Perspectives on Traditional Settlements and Communities: Home, Form and Culture in Indonesia

Bagoes Wiryomartono is an independent scholar and architect. His areas of specialization are History, Theory, and Design of Urbanism. The central and leading subject for his life long investigation is the question of meanings in the context of the Built Environment. Phenomenology as the science of being, is the principal method of his investigation in dealing with the question mentioned above. His interest in philosophy was introduced by the works of Martin Heidegger who has always been the most influential thinker for Bagoes Wiryomartono, since his student years in Aachen between 1983 and 1990 when dealing with philosophical questions and inquiry. The author earned his Doktor-Ingenieur from Technische Hochschule Aachen Germany in 1990. His postdoctoral training as a scholar was conducted in the United States of America under East West fellowship at the East West Center Honolulu Hawaii in 1991 and Fulbright scholarship at Smithsonian Institution Washington DC in 1992. Since 1993, he returned home to Indonesia and was appointed as senior lecturer and researcher for history, theory and philosophy of the built environment at the Institut Teknologi Bandung Indonesia until 2002. Between 2003 -2005 Bagoes was a Visiting Research Associate at the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto Canada, conducting research on urban theory and the dwelling culture in modernity, based on his field research in various rural and urban communities in Southeast Asia. He was a Faculty member at the Department of Architecture, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (2010- 2013). Besides his theoretical work, Bagoes was a practicing architect and urban planner/designer with extensive years of experience in Indonesia and Canada (2006-2013).