Got delayed in the station?

This is what we had in mind after finishing a long discussion and arguments on creating the most effective circulation and functions for an interchange station. At that time we thought that station is a very 'functional' facility, thus every chance to design it would need greater consideration to the public use or flows. Thus again, this wasn't just an image competition that pleases jury's and public's eyes, hence professional certification is needed for each entrant. After the discussion settled, we needed a striking punchline or statement that may put our design to the new level of understanding, how an interchange should be and look like on its urban context.

Why would be delayed become somehow entertaining experience?
Have you ever been delayed by someone or from some scheduled task in Indonesia? Most probably you have, and some would think that the term 'jam karet' is still relevant. This might be unpleasant condition to have, if we constantly put ourselves as the object of delay. On the contrary when one choose to delay him/herself from a scheduled task because the situation 'lures' him/her to do so.

First, the site is quite specific where roads and railways are cross-overlayed upon each other, with an additional of water element in Ciliwung river. This has in fact devide the site into 4 different area, each with its own development plans; Dukuh atas on northeast is known for its density of market, small residences, and night clubs; Talang Betutu on northwest with its skyscrapers future development; and south sides with its developed business district and hotels. Although separated by the site, we did not see how the interchange stations (between commuter, airport link, and MRT) should also be as well, as the TOR would suggest. An interchange station should represent speed, accesibility, and comfort. And we cannot suggest comfortable and effective 'speed' of interchanging in a separated stations concept.

While the station itself represents speed, other public (commercial and communal) facility in the station offers comfort that is related to a slower pace concept, thus 'delaying the speed' for a more public refreshment facility is the issue that we proposed for Dukuh Atas interchange station. Delaying also means providing more green open space that surrounding area lacks of, so that it sustain its presence on the ground and upper level as people meeting point, or simply a place to have your lunch during the busiest day in Jakarta.

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Lighting Design

In Indonesia, “Lighting Design” has been commonly considered as another profession related to electrical (M/E) engineering, and sadly, some do not understand why would such profession even exist? Once, we were working on the design team for a big hospital project when the principal said,” leave the lightings to the M/E engineers, they should know what to do”. At that time we thought, perhaps lighting have nothing to do with architecture.

Almost 80% of the information received by human brain is captured through the eyes as human sight sense. Thus, the basic concept of such profession may said to be “the most beautiful things cannot be seen without light.” This profession has been developing as the electronic starts to fulfill human needs for technology, from a simple light bulb to the discovery that turn human from daylight into 24-hour creature.

What does a lighting designer (LD) do?

Lighting designer is an engineer whose expertise lay on the art and technique of manipulating lighting. They are not merely an electrical engineer, but they may also an architect or designer graduates, with a taste of art that sometimes could not be understood by on-site technical applicator.

For instance, for a meeting room, LD would calculate the amount and power of illumination needed for meeting activity according to the standards, through a complex calculation and regular research for human eye. One may have various scenarios for meeting, such as discussion, writing, and presentation that need different lighting treatment. A simple miscalculation of illumination may result in weary eyes, exhaustion, and even nausea.

As for public facility such as sport fields and public roads and pedestrians, LD also put a thorough consideration on how to choose or create lighting fixtures, as they might also affect human safety issues. In a 4 season country like Germany, winter may also cause different way of designing lights since the sun only shines for less than 10 hours a day.

A contrary to a meeting room and standard public facility, entertainment/leisure facilities’ LD such as cafes, night clubs, or building facades, does not focus on fulfilling technical standards. A sense of art may dominate the way LD propose their designs, how they manipulate shadows and lights, the dark or lighter side of the room with a touch of colors to create interesting ambiance.

Lighting design technology has been improving rapidly during high-tech era, where the use of energy-saver illumination and lighting controller to manage multiple scenarios for a room, have reached a higher level and varieties. We may even turn the lights on/off from mobile phones. The challenge now for LD is to create, choose, and determine the right lighting or luminaries from variety brands of fixtures, with millions of shape of armatures in the world, to be set accordingly to human needs. Thus for LD, to know the minimum/maximum standards for a room may not be sufficient without the experience of selecting and combining those armatures with aesthetic consideration in real projects.

In collaboration with artists, an LD can develop their sense of art through installation. The art of space installation is also an interesting challenge, since lighting may assist the expression method or media for the artist. An installation object may emerge differently at night by the use of artificial lightings, and so does the well lit city during the night.

Initially, the LD profession was held under an illumination technique organization named CIE (Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage) in Europe and IES (Illuminating Engineering Society) in US, and they were dominated by electrical engineers. As the time went by, such LD organizations form a more specialized association, namely IALD and PLDA. Today, IALD and PLDA has been collaborating well so that its LD member would not necessarily register to both organization to have its acknowledgement. PLDA in Europe has developed more in world wide than IALD in US, as it has expanded to Asia.

As in Indonesia, such LD organization has founded in early 90’s by the name of Himpunan Ahli Teknik Iluminasi Indonesia (HTII). With its headquarter is in JDC (Jakarta Design Center), HTII has stood proudly side by side with other designer associations in Jakarta, which mark the next phase of lighting design world.

Pavilion 95, as one of the few consultant specializes in LD, has been putting an effort to register its experts to the standards of HTII and even ELDA (European Lighting Designer Association), to raise its competence in the lighting business. Thus, we feel obliged to remind the importance of having a well designed and calculated lighting for your room or facility, especially when lighting affects not merely aesthetic sense but also health and safety for human activity.


Agust Danang Ismoyo, ST.,MALD.

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Maya Lin, an architect and sculptor

Maya Lin was known for the first time from her earthwork design on Vietnam Memorial War, a competition which catapulted her to fame when she beat other 1400 contestants including many professional architects, when she was a 21-year-old senior at Yale. For those who love to watch Hollywood movies with Vietnam war setting must recognize this landscape memorial. Through her design, Lin proposed a memorial with book life form splitting the landscape and submerged into the earth, cutting aggressively into the Washington Mall. It is outspoken and angry in the way like a visual scar on American landscape, symbolizes bitterness and grief over Vietnam war.
In her new earthwork project at the Storm King Art Center,New York, Lin creates seven rows of undulating hills cradled in a gently sloping valley and she names it as “Wave Field”. This is a project that proposes an ocean waves expansion that have been frozen in place when you look from a distance. Yet as soon as you walk into the piece whose earthern swells range in height from 12 to 18 feet, your experience of it changes remarkably. At first, standing at the bottom of a slope, it may look craggy and insurmountable. But in scaling it — which turns out to be relatively easy because of the rough surface — you become keenly aware of the earth itself, currently a patchy mix of topsoil, short grass, clover, white daisies and yellow-flowered partridge pea, which attracts swarms of monarch butterflies.
Back to eight years ago when she was invited to make an earth project on this area, Maya Lin found herself attracted to an area known around the art center as the gravel pit. Located on the property’s southwestern edge, about 100 feet beyond Andy Goldsworthy’s “Storm King Wall” (1997-98), the pit was a reminder of what Storm King looked like in 1960, the year it opened. In the year of 1950s much of Storm King’s landscape consisted of acres of gravel that had been mined from the surrounding fields in connection with the construction of the New York State Thruway. Over the years the art center used this rocky material to shape its grounds, creating the seemingly natural hills and valleys that now are dotted with sculptures and site-specific works by artists like David Smith, Isamu Noguchi and Mr. Goldsworthy.

This man-made landscape, bringing gravel in and reshaping it and that’s what attracted the architect-landscape artist for the first time. As usual, Maya Lin tried to make her piece become less of a centerpiece. She prefers to create works on the edges and boundaries of places so they would begin to own the environment. The piece at Storm King’s board is Maya Lin third pieces with similar shape as her two previous projects at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at the courtyard of the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. federal courthouse in Miami. Both of these previous projects are smaller than the piece at Storm King. Lin believed that she had to culminate the series with a field that literally giving the most extreme space experience within these hills, so when she found a perfect location she decided to make the waves much larger than human body and create the piece as a concluding part of her two previous earthwork series

Since the site was officially a mine, the Art center’s board had to secure permission from the state Environmental Conservation Department to reclaim it as an artwork. The department has strongly supported the project. Because Ms. Lin is also well known “a committed environmentalist,” as she put it, she was intent on using minimal intervention to turn it into an artwork and making the most of what was already there.

In a collaboration with other local landscapers, Maya Lin and teams sculpting the landscape with a bulldozer and create the waves and the bowl-like valley in which they rest were largely built from the gravel and earth in the pit itself as well as a berm that had shielded the site from view. By the time the piece opens to the public next spring, it will be shielded from the Thruway by about 270 young trees — a mix of maple, oak, sycamore and other local natives. That’s how many trees Ms. Lin’s studio staff has calculated it will take to offset the fuel and energy consumed in making the piece, including the artist’s own frequent car trips from New York. This trees idea derives from Maya Lin’s firm believe on global warming. And she still looking for more trees that can take hotter weather and become more dominant on the piece. She also believe when the spring come, tall plants like deertongue and Canada bluegrass around the piece will have taken over from the ground cover that now holds the topsoil in place. Eventhough she doesn’t want to recreate water, Lin hopes that the grass will flow in the wind and feel more like its own formal play.

As an Architecture graduate Maya Lin’s entire career has been interplay and swing among what she regards as three separate strands: she is an architect and an artist, and she also designs memorials (a criteria that she likes to call them as anti-monuments) that fall somewhere between the two. She has been pursuing all three directions since she finished the Vietnam memorial in 1982.

During her time in Yale graduate school of architecture, Maya Lin found herself spending more and more time in the sculpture studios and start working with her hands. Soon after completing her master degree, she designed her second monument, the Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, which was dedicated in 1989. By 1993 she had completed her first major building, for the Museum of African Art in SoHo, which is now defunct.

Since then she has worked consistently in all three areas, often developing ideas for one sort of project while working on another. In 1993 she created her first site-specific sculpture for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Called “Groundswell,” the piece consisted of 40 tons of broken tempered glass poured into snowdriftlike piles around the museum’s exterior walls. From this came the idea for her first earthwork, “Wave Field,” in Michigan, which she completed in 1995.
In the past Maya Lin has always conceived of her different career strands as separate. She always think that this might be the only way to keep herself balanced. Yet recently she has been coming around to the idea and realize that the strands may be intertwined. Now she can conclude that her design whether it’s art, architecture, or memorials will intrinsically tied to the natural landscape around us.

-- New York Times and other references related--

This is one of those stories that made you perceive architecture as a frame of mind, thus allowing you to create, work and even succeed in whatever field you are in. So, if you're an architect then there's no boundaries for you to create your own space, even if it is made from lawn, furniture, light, sound, or whatever you can imagine it to be.

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Gehen wir nach Berlin 1

August may be the perfect month to enjoy Berlin, considering this year to be the worst weather to have in Berlin. You can easily count your fingers how many times sun shines through the whole day. What a strange summer.

As Germany’s capitol, Berlin is strategically located in the mid Europe, which has an important role in the history of Europe and even the world. Its central location, supported by good transportation lines that connect every corner of the country, has become potential political power across Europe. The combinations of bus lanes, upper ground train (S-Bahn), and underground train (U-Bahn) have proven to be the main artery that holds the life of Berlin for 24 hours. These transportation infrastructures were designed to accommodate up to 10 million citizens, such an ideal scheme for a big city to have, unlike Jakarta that still prefers 4-wheelers roads.

Along with those infrastructures, Berlin is also known for its architectural history and development. Though it may not be too big or as dense as Jakarta, It seems like it is one of the best city reference for every urban planner and architect to visit.

Our journey begins early morning through bus route 100 that accommodates tourist and backpackers to have a glimpse of Berlin’s architectural review on a friendliest budgetJ. It started from the historical Church of Kaiser Wilhelm II that was bombed in WW2. This landmark was planned not to be renovated as remembrance of the horrific WW2 aftermath, thus it was named as Gedächtnis Kirche or the Church of Remembrance. As for the church’s daily activity, a modern octagonal facility was built surround it, that was designed by Egon Eiermann in 1959-1963.

Our journey started toward west along the Kufürstendamm road, one of the city’s artery towards downtown. Kufürstendamm is the ‘central park’ for Berlin that functions as city lungs. This main boulevard is sheltered with big trees on the median, with wide pedestrian walk where cafes extend their domains. Not far from there, we found this modern look office building with sharp glass-panel corner proudly emerges from old and classical style surroundings. It is the Neues Kanzler Eck’s office building that was designed by German-American architect, Helmut Jahnn, and was built in 2002. Along with the pedestrian, this building also provides public venues on its ground level, with cafes and shopping arcades that offers many souvenirs for tourists.

Across the road, we found this cylinder structure that turned out to be a five star resident named Swissotel. This contemporary monolith 5-storey building stands on the intersection of one of the busiest junction in Berlin, where many people walk across the pedestrian to shopping malls and arcades. The curvy facades was covered with exposed vertical aluminum mullions create a unique visual experience, as a contrary to the Eck’s sharp edged building.

The journey continued towards the other way to Zoologischegarten. Similar to the other side, this part of the road also offers many luxurious shopping arcades, executive resident and hotels. One of the interesting building we found was a clothing store Peek&Clopenberg, with simple grid facades yet it was covered with 18 different modules of curving glass panel. This building was designed by local architect, Gottfried Böhm in 1995.

After few more blocks, we continued the tour by bus to another interesting place, Reichstag, one of the famous landmarks in the ‘bear city’, Berlin along with the Brandenburgertor. On our way there, we came across another modern sharp-edged transparent office building, that turned out to be the headquarter of CDU, the current Germany’s Counselor’s (Angela Merkell) party. The transparent atrium with glass-panel facades was set to the outer perimeter as to cover the 7-storey main building. The original concept was a representation of a yellowish ship that sails through the ocean. This fascinating building was designed by Petzinka, Pink & partners and was completed after 2 years of construction in 2000.

Another interesting buildings in the neighborhood are the Embassies, starting from Luxemburg, Malta and Qatar, where they were located in the building compound designed by mid-east architect, Orezi Sayed Mohammed.
Next to them we saw the Malaysia and Mexico Embassies. The Mexican’s was designed with series of concrete columns and copper door entrance as its accent, which has reflected mid-American tropical building character.
Next we have these Scandinavian Embassies, from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. These Embassies were located in a building complex that was masterplanned by Berger+Parkkinen, the Danish architects. The variety of architects involved in the projects has shown a great relationship between Germany and its neighboring countries, especially in architectural context. The complex was related by the presence of water element, as it also reflects their geographical relations to the north sea.

After passing the Embassies, we came at this giant pole structure that lies in the central of urban park, Tiergarten, where our journey with bus route 100 was ended. One of the main attractions in the area is the famous German parliament building, Reichstag. The 19th century Wilhelminian building had been burnt down by Hitler during the WW2, and had been reconstructed with a modern giant glass dome, designed by Sir Norman Foster in 1999. This glass dome has some sort of giant reflectors that maintain constant sunlight through the building, to achieve optimum natural lighting during the day. The dome is actually open to public, where people may see the parliament’s meetings below as well as interesting views outside. An interesting tip for tourist to go inside the Reichstag: please bring along your babies and their strollers, as they will let you in first without long queuing J.
On the northwest of Reichstag we saw the Bundeskanzleramt, the Germany’s white house, where the German Counselor does her duties. The building is actually 4 times bigger than the Whitehouse, and was designed by Axel Schultes.

On the north side we saw another modern structure that is separated by Spree river, which was functioned as the border between former Eastern and Western Germany. Now, the building unifies both sides of the government as well as other states in Germany. This large yet light building with slim columns and lighter wall facades was designed by Stefan Braunsels in 2003.

--August Danang's Log on Berlin trip--

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