Architecture and Sustainability: A Personal Story
This time I would like to share a little bit story of my own life experience. This post is generally a short reflection on my 5 years professional career as an architect after I finished my undergraduate degree. I would like to share how my professional experience has influenced the way I understand the relationships between architecture and sustainability. I was trained as an architect and worked as an architect before I continued doing Master of Sustainable Built Environment at UNSW, Sydney. I spent 4 years of undergraduate education to get my Bachelor of Architecture degree from University of Indonesia. If clicked, the image below is linked to my architectural portfolio showing a general outlook of my educational and professional projects before my Master education started.
My first undergraduate design studio was to create a personal meditation space. At that time, I already believed that cutting down trees to build something is not a good idea. Therefore, I came up with the design that is preserving existing trees. As the time passes by, I learned more and more about sustainable architecture. Back then at my undergraduate program, it was often called as "green architecture". I always tried to incorporate green features into the design. However, my understanding of sustainability at that time was not as comprehensive as what I have now. I treated sustainability features just as additions to the conventional building design. What I understood was that the green features made the building better. I did not really understand the holistic reasoning underlying the necessity to have sustainable architecture other than it's good for the environment. I did not fully understand that sustainability is also related to social and economic aspects besides environmental ones (triple bottom line). I did not know about triple bottom line (or quadruple bottom line) just yet.
After I finished my undergraduate degree, I worked for an architecture firm with a global network and international projects. Its headquarter is located in London, but I worked for its Jakarta branch office. The way the company worked allowed me to have experience working on international projects. However, the projects were mainly commercials and I did not have enough chance to explore sustainable architecture within my company practice. As a result, I tried to learn and practice more on sustainable architecture through competitions and my own personal projects. I managed to win a few national and international design competitions as a result.
One of the competitions I won was a drinking water treatment facility design competition held by the Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing of Indonesia. The design attempts to expand the ability of the facility to serve more benefits than required. The primary function of the facility is obviously to treat freshwater into drinking water. My idea is to add social function to the facility so that it can be used as a public space as well. A retention pond is the key element of the design which is useful to store rainwater. The landscape design also incorporate plants that are easily maintained. Some plants with the ability to expel mosquitoes are also used. To know more about the design, you may check the highlight on page 52 of my online architectural portfolio or contact me for more details.
After spending almost three years working for two architecture offices, I resigned and attempted to grow my own business. I spent about two years working independently. One of the last projects I worked on before I came to Sydney was the design of a Photo Voltaic (PV) Plant in Lombok, Indonesia. The PV plant was sought to become the first large scale PV plant development in Indonesia. The PV plant was also developed as farming area, which will be managed using permaculture system. Please refer to the last project listed under my online portfolio for the details of this project.
By studying here, I have gained a lot of new knowledge and skills on sustainability and the built environment. After I finish my degree, I expect to go back to Indonesia and do more works on this field (sustainable built environment). At the moment, sustainability is not really a popular subject in Indonesia. Although I believe the people live more sustainable life compared to some of the developed worlds (if we measure environmental footprint per person), I believe we still have a lot to do to make our buildings and cities more environmentally responsible, economically viable and socially equitable. I would like to be a part of this national endeavor.
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