Rumah kebaya

Condet and Setu Babakan, Jakarta

A rumah kebaya is a Betawi house: a brick plinth on low ground, a timber frame bought by the length, a tiled roof that changes pitch partway down, and a langkan across the front facing the road. Two things make it worth building here. Its neighbours are not kin: every other building in this collection is placed by a relationship — a compass direction, a family yard, a clan square, a river, a tree — while this one stands on a plot beside a road, and the line it may not build past was drawn by somebody else. And its front is a room for people who are not let in: the langkan can be stepped onto from the road without passing a door, and the house’s first door is behind it. The sun in this model is computed for Jakarta, 6.27° S and 106.86° E: the only city site in the collection.

A rumah kebaya is a building of mixed descent — Dutch joinery, Chinese ornament, a Malay plan — and none of that mixing is visible in this model, because what is modelled is only its arrangement. The carving of the gigi balang, the louvred windows, the turned terrace rail and the fretted bargeboards are not modelled; the gigi balang board here is a plain board. Beyond that: the plot size and the setbacks are the author’s reading and in fact differ from street to street; the rumah kebaya has several relatives (bapang, gudang, joglo Betawi) that are not built; and it should be said that these houses are still standing and still lived in, in the fastest-changing city in the country — there are fewer of them not because people stopped building them but because of the price of land.