The built environment is influenced by culture, belief and past experiences of its inhabitants, as elaborated by scholars such as Rapoport (1977, 2004), Gustafson (2001), etc. Apart from beliefs, Altman and Low (1992) also relate culture to perception, values and norms, customs and mode of appropriate behaviour that constitute a cluster of characteristics. The suggestion is supported by Gustafson (2001) who argues that the cultural aspects of place involve meanings related to the environment. This can be linked to their opinion that place attachment involves culturally shared affective meanings and activities associated with place that derived from socio-political, historical and cultural sources.
The meaning and importance of the traditional architecture
Architecture refers to the designation of space. It is the art of constructing the spaces required for making the lives of people easy and enabling them to engage in and maintain such activities as sheltering, resting, working and entertaining. The creative/aesthetic aspect has to take into account functional requirements in relation to economic and technical possibilities. In other words, it is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and the physical environment (Kuban, 1998). According to Aknesil, architecture is the art of designing buildings and the physical environment to an appropriate scale and with features to make such spaces livable (Aknesil, 2011).
In most regions of Indonesia, traditional patterns of social living are eroding and giving way to new personal initiatives. Adaptations of traditional house forms for everyday life are self-evident. The process resulted in building a new construction that its appearance is still being associated with a traditional form, yet it meets individual aspirations and pride in local ethnic identity. At the same time, national tendencies towards cultural differences are being countered by accentuation of local ethnic culture. This phenomenon contributes to the attempt to a better understanding of what are the most important parts in an architectural creation.
New house forms are not constructed in an open ground. They reinterpret architectural heritage whose origins are shared by the community. Knowledge of architectural heritage, for this reason, is indispensable for understanding a particular local development in formal manifestations and symbolic meanings. How architectural structures express ideas about relationships within the social and cosmic universe has been researched elaborately worldwide. The Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (1997) by Paul Oliver is one of the most significant results.
A traditional house has an important position as it stands for the concept of a unifying principle (Levi-Strauss in Schefold, 2003, p.4). The rich decorations and complicated building construction underline the importance of a house as a unifying principle. House forms are often related to status differences and emphasized as an effort to achieve a higher social status. This condition implies that modification of buildings is related to the effort of en dorsing personal ambitions (Schefold, 2003, p.7). Most of the houses certainly have a prime practical function as they are shelters and storage rooms. Nevertheless, architectural features appear under the influence of different owners. Structural solutions of a raised floor for tropical soils and dangerous animals indicate logical reason.
However, respectively, the house form is conceived as an image of the under-middle-upper world of the cosmos. The formal features of houses are influenced or determin ed by symbolic meaning, and local manifestation of each feature may be expressed technically in quite different ways.
Vernacular architecture is abundant throughout regions in Indonesia and variation in form and use of dwellings and traditional houses are numerous. Indonesian vernacular architecture represents the cultural heritage of maritime regions, and a great diversity of local forms is being generated. Traditional houses as representative of Indonesian vernacular architecture reflect fundamental meanings of a house in its technical construction as well as in its symbolic richness. They are carrier of the collective memory of the community. Increasing the understanding of past and modern developments in vernacular architecture of Indonesia becomes central to gain new insight into architectural creation and dwelling traditions.
REFERENCES
1. The meaning & importance of the traditional architecture
2. Territorial Identification of Vernacular Settlement
3. Cultural Heritage and Close-range Photogrammetry
4. Modernization and Cultural Transformation