Mobius Public Theatre

Another project in Architecture Studio

Project Architecture B - Context, Cultural, and Establishment

Project Brief

The development of economy and business in Indonesia is being centralized in Jakarta, becoming the only megapolitan city. Jakarta has a lot of needs to fulfill. Indonesia have many big cities or the ones that may becoming big with their embryos of troubles and problems with the pontency to become Jakarta. Unless the local context becoming their spesific comodity that able to develops complementary to with what is in Jakarta.

How a not-so urban city can develop with their own local comodity, to prepare their own citizens needs? The understanding of the local potency will decides whether the project can rise the performance of the city.

Early before the project begin, there is a group research on the relations on city, cultures, and the activities. By comparing one city to another on what are the relations between the people, culture, and the city.

This project semester begins with a trip to Surakarta. In two days trip, our group needs to gather informations about the city, culture, and activites.

The spesific site is located on Laweyan Batik Village. As a district of Batik craftspeople in the middle of Surakarta, this area often intersects with the needs of needs fulfillment. (1) space to live, also (2) space to work/commcercial that support the activity of tourism. 

The brief on the project at the beginning of the process is to decide what kind of program that is suitable for the site context and culture. The program must support or give a new positive value to the site.

There are two keywords to decide what kind of approaches on the design decision: Withdraw and Emerge. The interpretation of each apporach depends on individual perspective.

Site Profile

Generally Surakarta is located in Central Java. The size of the city is 44Km2. The population density is 13.636/Km2.

One of the main attractions in Surakarta is it’s Batik. There are two batik tourism village that can be found in surakarta, Laweyan and Kauman. Most of the tourists came here to buy batik or to learn batik making process

The spesific zone of the site is Laweyan Batik Village, which located in the south border of Surakarta.

Laweyan is a small district containing many batik industries and showrooms. The residents of Laweyan mostly are batik producers and sellers.

The tipology of laweyan figure ground is mostly buildings. The houses in laweyan have a big open space as their own semi public space. They usually have an access called “butulan” that connects one house to another without having to go to the road.

Laweyan have almost none public space that appropriate to trigger interactions. The places that people usually use for socializations is the roads and alleys. Other social spaces they have are public buildings like mosque and graveyard to pray.

The site is divided by a river, Kabanaran River. It is a historic river that was used as a media for boat transportation that connects Laweyan to the big river, Bengawan Solo.

This river was once an important water feature. Because of this river, Laweyan Market can sell the Batik to other city, this river made it possible to distribute batik laweyan to far places.

Project Statement

Laweyan needs a public space that can trigger interactions. This public space must accomodate the events in Laweyan. On the other hand, this new space should not disturb the old activity in the site.

The program is actually a theatre, but when there are no performances or any gatherings this theatre can be used simply as public space. The performances here are actually spontaneous. People can use this space to perform anything to express the culture of Laweyan. In some special events this event can be booked to cultural events in laweyan such as Selawenan, a group of cultural event that periodically held on Laweyan.

There is a rickshaw that usually stays there and waits for people. These rickshaw can be a potential program to support the theatre in it. So a rickshaw station was embedded there because of that reason and to offer people a unique comodty that usually used in Laweyan.

The public space should not create another new commotion in a narrow space like Laweyan, so the approach taken for designing this public space is withdrawn. Another reason is to not cause a distraction because the close distance to a Mosque, Laweyan Mosque.

Because of the importance of the river in the past, there was an idea of making a river walk along the river from the east that ended in the theatre, in the west. The theatre space is also sunk down in order to give the user a recognition of the river.

The theatre was created by a bamboo sticks that joined into the looks of a surface. This bamboo surface represented the batik cloth lightness and flexibility. The mobius shape concept that changes function, from floor, wall, and roof represents batik cloth that can be further produced as shirt, bag, and any other stuff.