Sustainable Architecture Practice in Indonesia: Navigating Global Standards and Local Knowledge
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Abstract
This study investigates how Indonesian architects navigate between global green building rating tools (GBRTs) and context-specific design strategies across different project types and scales. Using a comparative analysis of sixteen award-winning projects by six Indonesian architects, the research combines semi-structured interviews with document review and inductive coding to map design logics against core GBRT categories. The analysis is around six themes used by GBRTs—energy efficiency, material resources and cycles, water conservation, sustainable site development, indoor health and comfort, and building resilience and adaptability—and identifies two additional themes central to Indonesian practice yet largely absent from GBRT assessment—social collaboration in the design process and cultural values. Findings reveal that in small- to medium-scale private and CSR projects, architects exercise greater autonomy to implement low-tech, community-based strategies, including passive cooling, proximate and recycled materials, hydrological restoration, and collaborative building processes. By contrast, large, regulation-led government projects tend to limit sustainability to compliance requirements, resource accounting, and site-level mitigation, often marginalizing socio-cultural dimensions and constraining contextual innovation. Across all design themes, recurring misalignments appear between GBRTs’ measurable proxies and architects’ context-driven values. These frictions show that what counts as sustainability in GBRTs—simulation outputs, certifications, and prescriptive thresholds—does not consistently capture what sustains practice on the ground: community resilience, ecological balance, and cultural continuity. In Indonesia, a context-aligned recalibration that recognizes adaptive comfort, vernacular material cycles, and participatory processes can keep GBRTs rigorous while making them more responsive to climatic logics, cultural values, and long-term stewardship norms.
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