The Kampung: December 6

Celebratory words...

THE KAMPUNG
a century of crisis in Indonesia from Thomas Karsten's Mlaten to "Domes for the World"

click on image for poster

Presenter: Hugh O'Neil

Settlements, some isolated and long established in remote parts of the Indonesian archipelago, others crowded within ever expanding cities, are essential to an understanding of the region. Their destruction and regeneration within such a dynamic social and natural order astonishes outsiders.

Hugh worked for two years as a designing architect and lecturer with the Indonesian Ministry for Public Works and Power in Jakarta and Bandung during the 1950s and was a board member of Australian Volunteers International for three decades from the early 1970s. Ongoing research is focused on the life and work of the socialist architect-planner Herman Thomas Karsten who worked on sixteen cities in Indonesia from 1914 until the late 1930s.

Hugh has also written about aspects of Indonesian culture including Islamic architecture, with the support of The University of Melbourne and The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In September, while in Java, he visited the district of Sidoarjo which continues to be inundated with mud pouring from an international joint venture gas exploration site near Surabaya. Such is globalisation for tens of thousands of Indonesians.

Thursday, December 6th, 7pm
RMIT BUILDING 50
(Orr Street, off Victoria Street)
Gold coin donation
http://www.architectsforpeace.org/