@TalesfromIceland Museum, Reykjavík
So this is the story of how I landed in Europe for the second time in two years!
In short, I am an awardee of the LPDP Scholarship by the Kementrian Keuangan, PK-71, 2016. This is one of my greatest blessings in the year 2016, when I was awarded this scholarship in May, and got the opportunity to study in September of that year. I might be one of the luckiest awardees, but please bear with my ramblings.
Well, in 2007, 17 year old me thought to become a landscape architect. Not out of nowhere of course. A crazy passion for the sport or art of golf which was brought down by my late grandfather, uncles and father, got me to enjoying the great green landscapes of the outdoors. But as my path has brought me, until 2015 my career and education was in the arts of building design or most people will say: Architecture.
Sidestory: music has always been my passion as well. No not playing though, just listening. Sigur Ros and their album Takk is until now my all time fave since High School, so I knew I needed to drop by Iceland during my studies. Luckily as the photo above shows, I’ve managed to drop by the awesome capital of the awesome country everybody knows as Iceland. During the Nordur og Nidur festival lead by Sigur Ros themselves actually!
My acceptance to the Landscape Architecture track of TU Delft was a great highlight in itself. As I had such a short time to prepare after acceptance to the scholarship, I guess I got lucky getting through in 2016. Even with a small dream of studying Urban Design and Development, I always had a gut feeling that Landscape Architecture should be my path. It was a story 8 years in the making.
Yeah, some might think these are two very similar topics, with similar ways of thinking. In my humble opinion, I can say, YES is true! But nonetheless, I know for a fact that there is a difference. It is the intersection between the indoor space and the outdoor. There is still a boundary in this intersection, that one must try and define. With one word to me it is, for now at least, process.
Sidestory: Future Cities Laboratory has also been a major part in my personal development of process-oriented thinking. I’ve spent nearly two years as a Research Assistant under the strong guidance of Prof. Stephen Cairns, and during that time also 9 months as a Project Manager brought me to realize even the art of building a 36m2 house is quite the challenge. Yeah I have led exhibits, and even pilot projects during my bachelors degree in architecture. But nothing can compare to a full-time research project!
The process of building a building and building outdoor spaces differ way too much. Both take time, effort, and of course money. Designing might take weeks or months, depending on the type of project and the needs of the client. The effort of the workers determines the speed of which the space will be shaped. Wealth of the client will determine how quickly the end product of the design will be shaped. But there is a factor that is very difficult to manufacture and accelerate in building an outdoor space: Organic Growth.
Everyone can dream up their dream house, their dream park, their dream country for that matter! But it is almost impossible to correctly calculate how things will grow organically. And I feel, 1,5 years studying this awesome subject made me realize that, there is a second nature to designing something which is growth.
What I learnt was not just the art of growing trees or growing plants, but also the process of growing my design and myself. Yeah, I know I’m already a good ol 27 years young, but I am still finding myself.
What do I want to become?
Where do I see myself in five years?
Who will be around me in the next ten years?
How will I become the person who I wanna be?
Out of those four, maybe the easiest is the last. By finishing my Thesis, with my LPDP scholarship I am at least one step closer to who I wanted to be in 2007. Even if it doesn’t answer the first three questions, at least it partly answers the last. So brace yourselves peeps. There’s gonna be a budding new Landscape Architect from the Archipelago known as Indonesia (INA).
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Peace and all the best,
ASAhtar
PS: an Indonesian version of this post is to be done (boleh gunakan Google Translate dulu untuk saat ini) and please do not hesitate to send me a mail asking me about my experiences, as this post is dedicated to the hashtag #LPDPuntuksemua