Fellowship, dear friend, means for me, therefore, honouring the outstanding achievements of Ms. Ruth and Mr. Ralph Erskin and many great architects of Sweden.

And at the same time, it also means paying respect and attention to the disadvantaged poor in all parts of our one world.

Dear friends,

Architecture is a fascinating profession. It bears in itself the vocation to co-create and serve a better and a more human world.

But to be honest, studying architecture and becoming an architect was not my own personal choice, although since childhood I love beautiful things and arrangements; something which I later learn as architecture, town-and regional planning , and the like.

What urged me to become an architect was the wish of my bishop, the late Monsegneur Albert Sugiyopranoto, a great personality who played a historical role in Indonesia’s struggle for independence; to whom the government of the Republic of Indonesia had granted the most honouring title of National Hero.

Bishop Sugiyopranoto deplored the architecture of most church-buildings that belong to the many christian denominations in Indonesia, which in his opinion, may strongly inducea widespread popular view that Christianity was a foreign faith. He wanted church-buildings and on general also the catholic liturgy in Indonesia, to reflect the universal substance of the christian faith in authentical autochtone expressions.

Considering that generally people would see church-buildings first rather than the Holy Scripture or Chruch’s liturgy, he wished me to go to the heart of church-architectural renewal movement after World War II, Germany; to learn the way European architects design religious buildings according to her cultural patterns and her historical heritage as well. I was not, of course, expected to imitate the experience of Europe. instead, I was to study the links between architecture and Lebensanschauung.

Germany proofed to be a very good choice, because many of its buildings and especially its churches that were destroyed by the cruel World War II, had newly designed and built into buildings of high quality. Added to the advantage was that many of the old heritages were still intact, untouched by the vastly destructive war.

Moreover, from Germany I could easily visit neighbouring countries, to see with my own eyes and heart their cultural heritages, which went hand in hand with entirely new efforts in the realm of architecture. Since I was very young my Dutch teachers had already succeed in making me fascinated by the history of Europeans, their ways of life and later their ways of thinking, which wera strongly tied with the history of Chrisitianity and its expression in art.

From my study in Germany, I learned from my lecturers at the Rheinish-Westfaelischer Hoshshule in Aachen and from the best examples of the old and modern architecture of Central Europe, to find the inner link between truth and beauty, which revealed to me how good and genuine architecture should be built. Not as mere fancies, but as manifestations of the European mind and Lebensanschaung, as expressions of the Bedeutung und Sinn, the symbolization and the inner meaning of architectural buildings, in other words: the unity of Truth and Beauty, which was formulated by Thomas Aquinas as: Pulchritudo splendor ordinis est.

As a student in the decade of the sixties, I was naturally impressed by the ideals of Bauhaus and the modern high-classic achievements of modern architecture, which culminated purely in but also symbolized by the clean mathematical technological aesthetics of Mies van der Rohe (and of course his grandmaster of the less-is-more aesthetics: Japan) and on the other hand the poetic architectural language of Le Corbusier.

Architecture as Lebensanschauung as well as Aesthetics. The question that troubled me most was then: how we Indonesians could establish a contemporary architecture, created on the basis of Truth and Beauty, and relevant to our own Indonesia history and our present situation.

The Balinese architecture and the old traditional architecture of the Javanese could serve as an appropriate foundation for such an endeavour. But it was disheartening to see that Indonesia was steadily destroying her heritage of good architecture from the past, although we could still find, in spite of the scarcity, some few remaining good examples of it.

During my last study-years however, a very good lecturer for town-and regional planning from the Faculty, Herr Dipl. Ing. Liborius Schelhasse, managed to open my eyes to see the real problems of architecture in developing countries. He widened my horizon to discover and explorer the other side of the moon. Aesthetics dimensions remained important of course, but it was not the core of the problem in developing countries, and my be it was not even the problem of architecture of our whole global civilization.

The main problem was justice, the crucial problem of finding the best way to structurally arrange the distribution of the national and global wealth and revenue; the urgent task of establising the best method to justly conduct the relations between the centrum North and the periphery South in the world, and the centrum – periphery relations within the developing countries themselves; the realm of architecture included.

Architecture should not be reduced to the art of making individual buildings only, but extended to all kinds of town-and regional planning that benefitted the majority of the people.

This new dimension of architecture, which Herr L. Schelhasse implanted in my mind on the perfect time, only a year before I finished my study in the Aachener Fakultaet fuer Bauwesen, became the first seed that later grew into the idea of Wastu, the central idea I developed during my 12 years lecturing on Architecture and Lebensanschauung in the Gadjah Mada State University of Yogyakarta (1968 – 1980).

Wastu is a Sanskrit word ; a much more comprehensive conception than the term architecture could suggest. Wastu is more than mere architecture (arche – tectoon = die Ur-sache oder Urdasein der technische und aesthetische Stabilitaet). The wastu-concept belongs to a part of the heritage. We Indonesians, especially the Javanese and the Balinese, owe to the antique Indian civilization, which is extraordinarily very relevant for all of us now. Zeitlos, is the German word for it, always relevant beyond time. Wastu means substantially The good and the true order of all beings which have form; goodness and true that are one as The Undivided and Undefined Self, but emanated into multiple beings which have form in this Maya world of phenomena.

So Wastu refers not only to the good order of buildings, towns or rural areas, but also to the good order of simple household articles, statues and the like; it refers to the good order of all beings that have form, which should return to the One True Undivided Undefined Brahma.

For people who do not view life and the world, ideas and things as not-real-and-deceiving Maya, the Wastu conception, however could still be very valuable in relation to the efforts toward the reordering and reharmonizing our more and more disorganic global word, which desperatedly needs a new and a holistic order of rearranging things. The term architecture (arche-tectoon) became, therewith, more and more inadequate and obsolete because of its narrowness; especially for a developing country like Indonesia.

On the other hand, although originated from a completely different world of interpretation on human life and its destiny, on the cosmos and the whole phenomena, the idea of Wastu could converge with Thomas Aquinas’ unifying idea of beauty as splendor ordinis, as splendor veritatis.

In the seventies I began to beg my friends of the Mother of all architecture-faculties in Indonesia’, the Institute for Technology in Bandung, to pay attention to the danger of the taking the wrong direction of the study of architecture in Indonesia. The blame was not to be placed on our senior architects and lecturers since we were always the children of our own times, yet the whole direction of the study of architecture in Indonesia had to be readjusted to solve the real problems of our country.

We had to reevaluate our concepts and practices of “architecturing”. We had to abandon the role of being mere epigones of the architectural world of thinking and designing that were based on foreign principles and ways of life. The great achievements of the dominant West still remained highly valuable for all of us, and or students had still be informed about their best examples.

However, the designing and the building of all being which have form had to be studied and taught with newer and more appropriate ways. To search for new relevant theories for architecture in Indonesia would be a hard task, and moreover such an endeavour would not be promising for our architects in terms of personal financial gains within the consumeristic mood of a superficial blitz-process of modernization in Indonesia.

Nevertheless ultimately it would be a question of being or not being for millions of Indonesians.

At 1979 – 1980 I asked to be relieved from my university duties to search for another ways to contribute something on behalf of the poor. It was all because I finally realized that I was becoming more and more alienated from the already-alienated paradigm of the official syllabi and teaching programs, which were centrally regulated by the educational policy of the government and accepted by the Indonesian architect society, in response to the actual demands of the contemporary order, which in real practice meant: the surrender to the will of the industrial moguls of the world of Ersatz-Kapitalismus.

I decided then to write my “farewell-book”, for a greater part containing my lectures at the Gadjah Mada State University, supplemented with a concise discourse on Wastucitra (Bild und Bedeutung in the relationship of Wastu and Lebensanshauung). The book was an honest homage to the treasures of the best achievement of architecture from the known Antique and Modern World from all continents, according to classical western criteria of aesthetics. it implicitly honoured the importance and inspiration we owed to western thinking and feeling about architectural aesthetics; albeit still aesthetics rich and powerful, with their abundant possibilities of the established rich and powerful, with their abundant possibilities of enjoying beauty and a wealth of time and leisure, which essentially had little relevance to the actual needs of the majority of Indonesians, who were still suffering from the law of the tropical jungle.

Through this book, entitled Wastucitra, too. I wanted to say good-bye to a beautiful world of seeing architecture from the perspective of a foreign paradigm, and through it I would like to invite, espedially the young, to ponder questions like:

What kind of architecture or better Wastu do we need in Indonesia? How should Wastu be conceived, approached and treated in Indonesia, for the benefit of the whole people and above all for the benefit of the disadvantaged majority of Indonesians?

After all, I wanted to retreat first, searching for a new way to serve the majority of the people.

So I went with a humble heart to the poor in the blackest spot of my town Yogyakarta, where former criminals and prostitutes had build their slum on garbage heaps on the Chode riverside; not yet knowing what exactly to do except that I was intent to teach or make project for them, I did not intent to teach or make projects for them, instead I primarily wanted to live among and with them, to share their fate; and maybe to contribute something useful, someting they needed most but they did not have.

The problem of the poor inhabitants of Chode-riverside was evidently not architecture, but, as I gradually learned from them: how to minimize their inferiority feelings; the common feelings of people that were rejected and abandoned; the everday feelings of people that lived with a permanent fear of being swept away one day by the almighty policies of development and modernization according to international capitalistic standards, which meant: according to western standards as well as their architecture-and town-planning rules.

My live-in became then a shared sociological, religious and political involvement, together with the slum-people on the Chode river-side; each party giving and taking they have and have not as well. Beyond my expectations, such an involvement somehow had contributed to the commencement of new initiatives of exercise, discussions, seminars and even live-in programs by students and lecturers from many Indonesian universities.

Although those activities were only done temporarily, and perhaps a little bit late, they at least had facilitated the intellectuals to establish contact with the poor, while at the time offering services for the benefit of the disadvantaged.

Gradually our senior architects and those among the decision-makers began to think about a topic that had already stirred the European civitas academica circa 1968; the topic that was ignited by the protest waves of the Students Revolutions in Paris and Berlin, (thus after I had finished my studies in Germany and returned to Indonesia), namely the political and socio-economical dimensions of architecture.

Meanwhile in the eighties Mr. Sutami, a very capable engineer during Sukarno’s rule and a respected minister of public works in Suharto’s New Order proposed the idea of a more comprehensive approach to upgrade the traditional town-and regional planning. A new science should then be studied in our universities and governmental institutions, that is, the science of ecological environment-designing within the scope of an all-archipelago space and physical order.

Such new holistic ideas of development among the high level decision-makers brought new hopes that a more human ordering of the many aspects of Indonesian wastu would take place.

Nevertheless in Sutami’s comprehensive frame of ecological thinking, unfortunately, the socio-economical and political aspects were taken for granted. It is understandable due to the existence of a broadly extended political fear. The deepest causes of why it was possible, that a situation could exist where multi-millions poor people lived under the grip of a very very affluent few, were never studied seriously. Up to the present, all the thoughts of most important decision-makers, among them are many architect assigned to the task of town-designing, the sanitary system and other infrastructure improvements, (or to put it in more general terms: modernizing the rural and urban areas) are still based on European views and or American models; entirely alienated from the real problems of the local and regional cultural history and the whole political as well as sociological context, and even sometimes bluntly ignoring contrary facts.

A recent example that provides a good illustration may be the underground railway plan for Jakarta, notabene a metropolis in a region of tectonic and volcanic earthquakes, whose building-ground is sinking by a fraction and centimeter a year and periodically suffering by extensive monsoon-floods.

In my opinion, we Indonesians, should rethink the whole realm of Wastu,starting from the most elementary elements people experienced in their dayly life. What is contextually in Indonesia the thing that is called a wall, a door, a window, a roof, a house, a street within the context of history and the evolution of the way Indonesian common people live together and earn their living?

What is a door? Did in the past doors and windows ever exist in Indonesia? How is it now?

Is a street in Indonesia the same with a street in England? Does it have the same functions?

What could be the most appropriate design for a street in Indonesia’s actual conditions with its specific economical and sociological variables and demands? Are the functions of a kaki-lima in the Glodok area of Jakarta or along the streets of Indonesia’s highly populated cities townsthe same as a trottoir in Paris or a 5-feet path for foot passengers in Birmingham?

Is a pasar in Indonesia the same thing as a market in Scandinavia? What is a bus for Indonesia?

Is a river coiling through an Indonesian town the same as the same river curving its way through rice-fields in the rural areas? Does a river like the Ciliwung in Jakarta have the same functions and meanings as the Seine in Paris or the Thames in London? What should then be the definition of a river in an Indonesian town? And what could be its possibilities?

What is wood? What is the meaning of steel, concrete or glass in the psychological frame-work of an Indonesian businessman or a becak-driver? What is exactly the use of a bridge or an aquaduct in the eyes of the Indonesian common people?

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