arsitektur.net

>> Kembali ke Volume 4 No. 1 (2010)

Yandi Andri Yatmo & Paramita Atmodiwirjo

During the visit of Louise Cox – President of UIA – to Indonesia, we had a chance to have a conversation with her. Below is an excerpt from our dialog with her, reflecting some of her personal views, interests and vision on architecture and other stuffs.

Paramita: At the beginning, what made you choose architecture?
Louise Cox: I did it because I wanted to go to university for long time. And I didn’t know what else to do. I looked at the whole lot of other things, sciences, and the mathematics area and then I aim in design. It was the longest course that I felt I could do, so I did it. And then I found it interesting, and the people were interesting, and other things I learned from other people about literature, and music, and other lots of things are all very interesting. In that period of my beginning I really like history of architecture. I do like arts very much, so I’ve always done things with that. So that’s how I started it all. But I’m not a designer, I’m really an administrator. I didn’t do much architecture. I could’ve been a secretary, a bookkeeper, an accountant, and a psychologist and I’m sure I could’ve still built all the buildings because that’s what you really need to do, that kind of stuffs.

Paramita: Do you have any favourite place in the world?
Louise Cox: There are too many. One of them that I don’t have anymore now is a house in Sydney. I could walk out on the balcony. I could look through the harbor bridge of the Opera House. And that is fantastic. But I can’t do that anymore, we have sold that house. It was something very uplifting because that building, in any mood it was raining or grey or sunny, sunrise or sunset, looks completely different, and the water also reflects everything. That’s one of the nicest things.

And I just like being in the forest seeing the sun come through the trees, it does come through, and see what patterns are like. It’s not about the building. I was out in the country before I went back to Paris in January. I went outside, it was five o’clock in the morning, the sun was just coming up. And it was pink all over this wonderful tree, the white trunk, with the green lace, and the pink was just coming out from the edge of each branch. It was beautiful. I just like this simple beautiful thing that you can get, that nature gave you, you don’t even have to make something.

I’ve noticed in Jakarta, maybe I’m never been near this area before in my life, but there’s a good lot of tree canopies you have on this road, you know, but I don’t remember it before. It’s very nice driving through those things. You feel cool even if it’s not. And it’s cooler in there anyway, I know, because of the tree hills, cut-down hedges. I don’t know, I think I am more a ‘nature’ person than a ‘building’ person. I feel better when I am near the natural stuffs. From the beach listening to the waves, or in the water, or just walking to some natural places somewhere.

People go to shopping mall on Saturday and Sunday and that put me off going anywhere near a mall. I don’t want to know that. I don’t want 5 million people, I can’t bear it. I don’t want to sit in traffic trying to get wherever it is and not being able to park at the other end. It’s just not my idea of joyness at all.

Yandi: Do you think when we teach students we should start from nature?
Louise Cox: I think we should take them outside, make them pick up, make them make things from what they pick up. I don’t know how you do that. I met this young teacher guy — from Thailand — in South Africa, he just told about what he did. In the first year he took them out into the field and then said ‘build something with what you could find’. The kids love building things. I saw a house yesterday, instead of having timber, it had everything made of bamboo. It was just a structure, it doesn’t have the roof or any other. You can just tie them together and it works.

Yandi: So it’s about the feeling?
Louise Cox: It’s something we need to feel. I don’t think we feel by looking at books or looking in the internet.

Yandi: When we design, do you think we should connect design to theory or literature?
Louise Cox: I think so. All the good architects that I know all have interest in writing and literature, from the great classicist right back to the pre-history people. I think the culture has to come true as well. They are the people that I like talking to and discussing things with, because I think it’s much more to it than just purely being visual. But a lot of architects don’t seem to understand the ‘culture’ things. Once when I was President of Australian chapter I ask all the art-goers, director of museum, director of all the culture, the man who ran the Australian opera, the ballet people… I asked all of them to have lunch with the council. But the architects - I was mad - they have never been near to the culture themselves. They didn’t go the ballet, opera, or theatre. What’s wrong with them? It’s not just about being able to draw. You need to know history, and other culture. In my society anyway, they comes true. And your heritage, whatever it is, or from whatever country they come from. Because it’s all there in some way, we can’t just give it up.

Paramita: If now you had a chance to meet an architect who lived in the past or somebody else, not necessarily architect, whom would you like to meet?
Louise Cox: I don’t’ know, maybe I don’t want to meet any of them. Maybe a Leonardo kind of person, not necessarily him. He was a man who did all these incredible things, but then Chinese had done them before anyway. So someone who I can discuss things with, to find out how they thought and why they did such things. He did such stranger stuffs, cutting people to look at the structure, the body and all the machines he did and other stuffs. Did you wonder where he got it from? The Chinese said they gave him some, this could be true, I don’t know, because their culture is so ancient, pyramid was purely built by full society. I just don’t know because I had Western education. I don’t know enough about Eastern religion and those other things.

Yandi: Do you think it’s very different between the East and the West?
Louise Cox: I’ve noticed going to meet Egyptian architect for years, and they always seem much more philosophical than Australians. I don’t mean that badly. But I am used to go from A to B. I have an idea of what to do. I don’t want to go around fifty circles trying to get from A to B. I don’t think like that at all…. Whenever someone from Egypt start giving a lecture, they gave philosophical views first, I noticed. Then the Western tried to do it but they don’t do it very well. I’ve also noticed that they made lots of quotes out of something but I’m not sure they really understand what they are using. You have more mystical things, don’t you? It’s inside. We have to find what’s inside as we tried to get around. And it’s much harder with our kind of education.

Paramita: Looking at the other way around, what are the strengths of Western education, something that we in the East should learn from?
Louise Cox: I don’t know. I actually had a more broad-based education. We have much more rounded education. We did history of architecture for five years, We didn’t do it as elective course, it’s part of our education. In first year we did Green and Roman, 2nd year we did Byzantine, Gothic and Romanesque, 3rd year we did – which I hated - Renaissance, Rococo and Baroque stuffs, 4th year we did Australian architecture. In 5th year we sort of did the Western world like Frank Lloyd Right and other 20th century grand architects I suppose. We never did Buddhist, Hindunese, Chinese, Indian architecture. We didn’t have that. No one we had to teach that. Our university have lots of students from Asia rather than Australian, will you teach them their history too or just Western? So that’s where its may go wrong. Do you teach them your own local history? I think the West is trying to be bigger and better than everyone else, like big brother, and has forgotten that other people might have even better culture as well.

Paramita: If you go back again to the time before you went to university, would you still choose architecture or would you choose something else?
Louise Cox: I would probably choose architecture because you get the sciences to the arts. And I think it’s the best education anyway. But I did not know that at that time because nobody ever explained it. We are so lucky, we’re much better, we’re not on our own like any other professions like lawyer or accountant or some others, because we have this other interaction and it was really fantastic. I like to do architecture, always. Because they make good plans, you know, they know how to think in a different way. That’s all it’s really about, getting people to think in different way. If only fifty percent don’t finish off being architects so what? At least we have a much more educated society. I think that’s what it’s about.

It’s about dealing with people too. But we never do that, I mean we don’t know how to deal with people. You get out of university, can’t build, don’t know what piece of timbers feel like when you drop it with bricks or something. You don’t know that until you try. It’s so theoretical. I think we should be more practical, but that’s my view. I also think that engineers, architects, planners, landscape architects, urban designers, should do their first three years together because we always work in team, we don’t work by ourselves. So it’s the team building a building, it’s not an architect, he doesn’t even know how to cut the timbers. We need to be able to work in teams. Then we’re saying “I’m the architect.” It’s something wrong I think. I don’t know, maybe you can find the secret of how to do this, it’s really difficult. I talked to many people at university, I don’t want to be you, I hate to teach. Really I’m serious. I can give people anecdotes of things that happened to me which could make them interested for five minutes. But I couldn’t teach structures, I don’t have the passion for it, and I can’t be a good teacher in design either.

Yandi: Do you think teaching is more difficult than practice?
Louise Cox: Absolutely, I think it’s just as difficult as practice, I think it’s just different. You do things differently in different schools. And you need to know how to share. That’s another thing that architects never do. The more you share, the more you learn, and the better you are. It’s just so simple. I’ve learned so much just from being here for a week. Just the way people think and what they do and what they’re interested in… just different things, helping each other. I didn’t know that you have heritage people do some works with school kids, and I didn’t know that you have disaster relief and all of those other stuffs, and I was really impressed. I mean there are some things that you do that I feel are better than what we do.

No one know what the other persons do, this is our problem. We don’t share enough, everyone do things here, in Europe or somewhere, but we don’t share. The world is small, a community really. We should be sharing these stuffs. UIA do many good things, no one know what we do. People are too lazy to go on our website. We’ve got guidelines. We look at heritage education. We look at doing something between sustainability and heritage. Next year there’ll be a congress in Tokyo, we’re looking at how to do something together because people never relate these two things. Heritage is sustainable. It’s so basic, I can’t believe why people can’t think both. Joining them around from countries to countries, trying to share what I know and to find out what people have and share with me. So there’s always opportunity we all have to share with others.