Female Architects

Three leading women architects in Indonesia are drawing the limelight with their nontraditional partnerships

In what may be a surprising fact to many, Indonesia boasts more than 150 architecture schools, second only to Japan in Asia, and more than half of the students are women. One of the best-known female architects in the country, Tri Rismaharini, now serves as the eco-pioneering mayor of Indonesia’s second-largest city, Surabaya. Yet among recognised avant-garde practitioners, women remain vanishingly scarce. Three that buck this trend do so in part because of nontraditional partnerships.

Wendy Djuhara heads the practice djuhara + djuhara with her husband Ahmad, now president of the Indonesian Institute of Architects. As Ahmad champions the country’s architects on a global stage, Wendy is the design leader within their studio. Though their commissions tilt towards the familial — a series of subtle homes culminating most recently in the Widjanarko House, and Shining Stars Kindergarten, an early education centre in Bintaro — their approach for those briefs has been anything but parochial. Addressing the climate and congestion of Jakarta directly, the Djuharas refute the wisdom of air conditioning, lot maximisation and isolation typical of the Suharto era. A humanist abstraction pervades the studio’s work, with an indooroutdoor parti pris and a cadence of spaces more in rapport with Japanese firms such as Tezuka Architects than with most of their compatriots.

A pioneer in another fashion, Susy Gunawan heads the interior design programme at Universitas Pelita Harapan as well as her own design practice Form Operation, which exists apart from her husband Stanley Wangsadiharja’s highly regarded firm. Both studios focus on advanced material research, though in quite different registers; Susy’s approach is more experiential, while Stanley’s is more digitally driven. They often work separately but they have been known to share commissions, as they did recently for the elegant Pavilion 26, a free-standing events space adjoining an original residence by Singaporean modernist Tan Hock Beng.

‘We liberate ourselves to choose what to focus on in the project,’ says Gunawan of their collaborative process. ‘We agree on the main concept, but we never limit ourselves to a certain material, colour scheme, pattern or mood. We rarely work based on conventional processes, instead moving from design to construction on our individual terms and methods.’

Following yet another unique path is Daliana Suryawinata of SHAU, a Dutch-Indonesian partnership she leads with husband Florian Heinzelmann. Echoing the absence of gender-specific pronouns in the official Bahasa Indonesia language, Suryawinata explains: ‘For me, being an architect has nothing to do with being a woman, as I can neither tell any difference between the two genders nor accept any differences outlined by society.’

A series of brilliant small libraries mark SHAU’s Indonesian debut. The first of these, realised in Bandung, lifts the reading room over a plaza to provide views above and shade below. The hovering, enclosed volume is clad in a deepened mosaic grid of ice cream tubs, each suspended sideways with bottoms in, out or removed to vary transparency while

encoding a message by the city’s mayor. The resultant facade protects the books and directs the views of those within, while projecting an unlikely, playful monumentality. The concept of play was central to the project’s gestation. ‘The microlibraries are a series we created to keep our staff entertained no matter what kind of projects we have at the office,’ says Suryawinata. ‘We played and experimented with form, materiality and structure as freely as the budget allowed.’

Djuhara, Gunawan and Suryawinata’s groundbreaking work clearly demonstrates that the subversion of roles often leads to innovation. The above projects take more care in situating real people in actual spaces than do those of many more formally exuberant studios led exclusively by men. Zaha Hadid, with Patrik Schumacher, took on that imbalance in the wider discipline headon; Djuhara, Gunawan and Suryawinata, along with their comrades-in-arms, test more oblique points of entry. One hopes the many young people studying architecture in Indonesia now will recognise their range and discover new ways to alter the landscape and prospects in their nation.