Dalam Loka

Sumbawa Besar, West Nusa Tenggara

Dalam Loka is the Sumbawa sultanate’s palace at Sumbawa Besar, standing on ninety-nine posts — as many as the names of God. That is why it is here. Every other tally in this collection counts something in front of the builders and could come out differently next year: households, clans, hearths, seats, shoulders, sleeping bodies. This one is given by a text, exact, and not open to negotiation. Two things follow. Ninety-nine is nine elevens, so the number fixes not only a count but the shape of the grid. And because posts cannot be added, the only way to a larger palace is a wider spacing — which runs into the span a single beam will cross. The sun in this model is computed for Sumbawa Besar, 8.49° S and 117.42° E.

What is built here is the frame and its arrangement rather than the palace. The real Dalam Loka is full of carving, louvred windows, ceremonial stairs and divisions of space that are not modelled at all; the inner part here is simplified to evenly spaced rooms. Beyond that: that there are ninety-nine posts is what the sources say, but the nine-by-eleven grid is the author’s reading — the number can be arranged other ways in a real building; every metre here is an interpretation, though the building stands, has been restored, and can be measured; and the palace was partly dismantled and rebuilt in the last century, so what can be measured today is not necessarily what stood in 1885.