Following on from their Holcim Awards winning project, young architects Nicholas Rodriques, Rionaldi Gunari and Gani Wiratama received a Holcim Foundation Research in Practice Grant (RPG). With the support of a USD 75,000 grant, they have spent two years exploring new solutions for this local building typology that enhance community wellbeing using local materials and expertise.

The districts in Jakarta that lie directly on the Cilliwing River have no sanitary infrastructure to speak of. This leads to untold problems for people and nature. Rionaldi Gunari, Nicholas Rodriques, and Gani Wiratama, students of Parahyangan Catholic University in Bandung, Indonesia, propose upgrading one of these districts using an environmentally responsible approach. “The community has made the river the center of their lives,” explains co-author Rionaldi Gunari, “so our approach is not to take them away from the river but to allow them to use the river even more with our environmentally and socially adaptive architecture.”

The Holcim Awards jury Asia Pacific acknowledged the project’s endeavor to highlight the urgency in finding solutions for the urban poor in Southeast Asia. The project was found simple yet effective and well-contextualized. The proposed solution upgrades a vernacular typology to make it more functional and environmentally sound: a modest gesture that once implemented and multiplied across a larger scale can provide.