Building Practice In The Dutch East Indies

This book reveals the ‘epistemic imposition’ of architectural ideas and practices by colonists from the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies from the late-19th century onwards, exploring the ways in which this came to shape the profession up to the present day in what is now known as Indonesia. The author investigates the scope of these interventions by Dutch colonial agents in relation to existing Javanese building practices, pursuing two main lines of enquiry. The first is to examine the methods of dissemination of Dutch-taught technical knowledge and skills across the Dutch East Indies. The second is to scrutinise the effects of this dissemination upon the formation of architectural knowledge and practice within the colony. Throughout this book, the argument is made that what took place in architecture in the Dutch East Indies involved a process of disseminating building knowledge as a form of ‘epistemic imposition’ upon the indigenous citizens of the colony – in other words, as an effective instrument of Dutch colonial power. This book will be of interest to architecture academics and students interested in developing a broader global understanding of architecture, especially those interested in decolonising the teaching of architectural history and theory.

In her research Yulia Nurliani Lukito analyses modernity and the construction of culture by the authorities using the images of Indonesian vernacular architecture presented at three different sites and times. She argues that modernity is not solely constructed by the authorities, rather it is an ongoing process modified by visitors of exhibitions. Pasar Gambir was a laboratory of modernity for the colony, and an important stage in modernizing and negotiating cultural and social conditions in the colony. The Dutch Pavilion at the 1931 colonial exhibition became a moment when the Indies heritages played a role in marking colonial territory. Modern ethnographic park of Taman Mini gives a way to the making of an official ‘authentic’ culture and suppresses the previous Dutch construction of the Indies culture.

Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces. The book draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, which provides a critical framework through which it articulates the dynamic relationship between ideology, architecture, and everyday practices, and reassesses their impact upon individual subjectivity and agency. The woman emerges as a central subject of the book, upon whom the phantasmagoric effects of the socialist state’s modernizing agenda have an acute impact at the level of lived domesticity and everyday life. Through a focus on the lived experiences of women, the book illuminates the prismatic effect of the state’s infrastructural and legal intentions, including the ways in which these were subverted through women’s lived bodily experiences of the home. The book establishes, both theoretically and through the concrete case of the city of Bucharest, the methodological significance of Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria as an epistemological approach to a modern communist cityscape. Urban Phantasmagorias is an important contribution to scholarship in architectural history and theory, urban and gender studies, and post-socialist and Eastern European studies.

Political Postmodernisms shows how sites outside of Western Europe and North America undermine an established narrative of architecture theory and history. It focuses specifically on postmodern architecture, which is traditionally understood as embodying the flippant and apolitical aesthetics of capitalist affluence. By investigating postmodern architecture’s manifestations in the unlikely settings of Chile during the neoliberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Poland during the late socialist Polish People’s Republic, the book argues for a new account that incorporates the political roles it plays when seen in a global perspective. Political Postmodernisms has three goals. First, it challenges the familiar narrative regarding postmodern architecture as following the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Fredric Jameson) or as a socially conservative project (Jürgen Habermas). Second, it fills in portions of Chilean and Polish architectural history that have been neglected by Chilean and Polish architectural historians themselves. Third, Political Postmodernisms shows how architecture can work as a political form – serving propagandistic purposes and functioning as part of oppositional projects. The book is projected to be of use to students and scholars in global modern and contemporary architecture history, history of urban planning, East European Studies, and Latin American Studies.

Eight months into its maiden voyage to the Indies, the Dutch East India Company’s Batavia sank on June 4, 1629 on Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos off the western coast of Australia. Wendy van Duivenvoorde’s five-year study was aimed at reconstructing the hull of Batavia, the only excavated remains of an early seventeenth-century Indiaman to have been raised and conserved in a way that permits detailed examination, using data retrieved from the archaeological remains, interpreted in the light of company archives, ship journals, and Dutch texts on shipbuilding of this period. Over two hundred tables, charts, drawings, and photographs are included.

This book provides a wide-ranging overview of Dutch technological leadership in the early modern Europe, it explains whence this leadership came about and why it ended and it explores to what extent the Dutch case illuminates the evolution of technological leadership in general.

Design and the Vernacular explores the intersection between vernacular architecture, local cultures, and modernity and globalization, focussing on the vast and diverse global region of Australasia and Oceania. The relevance and role of vernacular architecture in contemporary urban planning and architectural design are examined in the context of rapid political, economic, technological, social and environmental changes, including globalization, exchanges of people, finance, material culture, and digital technologies. Sixteen chapters by architects designers and theorists, including Indigenous writers, explore key questions about the agency of vernacular architecture in shaping contemporary building and design practice. These questions include: How have Indigenous and First Nations building traditions shaped modern building practices? What can the study of vernacular architecture contribute to debates about sustainable development? And how has vernacular architecture been used to argue for postcolonial modernisation and nation-building and what has been the effect on heritage and conservation? Such questions provide valuable case studies and lessons for architecture in other global regions -- and challenge assumptions about vernacular architecture being anachronistic and static, instead demonstrating how it can shape contemporary architecture, nation building and cultural identities.

We are delighted to introduce the proceedings of the first edition of the Workshop on Multimedia Education, Learning, Assessment and its Implementation in Game and Gamification. This Workshop has brought researchers, developers and practitioners around the world who are leveraging and developing the education, media learning and scientific technology. We strongly believe that this Joint Workshop on Multimedia Education, Learning, Assessment and its Implementation in Game and Gamification provides a good forum for all researcher, developers and practitioners to discuss all scientific and technological aspects that are relevant to Digital Society. We also expect that the future Workshop will be as successful and stimulating, as indicated by the contributions presented in this volume.