Building a Home : Introduction

Building is a necessity, but architecture is more than that. Many technical, legal, and functional aspects and factors in design must be integrated in preparing a building and architecture. The quality of life, expression, meaning or symbolism is not necessarily considered in designing a building, but in architecture they play an important role, and even some scholars in classifying them as function of architecture.

For a house, for instance, a building must be designed to become a house, but an architecture should be designed to provide a home for the family who live in it. That is quite common among architects whose profession is to provide the society with architecture. To the Javanese, one of the ethnic groups of Indonesia, that ideals seemingly had been understood as early the second half of the nineteenth century. A treatise known among the Javanese as Primbon had recorded them in a unique way.

Topics on building and architecture, however, only becomes part of the whole content of that Primbon. As a written document on traditional architecture, scholars hardly give their attention to it. It is the aim of this paper to highlight and describe Primbon in terms of strategy, design and actors in building a home. In this paper, the organization started with the setting of Indonesia and Java in its concern with the development of lesser developed villages. I will also give a brief background upon the Primbon and the Petungan in this chapter.

A chapter that specifically presents an identification of Petungan will be the succeeding chapter. The three following chapters will subsequently describe the strategy(ies), design and actors in building a home. A concluding remarks will be the last chapter of this paper