Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemThe Minangkabau House: 'Spatial Opportunities' in Rural Western Sumatra, Indonesia( 2022)This thesis applies methods from gender studies to an architectural analysis of vernacular dwellings of the Minangkabau people in rural western Sumatra, Indonesia. It asks how the social and physical characteristics of the Minangkabau house become intertwined with the continuous reshaping of the villagers’ notions of home, matrilineal kinship and social relations, and gender roles. This thesis builds on prior research on the ‘Minangkabau House’, posing a critique of essentialist, binary notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ implicit in some studies of vernacular architecture that focus on Minangkabau dwellings. Existing interdisciplinary literature has illuminated how embodied customary or adat principles of matrilineal social relations are tangible in house form and expression. However, some of these writings have misinterpreted the significance of the relationships between the Minangkabau house and socio-spatial transformation, which this thesis seeks to redress through a study of several house types. In addressing this problem, this thesis adopts two analytical lenses: ‘spatial opportunities’, as coined by the feminist geographer Ayona Datta to denote possibilities for empowerment embedded in space, and ‘intersectionality’ as proposed by the critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw to comprehend social experiences specific to an individual’s particular identity. The analysis is based on eight weeks of spatial ethnographic field research conducted in a Minangkabau village. Participant observation, architectural and spatial observation, and semi-structured interviews were employed to record the physical features of the houses and their surroundings, and the villagers’ experiences of dwelling as shaped by multiple factors including the physical settings, adat norms, and their dwelling activities. This thesis argues that encounters between the customary system of values and coexisting ideologies have produced socio-spatial opportunities by making possible a multiplicity of what villagers perceive as adat and of the ways in which they put adat into practice. Dwellers transform the embodied social opportunities that are expressed in the architectural, spatial and symbolic features of the house through adaptive decision-making and considering available options for empowerment that give rise, in the process, to new material expressions of architectural form and use.