Singkawang is a small city, located in West Borneo, Indonesia. Demographically, Singkawang consists of three major ethnics: Tionghoa (Indonesian - Chinese), Dayak, and Melayu that live alongside together for many generations. The diversity makes Singkawang blessed with abundant art & culture potentials that has yet explored before. There’re are several potential... Show More

Singkawang is a small city, located in West Borneo, Indonesia. Demographically, Singkawang consists of three major ethnics: Tionghoa (Indonesian - Chinese), Dayak, and Melayu that live alongside together for many generations. The diversity makes Singkawang blessed with abundant art & culture potentials that has yet explored before. There’re are several potential annual events, for instance: Cap Go Meh festival, Gawai Dayak Naik Dango festival, Ngabayotn festival, and so on. But the most famous event that potentially visited by tourist from all around the world annualy is Cap Go Meh. Other events for the rest of the year aren’t really prominent. Despite those cultural prospects, the majority of Singkawang people are still classified into the low-income people. Nowadays, younger generation prefer to move outside Singkawang in order to achieve a better life. Responding to the problems and embracing those multicultural potentials, the non-profit organization, Singkawang Cultural Center Foundation comissioned us as an architect to intervene and re-design one of the oldest almost-inactive cinema in Singkawang. The project itself later called Singkawang Cultural Center. In this case, Singkawang Cultural Center is a pioneer project serves as a cultural house, a community center. It is expected to be a trigger for further development of both economic and cultural tourism aspect through its architecture and programmes. Also as one of the tourist destination that ables to portray Singkawang and its people - a representations. The design process focused on repairing the old cinema, creating new ambience to the city, emphazising locally available materials (red brick of Singkawang), and responding to climate conditions. All of those design approaches were done without intervene the form of the old cinema itself.