Experiencing – FOAID

In this country, “international” quietly tends to mean the West. Guests from Europe are received as an honor; guests from Asia, as an ordinary visit. Last month, 101 architects from India came, and we would rather call it by a truer name: a visit from distant kin.

Last year, we were the ones who went there. This time, it was their turn to come here.

Through @project101explorers organized by FOAID @foaidindia.in, they travelled across Jakarta and Bali, to study integrated planning, climate responsive design, and ways of working within dense cities. Some visited Guha the Guild, others Guha Boboto, while the rest joined us at Alfa Omega School.

Before telling the story of their visit, there is something that must be said first, because it is what made this encounter different from the usual visit of foreign guests.

They were not strangers. They were distant kin.

The Nusantara has been a place of mingling for thousands of years. Currents from India brought scripts, epics, and ways of thinking, until the Ramayana and Mahabharata became wayang watched by our grandparents in their courtyards. Currents from China came through the ports, bringing trade, craftsmanship, and foods we now simply call our own. To the east lie even older Melanesian and Australasian layers. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika is not a slogan invented in a meeting room; it is a description of what has long been happening here.

And its hybridity was made here. Not in India, not in China, but across these islands, where all those currents met and became something else. That is why almost everyone who comes here can find a fragment of themselves, and why we have never quite felt that we were receiving outsiders.

Even the name of this house is proof. Guha comes from the Sanskrit guhā, meaning cave. When our guests from India stood before its sign, they were, in a sense, reading a word from their own ancestral language, one that had moved homes long ago and become ours too.

Our introduction to this circle began in Kolkata, when we were invited to speak at an architecture forum there. We brought stories of bamboo, reclaimed bricks, and village craftsmen. What we received was not applause, but questions that demanded answers. That is often where friendship begins.

At Guha the Guild, they asked questions like people at work, not guests passing through. They wanted to understand the method. How are reclaimed materials chosen and treated? Why are the walls perforated? How does the chimney effect actually work? Almost every answer was followed by the same question: why?

It was the question we valued most. Reclaimed materials can so easily become a style, and openings in a wall can so easily become decoration. What matters is the reason behind them, and a reason can only be tested by someone willing to ask twice.

One question caught us by surprise. They asked about our references: who shaped the way we work, and where its roots lie. For them, this mattered before technique, because practice without roots can become little more than a collection of changing styles.

At Alfa Omega, the conversation shifted. We spoke very little about technique. Instead, we told the story of the school’s founder and his devotion to education: how the school came to be, and how it continues to live. They listened closely, eventually joking, “Perhaps we should build one in India too.”

When we told them the school stands on a former swamp, they immediately responded. In India, building over wetlands is prohibited because of the biodiversity they hold. We explained our own context: land squeezed between industrial areas, where the water is often mixed with waste, and zoning regulations that allow construction precisely there. No one won the argument, but both sides left with something they had not arrived with.

They were curious about the bamboo too, what kinds we use, and how we treat them. Then one object made them pause: ijuk fibre. They had never seen it before and thought it was dyed coconut husk. We explained that it comes from the sugar palm. Their curiosity opened into stories of how bamboo is used in their own practices.

Standing in that open roofed school, we remembered a place we had visited after the Kolkata forum: Santiniketan, where Rabindranath Tagore founded his school and held classes beneath the trees rather than inside enclosed rooms. For those of us from Jakarta, where a school usually means a multi storey building with air conditioned corridors, being there was a lesson no book could teach. A learning space does not always have to be a room.

And the lesson we had brought home from there, without knowing it, was standing before their eyes that day, in the form of a school built over a swamp.

The testimonials they left behind were rarely about form. One wrote that what stayed with them was not the project itself, but the way of thinking about life behind it. Another spoke of warmth, of feeling at home, of wanting to sit there all day and lose track of time. We keep these words not as praise, but as a quiet assurance that the work we have carried on, almost silently, can be read by someone seeing it for the first time.

In many traditions of craftsmanship, young craftsmen once had to leave home before they could be considered mature, to travel from city to city, work in other people’s workshops, and return carrying things that could not be taught in their own villages. We have always hoped that this tradition might live again.

Last month, that hope arrived in a way we did not expect. Not because we were the ones who travelled, but because our distant kin came to us.

And that is what we are most grateful for. It did not feel like a tour, nor like receiving a delegation. It felt like returning a visit, in a house whose very name, after all, already comes from their language.

Thank you @shrraddhabadiani_foaid and @saranginair_ for reaching out to us and arranging this encounter.

#ExperiencingGuha #OMAHLibrary #LearningThroughSpace #GuhaTheGuild
(rs, hs, ty, fm)