An architect’s private house, his workshop, his gallery-library open to the public, as well as a dental clinic and a forthcoming coffee shop: these are the elements of a very rich program, challenging the mono-functional purpose of a single, tiny lot in Jakarta’s residential neighborhoods. The complex is called Guha, and his designer-client is Realrich Sjarief, who founded his firm RAW – Realrich Architecture Workshop in the capital city of Indonesia.
The variety of functions is matched by the diversity of the selected materials, for structures and partitions, including steel, wood, glass, metal, chalk, bamboo, plastic, stone and concrete. In fact, Guha is conceived as a catalogue of the manifold opportunities that a sensible combination of tradition and innovation can provide to architecture, in terms of construction techniques and languages.
In regards to technology, this and other projects by Realrich Architecture Workshop can be linked to the research carried by other protagonists of South-East Asia contemporary architecture, for instance Vietnamese Vo Trong Nghia and his experimentation on the structural use of bamboo. Compared to the latter, though, Realrich Sjarief is seemingly less interested in achieving a synthesis, both conceptually and formally.
Guha is an architecture made of additions and juxtapositions, where proliferate the encounters and the overlapping, the similarities and the conflicts between volumes, colors, textures, light effects. Vegetation, and more particularly climber plants, further adds to this stratification. Therefore, for its formal and evocative exuberance, it rather hints at the restless and dreamlike eclecticism of such artist-architects from the 20th century as Bruce Goff and Paolo Soleri.
- Project:
- Guha
- Program:
- library, dental clinic, private house, workshop
- Location:
- Taman Villa Meruya, Tangerang, Indonesia
- Architects:
- Realrich Architecture Workshop
- Lead architect:
- Realrich Sjarief
- Design team:
- Amud, Mohammad Enoh, Alifian Kharisma, Miftahuddin Nurdayat, Septrio Effendi, Fakhriyah Khairunnida, Vivi Yani Santosa, Tirta Budiman, Aqidon Noor Khafid, Amirul Farras
- Client:
- Realrich Sjarief + Laurensia Yudith
- Gross built area:
- 600 sqm
- Completion:
- 2020