Proklamasi

Kami bangsa Indonesia dengan ini menjatakan kemerdekaan Indonesia. Hal-hal jang mengenai pemindahan kekoeasaan d.l.l., diselenggarakan dengan tjara seksama dan dalam tempo jang sesingkat-singkatnja.

Djakarta, Hari 17 boelan 8 tahoen 05
Atas nama bangsa Indonesia
Soekarno/Hatta

In English it reads, we the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters concerning the transfer of power and other matters will be carried out in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time.

This nation was proclaimed with two sentences. They were typed overnight on a borrowed typewriter, read aloud in the front yard of an ordinary house, the flag sewn by hand by a mother, the flagpole a piece of bamboo raised in a hurry that very morning. No building was erected for the occasion, no stage, no ornament. Yet no other text in this country carries a deeper meaning than those two sentences.

Every August we read them again, and every time we feel we are reading the clearest lesson in architecture we know. The Proclamation is fit for purpose. It carries only what is necessary, independence is declared, and everything else shall be carried out in an orderly manner and in the shortest possible time. Simple, yet as deep as anything ever written here. Simplicity, it turns out, is not the opposite of depth. It is its vessel of soul “jiwa”.

The feeling of freedom has never been one single soul. It is felt inside the sorrows of life, inside sweat, inside tears, and its color changes from hand to hand. Society has its dimensions, and architecture carries the same dimensions with it, between the empowered and those who have little, between the commercial and the keepers of identity, between those who accumulate and those who wish to share. For some, freedom means being free to build anything. For others, freedom is still as basic as being free from a leaking roof in the rainy season.

So we question our own work. If a nation could be born from two sentences, in a front yard, on a bamboo pole, why do we so often assume architecture only becomes meaningful when it is expensive, grand, and loud. Perhaps what we have been calling richness is merely noise. True richness, we believe, lives in ordinary materials that are empowered, concrete, brick, bamboo, steel, and many more materials stacked in a dozen ways by patient hands, their variety born from intelligence, not from price. Where the essence of them meet, patterns emerge, the spirit of life at work through simple things. That is the essence we are searching for.

Writing this, we feel peace, and we feel mindful. Perhaps this is the better way of writing, in anger comes calmness, and no movement needs to be founded. What we celebrate is moonlight, a brightness that does not blind, that lets soul remain visible. What we cultivate is gentleness of conduct. Like in river of life, being water and stone, one flows, one stays present, and the two complete each other. That is where the dharma of this profession works, the knowledge we hold is not ours, it is entrusted to us to be put to use, and its fuel is loving kindness, not ambition.

So if we are asked what freedom means to us, the answer is simple. Freedom is to help those around us sincerely. Freedom is to work sincerely as a team, for no building has ever stood from a single pair of hands. Freedom is to keep a white heart, honest in every step, clear in a good purpose, and that purpose stands on the interest of liyan, a gentle vernacular word for the others who are not ourselves.

Because the life we serve is limited. Its land is limited, its money is limited, its years are limited. Architecture cannot extend any of them. It can do only one thing, complete them. Make the limited feel sufficient, feel whole, feel worthy of being lived in as a life. A small house where the wind flows, a terrace that holds conversation, walls that keep the growing of children, that is a life made complete. And a life that is complete never asks how many square meters it has.

On the seventeenth of August the flag will rise everywhere, and that night the same moon will shine on the large houses and the small ones alike. We want to remember that day as the day this nation showed the noblest way of working, saying just enough, doing what is necessary, carefully, in the shortest possible time, and entrusting the rest to a long love. The architecture we aspire to works the same way, flowing like water, present like stone, completing one another. Merdeka.

(rs,nh)