When I read news about architecture becoming the #1 most-coveted faculty at my alma mater, I wondered about what factors could have made it happen. This was despite architectural studies being presented in bad light for a political campaign last year, which illustrated how today’s university graduates have difficulty finding employment. The sentiment was denied (unsatisfactorily, according to me and my peers) by the chairman of the Indonesian Institute of Architects. Perhaps, this is merely testament to how “all press is good press”. [I want to hear your view if you are a student interested in architecture — drop a comment below or reach me elsewhere.]
But it is well-known that the majority of architecture school graduates in Indonesia don’t end up becoming architects. The head of the architecture department at the University of Indonesia stated that only 50-60% of their graduates go on to practice in their field. He did not cite architecture-specific tracer studies, so I would even hazard to say that 60% is an exaggerated percentage. For regions outside of Java-Bali, some schools even state that around 40% of their graduates are not absorbed into the job market at all. Several factors were mentioned to contribute to this problem, including the legal trickeries of the construction system which often hurts architects, as well as the difficulty of completing architectural studies itself.
Nevertheless in almost 5 years since I graduated architecture school, I could safely say that at most, only a quarter of my 113-student class went on to become architects. This is not to say that architecture graduates can’t find meaningful employment: many of my peers work within the field as urban designers, researchers, property consultants, developers, and government officials. I myself worked as a writer and editor before going on to join architecture consultants in 2019.
Our variety of experience was what interested my peers and I to get together and hold 15-minute presentations related to our respective work, followed by discussions regarding the current cultural and professional climate. Masterminded by Rani, this event was called “bvnd” after the name of our 2011 class, Balavirya. The event featured seven presentations classified into three themes: urbanism, architecture, and the general field.
My presentation, recorded in podcast format above (delivered in Bahasa Indonesia) was titled “Narasi Arsitektur/Architecture Narratives“. It was based on my career in architectural media and my subsequant foray into practicing architecture. In the presentation, I talked about Lyotard’s theory on postmodernity and its relation to today’s architectural education-cum-workforce system; narration as a re-production of architecture as illustrated through the Greek myth of the Knossos labyrinth; and practical applications of narrative through and within architecture.
Here is a translation of my caption for the event promotion:
Humans make sense of the world through narration. In architecture, narration can be a tool to frame a slice of the world, examine its myriad of problems, then peel it back into understandable forms.
But narration does not stand on its own in the architectural field. It is inseparable from the mechanisms of production that begs the question(s): for what do we build something? Why do we tend to favour some things, but not others? What are the ramifications that our creation has or will impact throughout time?
Every process and product of architecture contains narration, as Beatriz Colomina articulates: “architecture, as distinct from building, is an interpretive, critical act. It has a linguistic condition … when its rhetorical mechanisms and principles are revealed.”
Architectural interpretations are disseminated through many mediums–books, magazines, journals, presentations, exhibitions, models, photographs, captions, sketches, diagrams, renderings, drawings. How are narrations constructed and read, and how do they influence the architectural practice?
To close this post, here is an addendum about narration, as quoted from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: “Direct experience is an evasion, a hiding place, for those without imagination. To narrate is to create while to live is to merely be lived.”
Click above to listen to my presentation. Many thanks to Rani for heading the event and producing the documentation in all of its formats. Please follow @balavirya on Instagram for updates on our upcoming events, which aim to reach bigger audiences from all layers within and beyond the field. Click through on Spotify to listen to more of my friends’ insightful presentations, or watch them on Youtube.
