Indonesian architect Ary Indrajanto’s empathy-driven practice

“Did you know that I grew up in a family whose business was managing my grandmother’s hotel?” shares the architect. Not many people do, in fact. Indrajanto is known in the local architecture and design community as Ary Indra, one of the founders of the prominent Jakarta-based architectural firm Aboday and creative collective Sahabat Selojene, whose career in the industry was forged for nearly a decade in Singapore.

“I remember being excited looking at arriving guests — guessing where they come from, what their professions are. Perhaps venturing into hospitality is part of reminiscing about this period of curiosity in my present phase of life in order to recreate excitement,” he says when asked if expanding his life’s work into the hospitality sector in his birthplace was his life coming full circle. 

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“I always have those five-yearly goals and retrospects in my life and career,” Indrajanto says. “I embarked on my Singapore journey when I was 25, set up Aboday when I was 35, started learning piano when I was 40, and decided to include sport and routine exercise in my lifestyle when I was 45. I believe I always need a new spark regularly to make life exciting — maybe it’s a Gemini thing,” he laughs.

Talking about his time in Singapore, he says: “Good architecture is 25 per cent aesthetics, 50 per cent a combination of discipline, perseverance and endurance, and the rest is luck. Yes, you hear it right! You need the right ratio to maintain your presence in this field. I have spent more than 15 years balancing the ratio to set a strong foundation for my next milestone.”

Trading Jakarta’s heated hustle and bustle for Salatiga’s cool quaintness had always been on the cards when he reached 50. “What can be more exciting than starting a new life when you reach your half-century milestone?” he quips. 

In preparation for this move, he bought a contoured plot of land with a panoramic view of paddy fields, and renovated its existing old house. In 2019, Indrajanto was involved in a CSR project near the town, a small community prayer room which he dubs “an eye-opener for someone who used to do architecture in a corporate setting”, and decided to settle down in the city earlier than planned that year. “Then, the pandemic helped me realise that life is not so much about how much you achieve, but how you achieve it. It gave me a reason to reside for good in Salatiga,” he shares.

Today, the architect has acquired surrounding plots amounting to one hectare of land he christened Selojene, Javanese for “yellow stone” after the yellowish limestone found on the site. On the Selojene complex are his private residence, office, guest house, workshop, fish ponds and various tiny homes for his many pets, which include two dogs, a rooster, five cockatoos, and a cat and her four kittens. 

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The change of environment and the distance from Jakarta has given him a fresh perspective of architecture. “I practise my architecture with more empathy, not only in choosing projects but also in consuming materials. My latest reuse, rework and rethink approach sums it all up. Living in a rural area opens up many opportunities to do this — renovating rather than building anew, and using off-the-shelf materials to ease and reduce the economic burden of projects are now part of my design vocabulary,” he elaborates.

The best example is Indrajanto’s own residence, which reuses the humble materials salvaged from the old existing house, resulting in a unique home with glass-louvre windows as outer walls and ribbed aluminium sheets as space dividers.

Selojene is a work in progress, and Indrajanto hopes that in the future, it will become a platform for “pushing every attempt to become a happier human being”.

“Art has always been my other hidden passion,” admits Indrajanto. Though demurring that it’s too late for him to become an artist, he enjoys nurturing emerging talents and giving them platforms to showcase their work and broaden their exposure.

Leveraging his spaces and his network in Jakarta and beyond, he has been curating and organising exhibitions for rising new artists and collaborating with them for his projects. One highlight of Indrajanto’s portfolio includes a stint as curator for the Indonesian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018, titled Sunyata: The Poetics of Emptiness.

The PituRooms hotel itself serves as a gallery for these emerging artists. Inside its 2.8 by 3m rooms and outside on the visually porous, crisscrossing metal staircases are various artworks—both conventional ones such as paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as contemporary examples such as digital videos—that delight, entertain and compel guests to share them on their social channels.

“I believe curating and organising events that involve artists from the younger generation will make the world — or at least, the town — a better place to live in,” he says.

It’s hard to argue with that, especially given the living, breathing evidence such as Gumuk Sidul Menul-Menul, which has become
a prominent tourist destination for local communities. Completed in 2022, it is a multifunctional public space featuring a 75-seat amphitheatre, 187 steps snaking through the verdant mountains, and a photogenic canopy made with thousands of teakwood pieces that was co-created with Yogyakarta-based artist Wisnu Ajitama.

“It has a weight of empathy more than my other projects combined,” says Indrajanto of the project. “That makes it my current favourite as we managed to synergise limited capital, rural potential, artist collaboration and academic input into one project that functions socially and economically for the community around it.”

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Contrary to the popular belief of his peers in Jakarta and Singapore, Indrajanto is not retreating to Salatiga to retire. He is actually busier than ever. “The amount of stress is the same when you try to juggle more things. But you have a lot of respite, time to read, explore new things, and be with fewer, closest people,” he says. And he has no plans to retire. “As long as I can work and have a two-hour power nap every day in the same compound, I am happy.”

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