Presented by: Adam Jefford

Transcript

2017 UQ Architecture lecture

Melissa Liando

Presented on 28 March 2017

Presented by:

Adam Jefford

Manager, APDL, MC

Speakers:


Sandra Kaji-O'Grady
Professor and Head of School

Melissa Liando
Architect

Silvia Micheli
Lecturer


Adam Jefford:

Hello. Welcome. It's good to see you all tonight. My name is Adam Jefford. I'm the Manager of the Asia-Pacific Design Library.

I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land and pay respects to their ancestors who came before them and to the elders still living today. The location of the State Library on Kurilpa Point was historically a significant meeting, gathering and sharing place for Aboriginal people. We proudly continue that tradition here today.

Now I have a public service announcement. I've just heard and some of you might know that the XXXX Brewery is on fire. Now, obviously beer is an issue but more importantly I suspect that some of our other guests here are going to be a little bit delayed. So, we've got the door at the back of the auditorium open, so if somebody does come in, stumble in around, just maybe make some room for them, that would be amazing.

The fire is out now but the roads are still closed. If you're heading home that way as well maybe just consider going a different route than Milton Road.

Other housekeeping issues – toilets – Level 2, Level 3. In the case of an emergency please head to the closest door. We'll assemble at GOMA which is just behind us down there. The phones in your pockets, in your hands, in your bags, please make sure they are on silent. We do have a hashtag that you can use tonight if you want to follow along and Tweet, Instagram or whatever other social media you have.

The other thing I should mention on Instagram is at the end of the lecture tonight we'll be announcing our first winner for Arch-I-Spy. So we're really excited about that and we're excited to share with you the image that we think is fantastic from the last week. For those of you who have friends or colleagues who couldn't get here tonight we are live streaming right now and the video will also be up online in the next little while, both on designonline.org.au as well as through UQ Architecture right now I think on Facebook as well as the APDL Facebook.

To get any information that you might need about your CPD points there is some information on Design Online and you can also get that information on SLQ What's On page as well.

It's my pleasure to pass over to Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, Dean of Architecture and Head of School at the UQ School of Architecture to introduce tonight's event. Please welcome Sandra

Sandra Kaji-O'Grady:

So good evening and welcome. Tonight I'm stepping in for Series Curator Kelly Greenop. She sends her apologies as she couldn't be here to welcome you all to the second lecture in our 2017 lecture series.

Before I introduce Melissa I'd like to briefly mention the school's Social Outreach Studio.

I think I'm meant to do this.

The Social Outreach Studio offers students the opportunity to travel to rural and remote communities and collaborate with organisations who are facing social or economic disadvantage. The studio aims to connect architecture students with communities where architects and design ideas are less common. Students learning in remote and regional areas are better equipped to meet future challenges and will be encouraged to work outside their comfort zones in their careers as architects.

I'd like to encourage you all to donate online today. Just Google search for 'Social Outreach Studio UQ'. We are planning right at the moment a possible Social Outreach Studio for second semester in Cairns.

I'd also like to briefly mention that there are still a small number of tickets available for tomorrow night's Working in Asia event which is hosted by Gadens Lawyers. The panel explores how working in Asia might open up new professional and personal opportunities from working in the slums of India to boutique studios in Japan. The panellists Anya Meng, Christina Cho, Kali Marnane, Kirsti Simpson and Natasha Chee will discuss their motivations to work offshore and share their rich experiences. I've been speaking with the four of them over the last few weeks and they've got some very good stories to tell. So please register via Eventbrite.

Now onto tonight's lecture. It's a real pleasure to have Melissa Liando here of Csutoras and Liando in Indonesia. Melissa grew up in Indonesia until about the age of 11 when her family relocated to Sydney. So her childhood was spent in Australia and Indonesia. She graduated with an interior design degree from UTS in Sydney and then after a few years working and travelling decided that she wanted to expand her opportunities and go back to study and to study architecture. So she did her professional degree at TU Delft, worked in London and was it in Delft or London that you met your partner? At Delft.

So at Delft she met Laszlo Csutoras and they set up practice in Indonesia about five years ago. The practice is already doing interesting things. So one of the especially strong reasons for me being happy that she's here is that we'd had a cancellation. I don't think she knows this, but we had someone else lined up for this spot who pulled out right at the last minute. I was actually quite pleased because I had wanted to get Melissa out here for some time. So, it gave me an opportunity to intervene in the curation of the design series which I'm really not meant to do but I did. So she's my pick. I'll take the blame and the credit.

So I'd now like to welcome Melissa onto the stage.

Melissa Liando:

Thanks Sandra.

Thank you for APAC and the School of Architecture for inviting me here tonight. I'll show you a few of our projects. So hopefully I can share with you what we've learnt and the surprises we have encountered as architects in Indonesia. So I'll start a little bit about our background.

Laszlo and I, we met in Delft while we were doing our postgrad studies at the Technical University there. He is from Hungary and as Sandra mentioned earlier I was born in Jakarta. I spent the first 11 years of my life there before I moved to Sydney. Basically after graduation we moved to London where he worked for Tony Fretton Architects and I worked for Grimshaw and later on for a longer duration for a small practice called Cottrell and Vermeulen Architecture.

There we did projects such as these. This is the British Embassy in Warsaw, Poland which Laszlo worked on. Next is a building called Solid 11 in Amsterdam which was designed and engineered to last for 200 years. It was designed together with [08:26].

This is a State School which is located in a predominantly Muslim part of Birmingham in the UK and this is a brick-clad school for a private school in the English countryside.

So, in 2012 we decided to set up our practice, having spent the first year basically travelling to visit our families in Hungary, Australia, Indonesia and also we travelled in Holland. What brought us to Jakarta was this small project that you can see here. It is a refurbishment of a small house which we reconfigured internally and externally. You can see here that it's clad in the local andesite stone and here, just a couple of images of the façade. Basically having finished this small project the optimism typical of the Indonesian people sort of convinced us to stay and do more. But having spent more time in the capital city of Jakarta we grew semi-frustrated in a way because of the lack of public spaces. There's a lack of parks and social and cultural venues which we were in a way accustomed to.

Basically a lot of things happen inside a shopping mall and the city is filled with shopping malls. So you would do everything. You would eat, sometimes study or see a concert, everything in a shopping mall including watching a movie in multiplex showing predominantly Hollywood blockbusters.

So while searching for alternatives we encountered a non-profit organisation called Kineforum which at the time they were basically in a city of over 7 million people, they were the only cinema that played classical and independent films. Our adventure sort of began there when we did this open air cinema with them together in 2013. It was a temporary open air cinema designed for about 200 people located in the CBD in MONAS which is the national monument park. How we arrived to doing this project was it was basically by a simple exchange of emails between two strangers – us and them. We didn't know them, they didn't know us. We wrote that we have an idea that could promote their work. They were curious enough to meet us, so we met and that was it really.

We talked a lot about the state of cinemas in the city, the disappearance of more traditional and open air and independent cinemas being replaced by multiplexes in shopping malls. Basically what happened was that because there were only multiplexes left it became quite unaffordable for people to see a movie. So I'll show you this image because it shows the tradition of having open air screenings in Indonesia which practically disappeared in around the '80s replaced by multiplexes. What I'd like to show is that basically going to open air screenings like this, it was not just about the idea of seeing a movie. It was really about the sense of community, social gathering, speaking to the people next to you, your neighbour and very often the street in front of your house would be closed for a night or two and the whole neighbourhood would gather around to see a movie.

So, from the very beginning we decided that the cinema should be free for all. It should be centrally located and unique enough so that people of different types and different classes would come together. It should also give them an experience of a proper cinema-going experience. So the equipments that were used were professional, state of the art, Dolby surround system, projectors and so on. It also had to be fast enough to be assembled and reusable and recycled after. It also had to introduce the social side of cinema-going.

So this is where it was located. It's in the CBD at the National Monument Park and basically this was where it was originally proposed, the location but it was moved to the Futsal area nearby. This is a view of the city, the CBD adjacent to the park. So it's the most central location that one could build a cinema.

So we decided from very early on we want to revive this idea of the traditional open-air cinema. We were inspired by them and also we were inspired by Lina Bo Bardi and her work of the SESE Pompayer and also Achille Castiglioni. This is on the left you have a hanging shelf which she designed in the '60s for Bernini and on the right you'll have the floss installation for the lighting company. You'll see the influence of that later in our initial design.

So we wanted to create something light, something fun and something very simple and something very communal. So this was the first original proposed design. We designed a space which is raised from the ground and you have the foyer to the left with a canopy of light and you have the ticket booth and the bar separating the foyer from the cinema. So quite simple in design. We decided to clad the volume in a semi-translucent material to give volume to the space because it's located in a large, vast open area and also to let it glow at night. So for structure because we need to assemble it very fast, we used scaffolding, typically used in construction.

In Indonesia this kind of scaffolding is widely available but they were mainly used in the oil and mining industry. So it was the first time for the company to do something like this. For the cladding we used Agronet which is a sort of netting commonly used in farming allowing air, wind and light to still pass through and we chose it because it's also a low cost material.

This is the floor plan showing the stair case going up to the foyer area here and then you have the ticket counter and the bar separating the cinema. This is the section. So it is a very simple design. This is the rendering showing the staircase going up to the foyer with the canopy of lights and the monument behind and the cinema itself.

Incidentally we realised later that our initial proposal actually resembled the traditional long houses of Indonesia which are typically raised on stilts, having a long, communal space where different families would occupy. Luckily for us the organisers of Jakarta Biennale saw our proposal, so they helped us with the funding and we actually got the budget that we hoped we would get, but we didn't realise that there would be all these cuts. There were all these different government taxes and actually the end budget was quite a bit lower than what we hoped for.

So basically we had a week to redesign and we also realised that the location was changed from the centrally placed area to the Futsal area. We woke up realising that we also had to be the main contractor because there was not enough money to hire a main contractor to coordinate the subcontractors. So, this became the design. It became only one storey high. The main spaces are still the same. You have the cinema on one side, the ticket booth and the bar and the foyer. But we made it more open because it's to be on the ground surrounded by Futsal fields.

The other difference is we have these perimeter benches that go around, externally and internally. This is the layout which is still pretty much the same as the old one and this early render of the design.

Now I'll introduce you to the subcontractor teams. So we had two subcontractors, the first which you see here are the people who provided the scaffolding, we rented it from them and who assembled the scaffolding. So as you can see they're wearing hard hats – well some of them anyway – and work boots. So they were the more professional one. Behind here you'll see Mr Herman. He is the other subcontractor and this is his workshop. He mainly works in signage but he was willing to do this for us. It was his first time and we trusted him.

So basically this workshop that you're seeing here is about the size of a single car garage and this is his other workshop. Obviously we were surprised when we first came there to check out the work and I have to say that not all workshops in Jakarta look like this, in this condition but many are. At the time they were basically the only people who could match the figure that we had in our budget. So, now I'll go through the construction photographs because I think that will really illustrate how different things are, say in Australia and the UK than in comparison to Indonesia.

So the basic design had scaffolding as its structure, plywood cladding on top and then came the fittings which included the push-ons, the canopy of lights, the screens, the projector, the tables and the other loose furniture. Last was the cladding which was made of Agronet. So here you can see the scaffolding starting to go up with a little bit of the cladding. Next you can see these are couplers that connect the pipes together and basically the plywood sits on a little bit of hollow frame which then is tied down to the scaffolding. These are the guys going up to connect the pipes together and as you can see there's no harness. So every day they would climb up, this is about six metres high and they would swing from module to module trying to put all these things together, sometimes smoking away.

This is the view from the top of the city to the monument outside before the cladding was put on and this is after. This is the structure of the tiered sitting. We made them quite deep so you can either sit upright, lean back or sit cross legged, the traditional Indonesian way. This is the detail of the ticket booth which would contain the ticket counter, the café and also the speakers. These are just some details of how the structure and the cladding is put up together.

The signage and this is how it looked like inside after it was done. This is the graphic that we did which resembled the organisation's logo. These are the panels being painted at the workshop and I just want to point out to the gate that you can see here, that's the first thing that we saw when we arrived there. So we were a bit nervous whether they could actually do the job or not, but as Indonesian people, again, they are very optimistic and when we came there they were all smiles. So we were more relaxed then and we knew that they could do it, hopefully.

This was on day five, so it was half way done. You can see that the ticket booth is starting to be put up in the middle of a soccer match. Next came the fittings, the cushion, screens, projectors and the loose furniture. So there was a technical advisor who advised us on the distance that one has to have between the projector and the screen and also the viewing angle. This was the screen being put up, the speakers behind the screen and this was how it looked with the speakers inside before felt, rock wall material was used.

These were the canopy of lights. They were made out of clean sheets of aluminium which were cut and folded. These were the lights when it was being tested on site with the signage and on site in the foyer in the evening. So it created this almost pseudo lightning effect because it was quite even. These were the tables that we designed inspired by [24:37] and these are the tables on site with a view of the soccer match. Lastly came the cladding which was made by Agronet.

So these are detailed drawings that we provided and basically they were treated as curtains. So there was a steel wire which went through the curtain and they were tied to the scaffolding on top and at the bottom, in between the benches. These were the curtains being put up before they were stretched and these are the guys again, climbing up without a harness, stretching them up and he was smoking. Yeah, so multitasking the Indonesian way.

These were the curtains after they were completed, stretched during the day and it was nice that you could see the silhouettes of the scaffolding structure in the evening with two guys sitting on the benches. Lastly came the signage. This is the signage being made at Mr Herman's workshop, the signage on site and basically within 10 days it was all done. There was only one thing left and that was to get a pawang hujan. A pawang hujan is a rain shaman. You'll see it translated. To our surprise the majority of Indonesians believe that they can do their magic and perform their things at a given event, at a particular location and basically stop the rain from happening.

So places like golf courses would regularly use their service and important events such as weddings and government ceremonies. So there was actually a budget allocated for a pawing hujan or a rain shaman at least for the opening night, and believe it or not it did not rain a single drop that night.

So here it is, the view of the front shall we say, of the entrance area in the evening. You see this word 'Misbar' and it's short for grimisbubar which in Indonesian translates as 'drizzle disperse'. So basically with the traditional open air cinema, when it drizzled people would just run and disperse. So we adopted the name as well.

This is the view of it during the day from the base of the monument. The view of its rear during a soccer match and you can see that it almost looked like the tiered sitting was floating. Basically during the day when the cinema wasn't going the whole space would still be open. The only thing that was closed was the ticket counter which happened to be the door which would shut. So you get kids and adults sitting on the table, playing there and so on. This is the view of the cinema area at night with the monument behind and the foyer area and you can see some rain coats here. So besides the cinema being free we also gave away free raincoats which the kids absolutely love. So even though it wasn't raining they would just wear their raincoat. So despite the name drizzle disperse, when it rains people would still stay there. They would either take out their rain coat or take out their umbrellas.

This is the foyer again during a soccer match, views of the foyer in the evening, the crowds inside and the crowds outside. So most often it would be quite crowded inside and you'd see crowds gathering outside. I wanted to show this image because you can see this man here, he's the local garbage collector trying to catch a glimpse of the movie. I think it was the last night before opening night, a group of us, we were telling old ladies around the area selling food on the street to come to the event and to bring their families to watch free movies throughout the event. They simply couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe that it would be free, that something like this built in the park for the first time would be completely free. The only way we could convince them was we had to bring out the program booklet that actually had the word 'free'. They were all smiles afterwards and yeah, just because of things like that, it made things – yeah, it was really worth the effort. Because of that, because a lot of people didn't believe that it was free, the organisation decided to put this banner which basically said that the whole entire event is free.

This is the view again of the back with the soccer players, the players using the bench. Again, the foyer and the foyer area from one of the openings. Basically with this project from the beginning what I forgot to mention is that we didn't need any permits. We didn't have to get any building permits at all. The only thing we had to get was a letter from the governor and also we were asked by the Jakarta Board of Tourism and Culture who funded the entire project, a letter from the structural engineer that states that the structure has been calculated and that it is safe and sound. Basically we found out later that the whole reason for that letter is because the then Governor who is now the President of Indonesia was going to come to the opening.

Yeah, so we were very grateful that we get to do this project and from this quite a small project. It wasn't a big architectural project. It was a temporary building but because of it we got invited to places like Chicago and Germany and now here tonight. So, you never know.

The next project was an invited competition by the British Council. It was we had to create a space that would exhibit a few photographs and also display a live photo shoot during Jakarta Fashion Week. This was our proposal, very simple. We used tubular steel pipes to sort of hang the exhibits and aluminium foil emergency blanket as curtains to partially close off the photo shoot area. So, we were selected but I think about three weeks before it was supposed to be completed during a meeting someone somehow realised that they gave us the wrong dimension and basically the space that we had was only about a fraction of what we designed. So we had to again redesign within I think four days.

We started to realise that this was a recurring thing, working in Indonesia. There would always be last minute surprises and we would just have to improvise. So the final proposal became this which was a lot smaller and more simple, but still retaining the same sort of material. I just have a couple of images to show.

So the next project at Mantang is a project that we are initiating. It's for a cinema, café and outdoor exhibition space located in a dis-used car park in Jakarta. So, here is a rendering of it and we thought it would be a good opportunity to use sort of an existing public facility that isn't used for a social or cultural activity. So there is the cinema here, a café underneath and surrounding it is an outdoor art installation space. The idea was to get quite interactive art installations that could be enjoyed by both kids and adults.

This is the site. This is the rooftop of the car park which is not open to the public. So it's not used. It's a split level structure. This is the view from the top of the car park. So as you can see it's quite nice. You have the greenery and then you have the city skyline. So we've been talking to organisations such as British Council, Japan Foundation and also the Ministry of Youth and Recreation who supports the idea and are willing to help in providing programs and content to the project. So hopefully we'll get it going.

The architectural idea basically derived from the split level. So we have the cinema which rises up from the higher level of the split level slabs which gave enough space underneath for a café to be accommodated. So we have this form rising up which is almost like this hovering, mysterious object inviting people down below to come up.

This is the section. So as you can see it's quite simple in design. This is again the similar view that I showed earlier, the café underneath and the cinema. We intended it to also function say as a lecture venue or a concert or a play. This is the view of the café overlooking the city and the skyline and this is how one would look up from below. So hopefully through perseverance and time we could get it happen.

The next project is a small project that we did at the end of last year. It was for the State Film Company. They asked us to think of an idea of a very low cost, indoor cinema to be used in villages and regional towns within Indonesia. So what we came up with were these individual curved fabrics which looked almost like over-enlarged curtains made out of felt rock wall to semi-enclose the cinema that you can see here from the outside area. It also acts as an acoustic fabric. Inside again it's quite simply. You have a ply screen panel, space for the projector and loose sittings. This is the outside, just a simple table and the idea is that they could just use their accessing furniture if they have it. We have some panels to show the film programs and the community notices.

The next project Chedang is the first office project that we are working on, also in Jakarta. Is to go on site this September. It's to be the headquarter office of a plastic manufacturing company in Jakarta, eight stories high. So it will have things like a café, a show room, canteen function room, typical office spaces and also a top floor executive suite for its owner with a rooftop garden. This is the site here. So they occupy two plots next to this tower being constructed and the whole reason that they needed a new building was because when this tower was excavated they didn't do it properly. You'll hear that often sometimes I think in Jakarta. So the neighbouring building started to slide and it created huge cracks on the floor, in the walls and some of the slabs were basically sloping. So they needed a new building and thankfully they chose us.

So, this is our initial idea. Basically with the original building it was completely built fully within the side. The front sort of mandatory set-back area was used for parking. This is very typical for an office building of this scale in Indonesia. So we convinced the client to build in a smaller foot plate but higher, so they could have some outdoor garden at the front and at the back free of parking.

This is the ground floor plan. This is the strip here showing the drop-off area and the entrance. So this whole floor is to be the reception café and showroom area overlooking the back garden. Above that would be the meeting rooms and their sort of canteen function room with an outdoor terrace. So the first three floors were the semi-public spaces. This is a view showing the drop-off area, ramp to the basement and the entrance. This is the view of the entrance area under the building canopy.

This is the typical floor. So what we've done is we pushed the core to one side of the building with three openings so that the typical office area could be subdivided into three areas quite easily. This is the executive top floor suite, there's the meeting room, reception and an office suite complete with a dressing area and a bathroom. It's to be surrounded by tropical plants in a pavilion roof garden sort of setting. This is a view of it.

To decide on the façade we did a whole series of sun studies in different times during the day and in different months. That's basically to decide what the depth of the columns should be, how frequent it should be and what type of sun shading it should have. This is in development and this is most likely where it's heading towards. So it's a more solid, stone-clad solid façade with canopies in the front and more frequent columns on the side. Again, this is sort of going against the typical office building in Jakarta which predominantly use quite thin glass curtain walls.

This is the sun study of the internal areas and initially we wanted to use ceramic tiles as the cladding material which was common in all the office buildings in Jakarta. This is one of my favourite buildings in central Jakarta by Paul Rudolph which is completely clad in ceramic tiles, which is actually a great material because it's very durable and suits the monsoon season of Indonesia. Unfortunately though the client favours more stone façade, so that's – yeah, [42:32] stone façade of basically local andesite and granite.

The next project is the small apartment that we recently completed. It's a three bedroom apartment and we were asked to design all the joineries and pretty much all the furniture. So you can see here this is the kitchen and the kitchen overlooking the living room and here is the living room. We don't have so much photographs yet because it was recently done. This basically hides the storage and a folding bed behind. This is a table we designed. I wanted to show this project because in Jakarta there are a lot of workshops. There are a lot of carpenters. So you could easily get a prototype done in a very affordable way. So for this project we did a lot of one to one mock-ups. We did one to one mock-ups of door details and also of the joinery details. So the furniture is still ongoing.

The last project I'll show you is a house that we are designing. It will also go on site this year. It's a house for a family who wants a lot of outdoor space, which is not quite common in Jakarta. This is the site that you can see here. It's 600 square metres and the reason why I want to show you this photograph is I wanted to show the neighbouring buildings and again stress that in Jakarta and in Indonesia a lot of the houses are fully built in terms of width and sometimes the length as well, towards the back.

An interesting thing that we found while designing houses was that for middle and upper class households they would often have a group of staff. This would consist of say housemates, nannies, sometimes a cook or a chauffeur and they would actually live together with the family within the same house. So, privacy is always an issue and very often what happens is the architect would have to create a separate compound within the house that would contain their living spaces, so the maid's living spaces, say the bedrooms, the kitchen, the living areas and the bathroom.

So, what we did was we designed a three storey building, a pedestal with two stories of the main volume above. The width of the volume, it's only I think about half of the site but because it is flanked by these two larger, more grand houses, we used very, very deep cantilevers to sort of balance the volume but it also dealt with issues of heat and rain.

This is a view of the house from the side. You can see there's a pitch-roof pier and the whole reason is that in Jakarta you could not submit a DA for a house without it having a pitched roof. A flat rooved house would not be approved basically. So, we have to have a pitched roof. It dealt with heat but at the same time we made a gentle slope so you won't actually see it from below.

So this was an early working model that we did that showed the ground floor. There is a front yard and a back yard. The services compound are all to the side of the house including the circulation. This is the garage, the workshop, a guest bedroom and this area now is now completely open. It becomes the guest living room. This is the raised living area. So you have the kitchen, the dining room and the living room with a pool, a green area and you have the services here and the circulation core.

The top floor consists of the bedrooms, the master bedroom, a rumpus room and two bedrooms here. Again, the services are to the side with the circulation and you see that the balconies are quite deep. The rumpus room area goes from here to here and this is I think about 2.75 metres let's say. Then this is the roof which mainly contains the plant area and a laundry area.

This is an earlier render of the front façade of the building. It's to be clad in white travertine and you can see how - we tried to deal with the Indonesian climate most of the time in a very simple way rather than using complex engineering. So through the articulation of the façade with this openable façade and cross circulation and also with the deep cantilevers to deal with heat and rain. So the ground floor, the main floor finishes would be local andesite and terrazzo. On the first floor travertine and terrazzo and on the top travertine and timber.

This is a view from the back of the house looking to the street with the pool. This is the rear side of the house with the garden on the ground floor and these are just a couple of interior renders of the rumpus room adjacent to the bedrooms and the dining room and the kitchen overlooking the pool.

So, that's the last project I'll show and I'll just do a bit of conclusion. It wasn't easy for us at the beginning when we arrived to Jakarta. It was a new place, new people, new ways of working. I remember at the beginning we met quite a few people who asked us to design new classical homes or what they call as 'American classic' which is basically when you have a husband and wife who couldn't decide whether they wanted a modern looking house or a more classical Renaissance looking house. We would obviously politely turn them down.

We found that in Indonesia houses that are being built, they are quite stylistically very diverse. So often you get an architect who would work on these different styles. Another big difference we found that in terms of construction compared to say Australia and the UK, things are less contractual. So, that with the fact that labour is quite cheap, the locus of labour, you can change the design during construction in a more simpler and less formal manner between say architects and contractor.

I hope that you could see that our approach when we work on sort of low cost projects such as the cinema or a more higher end budget project like the office or this house, it's pretty much the same. We spend a lot of time actually drawing details and thinking about them. We found that we go to site more frequently than one would do say in Australia and the UK. The reason being is because many of the construction workers, they are not formally trained. So we would often draw on the walls on site and we would bring models, whether it's a 3D model on the computer or a cardboard mock-up to sort of show them how things work and what we intend to do.

At times of course they can occasionally test our patience, but I think we've grown more calm and patient when something goes wrong on site. It's actually quite pleasant dealing with people because Indonesians are not so confrontational. So, instead of saying 'no' they would say to my partner 'It's okay. It's okay Mr. We try. We try', which is quite nice and actually at the end of the project we'd get to know some of them quite well. This enables the architect as a designer to develop quite a close relationship with the people on site who are actually building the buildings which is quite nice.

Yeah, so so far at the moment we've been very lucky in the sense that we get to do a variety of projects. The house that you see here, it will also go on site this year. Hopefully we can continue doing that and we hope that we could do more public projects, whether they are temporary or permanent. Jakarta has in its way, it's changing and it has grown on us quite a bit. We hope we could contribute something better to the city.

So thank you.

Sandra Kaji-O'Grady:

Thank you Melissa. I'd like to welcome Silvia Micheli to the stage. Silvia is a UQ academic and she is our panellist questioner today for the Q&A session. Thank you.

Silvia Micheli:

So thank you Melissa for coming to Brisbane and giving this very insightful lecture tonight.

So I will start from the Kineforum which is a very interesting project and also from your consideration about the lack of public space in Jakarta. It seems to me that that building really is a cinema but at the same is a generator of public space, meaning it's also a soccer field. It's also a gathering point. I see that you really are keen in the production of public space. So what is your plan? How can you contribute to the production of public space in Jakarta, especially taking into account that Jakarta is changing. So probably there would be more opportunities.

Melissa Liando:

Actually the current governor of Jakarta, he has a program and he realises that cinema-going has become unaffordable for the majority of people as I mentioned before. What he is planning to do is to convert a lot of the market polls within the city and to transform part of the space inside as cinemas during the evening. So hopefully we could contribute to that. What he has done is he's been developing a lot of green spaces in cooperation with companies, private companies actually through corporate social responsibility which is great. The reason why he actually did that is because the bureaucracy of government funding which we sort of experienced with the Kineforum project. That's why with the other cinema that we are working on, the rent structure, we are trying to get private funding and sort of gather enough capital so that year by year we can be self funded. So hopefully we'll get that realised and we can show more ideas of public spaces.

Silvia Micheli:

Do you feel that the government and the authorities are supportive of architecture as a means of changing the making of the cities and Indonesian cities?

Melissa Liando:

I think now they are. It's election time, so I hope they'll get re-elected, but when we first came, I'm not sure if that was the case. From a lot of people that we spoke to, especially in the arts and design field, often when they were offered sort of a government project, they would say 'no' and the reason why was because of again the bureaucracy. Often it was very last minute in terms of funding and also the program but we didn't know it at the time. No one knew. So we just dived in and we did it, yeah. So it is changing, yeah.

Silvia Micheli:

How did you do it? How did you deal with this heavily bureaucratised regime and how are you doing now, in terms of practice?

Melissa Liando:

In terms of practice, when it came to let's say, the meetings with sort of the government departments and things like that, we tried to sort of almost stay behind the picture as much as we can. So let's say with the cinema, we were working with this non-profit organisation called Kineforum which was under the Jakarta Arts Institute. So from the beginning almost we said to them 'Okay, when it comes to permits and things like that you guys have to deal with it.' That's usually how we did it.

Obviously we still have to meet and comply with certain things, but it is really, really changing and it's becoming less bureaucratic. Probably the last minute aspects might still be there, so I think our strategy is basically to know what to expect, to know that there will be surprises somehow and we just have to improvise.

Silvia Micheli:

So by showing Castiglioni and Lina Bo Bardi I understand that your approach to architecture is holistic. You like working on different scales, from the urban level down to the production of details. So here is the question. Being a professional with specialisation counts more and more. How do you promote your design [59:08] which appears to work [59:10]?

Melissa Liando:

Where we worked before in our previous practice we basically did post the architecture and the interior, and often the furniture itself. So, we were quite used to that way of working. Also when I was studying at UTS in Sydney I did a sub major in furniture design. So I was always interested in making furniture and also I think because the clients that we have now, they tend to ask us to design both the architecture and interior. So, it is quite similar almost. So we quite enjoy doing that from the large scale to the small scale.

Silvia Micheli:

So let's move on and talk about tropical architecture. So I've seen that you have been invited to this exhibition, Tropicale [01:00:14] in Frankfurt and one more, South-East Asian architecture is of interest in other parts of the world, in the United States and also in Europe with totally different climatic conditions. So what do you think is the appealing factor of tropical architecture at the moment in those areas?

Melissa Liando:

I think they're starting to see that it's shifting, sort of the architecture being built from this idea of semi-traditional tropical architecture. Say probably a decade ago when you think of Indonesian architecture, the image that you would get are this tropical, Balinese style buildings. I think now the outside world is starting to see that there is something different, something more urban, a more urban architecture which has always been there since a long time ago but it was just not, I guess well publicised sort of thing. So I think that's where maybe the renewed interests are coming from and also if you think of Asian architecture, predominantly you will think of Japan, South Korea, China and maybe Vietnam. You wouldn't really think of say, Indonesia or Malaysia or Cambodia or maybe India in exception to say pseudo Mumbai. So, I think they want to know more about it which is good, yeah.

Silvia Micheli:

In terms of Indonesia and perhaps Jakarta it seems to me that there is room for experimentation and possibilities. So you have decided to stay in Jakarta and despite the fact that you have to improvise and deal with enormous differences, you are enjoying working there. So can you tell us a bit more about this city and this nation from an architectural point of view and what it can offer to maybe foreign offices working there?

Melissa Liando:

I think Jakarta where we are based currently is quite a chaotic city. So you have unlike say the neighbouring countries like Singapore which is very organised and quite Western-like. Jakarta is very different. Obviously when you go to the city centre there are all these skyscrapers designed by international architects, but you step out of this quite Western, quite modern facilities just by a few metres you've got this little houses which some are legal, some are illegal and it's a totally different world. So you always have this juxtaposition which we really enjoy. The cities are changing dramatically in terms of infrastructure and design and it's quite interesting to be part of that.

Silvia Micheli:

So it seems to me that in Jakarta at the moment there is this discrepancy between being very global and being very local.

Melissa Liando:

Yeah.

Silvia Micheli:

So how is it that negotiation of these two levels and what kind of identity Jakarta is developing?

Melissa Liando:

Hard question. I think now the people are more educated in terms of design. There are a lot more people being aware of say, arts and architecture from abroad. Predominantly I think personally that in terms of outside architecture it's mainly coming from America and places like Singapore. A little bit of Europe predominantly from Holland. Historically as well Indonesia was colonised by the Dutch and I think not so much from the rest of Europe which I think is why it was quite hard I think for us as well, the beginning when we started out because they look at the projects that we have done and they think 'It is so foreign.' But it is changing and there are a lot more discussions set up by the government with local practices to try to talk about this.

Silvia Micheli:

What are the venues where you meet your colleagues and the government and discuss about issues of public interest in Jakarta?

Melissa Liando:

There is the Architecture Biennale that takes place in Jakarta I think every three years. So it's still not that often. So we don't really have big forums like what you guys have here, but the government, they've also set up an independent body called, I think the Department of Creative Economy which encompasses all the design fields and they act almost as a sort of middle person between the government and the independent say designers and try to gauge what is needed and what they hope to do. That's been going on I think for a couple of years which is quite good because from that day they initiated quite a lot of projects.

Silvia Micheli:

What are your plans for the future?

Melissa Liando:

Our plans for the future, we'll still stay in Jakarta, at least for the time being. It's not an easy city to live but hopefully we can do more public projects and just sort of show a different type of architecture or a different way of dealing with local traditions and local surroundings.

Silvia Micheli:

Mentioning your local tradition, what is your knowledge of local tradition and your interest in trying to convert or learn from local tradition and convert it into contemporary terms?

Melissa Liando:

I spent the first 11 years of my life in Indonesia and during my school years here I would still go back there about once a year. So, it's still very much in my mind and actually I studied Indonesian literature as well when I was here. We always, with almost every project that we do we looked at precedents historically. So with the cinema that's what we did and with houses that's what we did because for my partner everything in Indonesia is quite new. He's spent most of his life in Europe and I've been away for some time. So it's also trying to understand and look at its progression with an open mind.

What we try to do is we try to make things in a simple way. So, in Indonesia there are lots of workshops that make things but in the majority they are still quite traditional in terms of equipment or ways of working. So, often we would have a design and we would talk to them whether it's possible to be built in this way or not and whether the detail would work out in this manner and whether they can do it. It's sort of like a compromise sort of process with what we want to do and what they can do. So that's also a common thing that happens and I guess it's a way of us trying to understand the way of making things traditionally.

Silvia Micheli:

So moving on, another issue of the profession is this talk series is very much focused on bringing out the role of women in the architecture realm. So we already spoke about that in your previous conversation but how is it working in Indonesia and in Jakarta as a female architect?

Melissa Liando:

I think they are more tolerant, say than in the west.

Silvia Micheli:

Surprising?

Melissa Liando:

Yes, surprisingly. So, I think say during the construction process, the contractors, they are, I don't know, maybe they are less manly or they are less aggressive. But maybe it comes down to the Indonesian or the Javanese people being not so confrontational as well. They are more casual about things. So I remember the first year when we came to Jakarta, we set up our practice when I had my first daughter and she's been on site. I used to carry her and sometimes, only one or two times we would go inside and they would actually be fine with it. So they are very accommodating in that way.

So, I think yeah, in a sense it's a bit better and there is this tradition in an Indonesian family, you are very close to your parents. So, very often the parents would look after or babysit your kids and I think that's why I've met a lot of, in a way women architects because they get that family support that then they can continue work after sort of giving birth and having a family. Also plus I think the maternity holiday, I think it's only about like three months or something. So you have no choice really in a way, financially for some families to actually go back to work. So there are pros and cons but I think it's quite accommodating in a way.

Silvia Micheli:

So thank you so much. I think we have run out of time and join me in thanking again Melissa.

Sandra Kaji-O'Grady:

Thank you both of you. It was really fascinating conversation.

So before we finish tonight I've been given the important duty of announcing the first Arch-I-Spy winner of the year which is this lovely little image here. I don't know what it is or where it is. Does anybody recognise it? It's not local.

It's in Singapore? Is that a guess or is it a…

So to our winner we will be in touch. The Library staff will be in touch. We don't know if this is the person's name or initials, so I won't even attempt it, but there they are. They're the winner.

Next week, so there's still a little bit more of APAF to go. Make sure that if you haven't booked for tomorrow night that you get along. Get onto the website and see what else there is remaining. There's lots of events.

Next week we have Jeremy McLeod and it's going to be a really, really great discussion. So jump onto the Design Online website and register. The tickets are now available for the next two lectures in this series.

So thank you and have a good evening and thanks again to Melissa and Silvia.

[End of Transcript]

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