Three years ago — we were strangers. In 2022, the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction convened emerging practitioners from around the world for a four-day charette in Zurich, later inviting six of us to apply for grant funding. The terms were broad: Working as individuals or in groups, we had to direct our proposals toward built projects — ones embodying both social and environmental paradigms of sustainability — and involve students.

From there, the conversations flowed. Over Zoom calls, emails and WhatsApp messages, our group — comprising Andi Subagio, Meriem Chabani, Vedhant Maharaj, Namjoo Kim, Twaha Kyomuhendo and me — eventually settled on a pair of interventions. In Tanzania, Chabani, Maharaj and Kyomuhendo partnered with a local NGO to expand an undersized local healthcare centre with a dedicated maternity clinic; the project is now under construction on the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Meanwhile, Subagio and Kim turned their attention to Subagio’s home country, Indonesia. In a village near Yogyakarta, a Javanese vernacular joglo house has been dismantled, relocated and rebuilt. The wooden structure has been adapted into an innovative — albeit somewhat controversial — hybrid steel form that now serves as a rehearsal and performance stage for traditional dance collective Padepokan Sekar Djagad.

As the sole non-architect in the group, my role was to document both projects as a participant–observer and critic, from the earliest concepts all the way to the student construction workshop that marked the Sekar Djagad joglo’s completion. Here and there, I even picked up a hammer. Recently, I caught up with Subagio, an Indonesian designer and founder of Jakarta-based SASO Architects, and Kim, a founding principal of Korea’s Studio DOHGAM and an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Seoul, to reflect on everything we learned, and everything we taught one another.

Stefan Novakovic — The last time I saw you both in person was in August, when the building was officially opened, and we held our student workshop. I’ll never forget the dances, the ceremonies and the hundreds of people gathered to see the place come to life. But something hit me on the flight home: I realized that we’ve never spoken much about our backgrounds — we were brought together in an unusual way, and then our collaboration just clicked into place organically. How did you get here?

Andi Subagio — I think I knew from an early age that I wanted to be an architect. My dad was a contractor, and when I was young, one of my cousins — an architecture student — was living with us. This was the ’90s. He had this big drafting table in his room, and it looked magical to me. Then I went to school in Yogyakarta, so I got to know the region and learn the Javanese language.

After graduating, I worked for a big Singaporean firm, designing towers for big Indonesian developers. The money was good, but I didn’t want to look at high-rise floor plans and spreadsheets all day. So, I took a leap of faith; I quit and started my own practice at the age of 25. I was far too young to do it, but you don’t realize that until later.

Namjoo Kim — I also come from an architectural family. My dad was an architect in South Korea, but he didn’t want me to follow in his footsteps. After the IMF reforms in the late 1990s, the economy collapsed, and it was a very difficult time for our family. My father’s practice laid off employees, and he never wanted me to go through something like that.

But I wasn’t about to become a doctor — I couldn’t stand the sight of blood. So, I became an architect anyway. After graduating from Korea University and then MIT, I spent five years at Höweler + Yoon in Boston, before coming back to Korea to start my practice with my partner, Kangil Ji.

Stefan Novakovic — We all come from totally different backgrounds all around the world, yet we converged on a hyper-local building type in a small Javanese village. Andi, you’re the only one that had any prior experience with joglo houses, which sparked the project. What made it an interesting typology to explore?

Andi Subagio — Indonesia is a very multicultural country of many traditions, religions and languages, and lots of regional architectural vernaculars. But in Java, the joglo roof is iconic. It’s a very traditional form with a thousand-year heritage. For centuries, the joglo house was associated with the Javanese aristocracy, and served as a status symbol; the bigger and taller your house, the higher social standing you had.

Then, as trade and commerce developed during the colonial era, the joglo gradually became attainable to wealthy commoners. All of that eventually changed. People now want modern homes, and these types of houses are seen as outdated. They’re getting demolished en masse, so this culture and heritage risk being erased.

Namjoo Kim — One of the first things I learned from Andi is that joglo houses are exclusively built using wood joinery. There are no nails, no glue, no concrete. It’s all held up by intricately carved interlocking wood beams. It means that you can dismantle, relocate, repair and adapt the structures relatively easily. As I learned more about it, my mind kept turning to the idea of circular construction. “Circularity” is becoming a popular term, and it’s a growing trend in architecture, but it’s not a new idea — particularly not in Southeast Asia, where wood design is very common, and where this type of re-use and adaptation has been practised for thousands of years.

Andi Subagio — Like most vernacular architectures around the world, it’s also a typology that is adapted to both culture and climate. The folded, angular shape of the roof has deep spiritual meaning; it evokes the mountains, which are sacred in Javanese culture, and it also organizes the spaces below in a way that symbolizes the relationship between the human body, the earth and the sky above.

At the same time, the angular shape of the roof and its cantilevered form facilitates airflow through the building. The natural ventilation creates cooler conditions in the central room, where hot air dissipates to the top. In our tropical and very humid climate, joglo architecture is a form of traditional ecological knowledge.

Stefan Novakovic — Andi, you’ve had experience with renovating and adapting joglo structures into modern homes. But this was a very different type of project: We adapted the roof — the original Sirman III joglo was dismantled and relocated from another Yogyakarta village — into a dance stage, pairing the wood roof structure with a steel frame, a terrazzo floor, and a randomized smattering of glass block shingles across the roof. How did it start?

Andi Subagio — I was speaking to some friends and colleagues in Yogyakarta, and I happened to learn about Hajar Wisnu Satoto, a well-known local artist and a principal dancer at the Ramayana Ballet Prambanan. He’s also the founder of Padepokan Sekar Djagad, a non-profit devoted to nurturing and preserving traditional Javanese topeng dance forms. Like joglo houses, these traditions are also becoming endangered, and there are few dedicated venues to support them. Satoto was very interested in a joglo, and with support from the Holcim Foundation, we were able to purchase an abandoned one and then figure out how to adapt it into a cultural setting.

Namjoo Kim — I think that these possibilities are one of the things that drew all of us to Indonesia. In Korea — and I think across North America too — circular environments are not our priority. Construction and economic development went in a different direction. We’ve already lost so much of our traditional built heritage, and we’re even losing the opportunity to retain and preserve what’s still there. But in Yogyakarta, there’s still a very local culture, and an active specialized labour force that’s keeping built traditions alive. I kind of envy this balance that Indonesia has, where there’s a growing awareness of environmental problems and carbon, but there’s still a wealth of traditional buildings like joglos that can be preserved and adapted. For many places, it’s already too late.

Stefan Novakovic — Finding this nexus of cultural integrity and ecological sensitivity was one of our key aspirations. At the same time, we ended up with quite an unconventional solution, which wasn’t popular with everyone. I’ll always remember the symposium we organized — together with Universitas Pelita Harapan — with academics, historians and joglo heritage specialists in 2023.

I attended virtually, and I think I presented at something like 4:00am Toronto time. Even though it was the middle of the night for me, I was wide awake when I realized how contentious our idea was received by some stakeholders. To many heritage specialists, pairing a joglo roof with a steel frame was anathema to the building’s spiritual and material heritage.

Andi Subagio — We tried to find precedents wherever we could. Months before the symposium, Namjoo and I went around Java (with a small group of architecture students) researching other joglo adaptations to find inspiration. To see a joglo relocated and reassembled is not so unusual. Even the process of digitally cataloguing each piece of wood through 3D scanning and using drones for site analysis are gradually becoming more common. The adaptive re-use of a residential building of this kind into a performance venue is a different story. A dance stage requires an open space, so we had to remove the structure of timber beams that hold up the roof to create an open span.

The idea of using a steel frame came from Namjoo. It’s something that isn’t done here — and it’s not something that I ever would have thought of. It ultimately makes the program possible, though, because the steel is strong enough that it can hold up the roof with just four columns, creating an open yet sheltered 110-square-metre stage.

Namjoo Kim — We removed the spiritual heart of the joglo, the four central posts that frame the most sacred space in the structure, the saka guru. And I still feel conflicted about that. At the same time, we were quite intentional about ignoring some of the older heritage experts. Our goal wasn’t preservation, strictly speaking. The question was, “How can we adapt the joglo for the future? How can we make it a vital part of a 21st-century cultural life?”

Andi Subagio — Even though the saka guru is gone, I think a cultural meaning is still there — the joglo preserves Javanese traditions and a distinctly local way of life. I think this is better than a museum to the past. But we must be careful with heritage. In recent years, we’ve experienced a “joglofication” of Javanese architecture, where the roof shape is tacked on to all sorts of buildings.

Stefan Novakovic — I noticed this everywhere. When I landed in Jakarta, I saw joglo roof shapes on the airport buildings — even though it’s not a local vernacular there. Then, when we were driving around Yogyakarta, I saw a similar roof shape on all sorts of civic buildings, even one awkwardly perched atop the flat roof of a concrete police station.

Andi Subagio — Yes, there’s a lot of well-founded distrust about the cheapening of heritage. And even as construction started, the steel frame was unpopular. We were lucky to work with Suprihatin, whose company, Sawong Joglo, is the top heritage specialist in the region. But he was also strongly against it. He had a somewhat different perspective than the academics. What he said to me was, “Why are you taking this work away from me and giving it to a steel contractor?” By reducing the joglo to a roof, we were also reducing his scope of work.

Namjoo Kim — When you look at the “joglo” shapes that are added to public buildings like the airport or police stations, it’s never actually built using wood joinery or traditional crafts. It’s not the real thing. And we have the same phenomenon in Korean architecture, where there are all sorts of references to ancient wood temples and traditional vernaculars in modern buildings, but they’re mostly just made from concrete.

Stefan Novakovic — This might seem like a very North American way of understanding the world, but my biggest revelation from being on site during construction — which architectural journalists almost never do — is that cultural authenticity is borne out by economics. I won’t pretend to have a deep knowledge of the spiritual meaning of joglo architecture, but Suprihatin’s critique resonates with me. Cultural heritage isn’t just a certain shape or a particular material; it’s also rooted in a specific mode of production.

A concrete joglo form is inauthentic because it cheapens the form in a symbolic sense, but also because it erases the skilled labour that produces it. That’s where heritage lives: in the hands of Suprihatin and his team and in all the livelihoods and families and way of life that are in turn supported through that economy. To my mind, that’s as much a part of sustainable design as a reduction in embodied carbon. We had a team of 12 joglo specialists working on the site. What good is preserving the form if it erases all that?

Andi Subagio — Thankfully, we were able to reallocate both the labour and the leftover wood to our “student joglo.” At the beginning of the project, Hajar Wisnu Satoto also expressed a need for a small office and reception area to accompany the stage and rehearsal space. So, we reused some of the wood and other salvaged materials to build a smaller joglo to serve as his office.

Namjoo Kim — This was our own construction workshop. As the main space was being completed, the three of us and a group of ten students — which we gathered from Indonesia and around the world via an open call — worked with joglo specialists and our project manager, Andreas Janu Saktyo Dananjoyo, to learn local construction methods. It was incredible. We learned that every single piece of wood in a joglo has a dedicated name, and so does every type of cut — whether to extend a span or create a right angle.

I had a similar kind of realization as you, Stefan. The heritage is the labour. At first, I was really worried about safety, and I was struck by how none of the construction workers wore shoes. But as I watched them, I realized they were barefoot for a reason — they were using their feet to grip the wood when they worked on the roof. It was amazing to see. And even though we didn’t take our shoes off, we all participated.

Stefan Novakovic — I wasn’t much use as a construction worker, but it was an experience I’ll never forget. As the workshop wrapped up, hundreds of people came out for the opening ceremony, and we saw the place come alive with dance late into the night.

Andi Subagio — When we finished construction, Suprihatin looked up at the joglo and told me, “Now I understand.” That’s stayed with me. And Hajar Wisnu Satoto is very proud of it, which means a lot to all of us. I went back with my studio students a couple of weeks ago, and we watched a dance lesson and a rehearsal. But I also learned that the space has become a sort of village hall for community meetings, and it’s being used for daily prayers by both Catholics and Muslims. Schools bring their students on field trips. People are even getting married there, joined together under the roof, where the saka guru once stood.

Emerging practitioners leveraging diverse global perspectives

The Clinic of Care is a collaborative architectural initiative led by the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and project manage by its Next Generation Ambassadors, advancing a new model of practice rooted in cultural respect, adaptive reuse, and social impact. Across two sites — a maternity clinic expansion in Tanzania and a repurposed performance space in Indonesia — the program demonstrates how design can serve as an act of care.

Rejecting the outdated notion of the solitary visionary, the projects reflect a shared methodology of working alongside communities to improve the built environment in ways that are environmentally responsible, culturally grounded, and socially inclusive. In this approach, architecture becomes not an imposition of form, but a process of listening, learning, and co-creating with people and place.