Javanese Architecture 1

Ordinary People's Houses

Except the pillars that are supposed to be Grecian, and the metal fence that is not supposed to be there at all, the picture above contains all that is Javanese in architectural matters.

The basic, the first to be seen, and the main philosophized clutter of Javanese architecture is a vast wall-less space named 'pendhopo' (Indonesian language adopted this term into 'pendapa'), the outermost part of a construxion called 'joglo'.

Joglo looks like this:

The joglo like in the picture above, to be specific, is the Central Javanese architectural 'trademark', which, after 1900, gradually got confined to public spaces and dwellings of those with 'the Authorities' (the definition of which changed according to circumstances).

The following are pictures of different Javanese architectural designs of ordinary people's homes:

West Javanese house (and accidentally also their traditional clothes)

East Javanese house (and traditional clothes of the island of Madura)

Betawinese house (and traditional clothes -- the Betawinese are
the native inhabitants of the Indonesian capital city Jakarta)

Now, to get back to the business at hand; pendhopo is the Javanese super-living room. They usher guests there, they sit daydreaming there, they do business there, they flirt and concoct romance there, they rear their kids there, they hold weddings, anniversaries, funerals, everything -- there.

Come to think of it, why on earth did they build bedrooms, inner sitting rooms, study, and so on behind this pendhopo?

Javanese architects always put the kitchen at the last part (i.e. the farthest rear) of any house, you can imagine how long guests must hold on if they, say, just landed from the Sahara and haven't gotten anything to drink for the last thousand miles, before they get some tea (in Java and in Indonesia, you must give your guest something to drink and some snacks; so if your role is as the guest, you can count on it).

In my great great grandpa's house near the Lawu mountain, the gap between pendhopo and the kitchen seems large enough to host the entire Manhattan, and no one ever thought to change this obvious inconvenience even though they knew the kitchen and pendhopo are the two sections of the house that are continuously busy 24/7.

Teak and rattan chairs big enough for sumo wrestlers to sink in are indicators of the laid-back attitude the Javanese in general, and Central Javanese in particular, originally had. In 1980's pendhopos even still got beds, like the pendhopos of their ancestors' until 19th century.

What I'm rambling about is of course the upper and upper-middle class Javanese dwellings; lower than that, there usually is nothing at the front porch (which is also a pendhopo, but out of the limited space it's shrunken to minimum) but one bed. The floor is smooth and slippery concrete (maniacally scrubbed every morning) or smooth clean earth.

We call this front-of-the-house bed 'dhipan' (in Indonesian: 'dipan'; in hybrid English: 'divan'). We don't call it 'bed' because we don't speak English. Besides, the 'dhipan' is not supposed to be a bed like beds; it's for daytime languor and -- if there is no chair -- to sit with guests at, smoking and having some tea and do some biz on.

The characteristically Javanese attitude that tends to lay down at any slightest chance has been changing in big cities out of necessity, but the inner pace, I think, stays the same -- that's why Central Javanese people who work in Jakarta, Medan, Surabaya, and the like invariably already got exhausted after their 34th birthday and at 35 they start to crave retirement programs.

The Javanese tables, especially at the living room, are usually round, and shaped like a pedestal with massive single foot.

So here lays the 'why' Javanese architecture is reluctant about erecting concrete walls, never likes anything under their feet but marble (just before I forget: upon entrance to Javanese houses, even until this very day, you must take off your footwear; Javanese people roam around their houses barefooted), never likes carpets, and to which wallpapers are absolute aliens from Planet Zork.

I should have warned you that I don't intend to dish out stuff pertaining to grand architecture here you can glance at such at another page (click here).

'Grand architecture' in Java means just ancient temples like the Buddhist Borobudur and Hinduist Prambanan, both were built before the first thousand of years after Christ were over (see History of Indonesia). No one ever lived in grand architectural pieces (I just said they were temples, right?).

The real people around the temples lived in real woven bamboo huts with real roofs made of dried palm leaves that really leaked in real monsoon, and their superiors dwelt in wooden houses or marble-floored palaces which never looked like the 'grand architecture' at all.

'Grand architecture' in Java were all made of river stones or rocks quarried from one of the active volcanoes around this island. No real human house has ever been made of that sort of material.

So, the picture above is a lower-middle class house that you can see everywhere in Java, and the real homes of your possibly real pen-pals; usually in smaller roads and the fringe of the suburban areas.

Stone slabs at the lower half of the wall are characteristic of colonial housing projects (i.e. early 20th century).

The house above was built for a low-ranked native officer of the Dutch colonial railway system's bureaucracy in Central Java. It has no garage today because it never had any place for carriages or cars or horses either; the low-ranked officer had to walk everyday to work.

The status of the house in the pic above is the same with the Florida houses that environmentalist vandals burned and covered all over with grafitti whenever they had nothing better to do since 2000.

'Real estate' is an ugly term to most Indonesian ears since 1980.

We got an oil boom that year, and the entire decade was characterized by sudden affluence that wrecked Javanese rural areas in architectural rape that converted them by force (literally; that's why 'bulldozer' also sounds ugly to us until today) into some urban sprawls.

In 2005, every house like that is sold to low-budgeted newly-weds who will, if they did make the purchase and got themselves into a 10, 15, 20 or 25 years of mortgage, have to ride several dozen miles to whichever workplace they must go to. Current price is around IDR 35,000,000 (thirty-five million Rupiah). I'm lousy with Math. Just remember that 1.00 US$ is approximately 9,000 (nine thousand) IDR.

The size is about half of what a cocker spaniel needs to feel like being at home instead of feeling like being inside a kennel; and no hope for a Ford Ranger to get itself housed in the premises even if the whole house is brought down and rebuilt as a one-roomed garage.

The good news is, lower-middle class Javanese and Indonesian newly-weds can never afford either a Ford Ranger or a cocker spaniel.

This is a slightly larger 'real estate' thing (I forgot to mention that the term 'real estate' to the Javanese and Indonesian means "rows of insensibly small, unreasonably expensive, and badly-constructed houses, built by using the cheapest of all materials, situated in the middle of nowhere, sold by a bad agency that works for a big-city boss who has snatched the lands away from their previous legal owners, i.e peaceful farmers and pastoral people").

It is not affordable to newly-weds from the lower-middle class. Only people who can keep five cocker spaniels buy this kind of house, even though they might have to swap the five cocker spaniels with the iron fence and garden lamp.

I have no idea what kind of other people own houses like the one in the pic above, but my neighbor who does is nowhere to be seen in normal days and can only get glimpsed-at when there were riots in Jakarta (in 1998; see the sixth page of History of Indonesia).

To him, this house -- whose distance from his real house in Jakarta is the same as between Hollywood and Nevada -- is just an investment, so that his offsprings can crave each other's blood one day after he's gone.

The price of this house, even in Yogya, which is an inland town compared to Jakarta that is unmistakably a city, is more than IDR 100,000,000.

A local salaryman who has just getting married earns no more than IDR 250,000 every month here, if he works for the government.

Older houses (i.e. built in, at most, 1970's) in Javanese towns were built by real architects, commissioned by real home owners, like this one. Most of today's houses are built bysome unreal planners, working for surreal 'real-estate' agencies.

As a result, the older houses show enough Javaneseness or Indonesianeseness while the latter have often been marketed as 'Mediterranean Palaces', 'Caledonian Gardens', 'Spanish Palazzos', or whatever else to the same effect, even as no healthy-minded Indonesian really knows what they mean, for all the 'Mediterranean', 'Caledonian', and 'Spanish' houses look exactly the same.

How do you know a modern and postmodern house is Javanese or Indonesian when they all never have pendhopo anymore and are never shaped like a joglo, and don't look like any Indonesian house in other islands either?

The roof, sir.

Our idea of a roof is something triangular above our heads. If it's rather non-sloping anywhere, or tends to be flat, it's nothing Javanese and nothing Indonesian.

And we, as far as architectural history goes, prefer low live 'fences' and loath tall iron fences and disgusted at tall solid concrete gates.

This is a 'real-estate' house that comes as a hybrid of both the Indonesian and 'foreign' architectural ideas.

And this belongs to my mom, and occasionally also my dad's (he seems to be at tennis courts all year long).

It's not that Mom is a diehard patriotic citizen of the Republic; it just happened to be nearing the Indonesian Independence Day (August 17, see History of Indonesia) when the snapshot was taken. Every house is compelled to flutter the national flag for a week every year.