ABSTRACT
On Friday evening, September 28, 1923, in the Dutch colonial city of Bandung, Java, two architects faced each other in debate before a joint meeting of the Bandung Art Society and the Royal Institute of Engineers. The two architects along with most of the audience entered the hall in rough agreement on several significant points. First, in common with their Modern Movement colleagues in Europe, they understood that architecture was an essential vehicle for delivering on the promise of modernity, understood most simply as providing the greatest good for the most people. Second, this mission was all the more urgent in the context of the 1901 Dutch colonial Ethical Policy committed to reversing the centuries of brutal subjugation and bringing the indigenous populations of the Dutch East Indies into a fuller economic and political participation in colonial society. And, third, that architecture would play a leading role in the emerging social, economic, and political transformation by offering an overarching vision of a hybrid cultural formation of Indo-European or “Indische” architecture. 1 At issue in the Bandung “Style Debate” was the question of what architectural language and modes of expression held the greatest capacity to realize this emerging cultural construct.
