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Summary－Everything at two weeks
This book is about those platform houses, which still exist in Medan, Indonesia. It is organized into four chapters. In "Kehidupan-Life", we focused on the lives of the people who live in these platform houses. In "Sejarah-History" we wrote about the history of platform house in order for the readers to look at it from wider perspective. In "Struktur yang Hidup-Living Structure" we attempted to point out that many of the platform houses in Medan were created as a synthesis of the cultural tradition of Murayu and modernization of the habitat, instead of a simple evolution from the ancient times. Simultaneously, the chapter addresses the problem of building maintenance of the platform house. Finally, in "Saran-Proposition" we are making a realistic manifesto in order to summarize this study.
This documentation is a fruit of a collaborative effort by ARAC (Association of Rehabilitation of Asian Cities) whose objective is the rehabilitation of the urban environment of Asian Cities, and Group ﾒacetateﾓ whose aim is to gather and publish the knowledge regarding Asian architecture. We are in search of solutions to activate and energize the cities and town in Asia, with particular focus on the Southeast Asian cities. As a part of the project, we have come to focus and consider the possibilities of rehabilitating the environmental heritage of the Southeast Asia. Already, we have completed the field survey of the environmental heritage buildings of Medan, in December 2002, and collected data for over 600 buildings. From the inventory of these buildings, we have selected 150 cases and designated them to be the buildings of Medanﾕs glorious heritage. The methodology of research and survey, and the gathered data can be seen at http://www.medanheritage.org.
Our project has been proposed to further evolve the above-mentioned one-year project we call ﾒDiscovering Heritageﾓ. We believe that, this book will become an important vehicle, to confidently pass on to the future generation the precious examples of the local environmental heritage we discovered at the end of last year. We have appropriately named this phase, the ﾒNurturing Heritageﾓ phase. In other words, we are ﾒpolishingﾓ(or nurturing) the gemstone discovered in the previous ﾒDiscovering Heritageﾓ phase. The gemstones of Medan are located mainly in the central city district, the shop house district of the Chinese merchants and the platform house we have addressed in this book.
The main question, however, is: ﾒHow do we polish these gem stones?ﾓ Our exercise here is just one answer to this question. Shin Muramatsu ARAC
acetate001, Rumah Panggung, Perahu di Kota
It is the norm, that the research and survey to go public takes years. Moreover, in the worst scenario, when such exercise is conducted in the foreign soil of the researcher, the result is not reach to the local public of the subject research. When traditional or popular themes are pursued, the result is usually devastating. We have attempted to create a whole new program, in favor of the traditional methods of compiling and publishing the result of the research. Simultaneous with our research and survey, we have compiled the result in a small publication and to publish it immediately in the subject locality.
With the result of last yearﾕs survey in hand, we decided on the overall theme and goal of this yearﾕs survey prior to arriving in Medan. However, we have made all of the planning decisions related to specific survey, analysis, and the and production work such as the editing, layout, various artworks and the printing of the publication in the subject locality i.e. Medan. Many of the skilled collaborators came to Medan from Japan, and spent two weeks working with the student volunteers, both from Indonesia Japan. The main reason why we made the result into a small publication is, because it can be read anywhere, by anyone. In hopes of disseminating the contents of this publication to the people of Medan, we have decided to leave 1000 copies to our partner of this project: BWS (Badan Warisan Sumatra Heritage Trust).
The book we produced is not a huge tree; rather it is like a piece of Lambuhtan. The relative magnitude of the result is miniscule. But, if one piece of this fruit is delicious, people will rush to search for the origin of this tree. To put it in another term, this book will lead to the revitalization of urban heritage of Asian cities. We wanted to make such precious and small publication. There were, obviously, some shortcomings. Among other things, we were not able to describe the evolution of the platform house, in detail, nor cover specific information with respect to the rehabilitation of platform buildings. However, we will leave such assignments as the topic to be shared by many people in the near future. Norihito Rhenin Nakatani Publishing and Editing Organization "acetate" (translation by George Kunihiro) |