The photos started the way these things always start now—not
with a press release, not with a government memo stamped and initialed and
filed away in triplicate, but with somebody’s phone held up over a fence, the
shutter clicking in the wet Jakarta heat, and then that little swirling icon
that means uploading, and then it’s out there. It’s always out there
before anyone official has said a word, and that’s the trouble with the modern
world, isn’t it? The truth used to have a head start. Not anymore. Now the
rumor gets there first, and it gets there running.
What the phones caught was this: excavators on the east side
of the Merdeka Palace complex, their yellow arms swinging in that patient,
indifferent way heavy machinery has—unhurried, like they know something
you don’t, like they’ve got all the time in the world and you don’t—and piles
of raw earth where, as far as most people knew, there had only ever been grass
and shade and the long unbroken silence of a place that wasn’t supposed to
change.
It’s the palace, people thought, looking at their
screens. They’re tearing up the palace.
And once a thought like that gets loose in a crowd, it doesn’t
much matter whether it’s true. It just runs.
John Muhammad—an architect, and a man whose title (head of
the National Presidium of the Indonesian Green Party) sounds like it was built
for exactly this kind of moment—said what a lot of people were already
muttering to themselves in kitchens and warungs and taxi queues across the
city. He said the project had skipped its homework. No public transparency, he
said. No feasibility study worth the name. No sign-off from the people whose
entire job is to stand between old stones and new ambition—the cultural
heritage experts, the ones who are supposed to get a phone call before
the excavators show up, not after.
To this day, he told Tempo, no information
has been given to the public at all. Skip the requirements, he warned, and
you don’t just get bad architecture. You get penalties. You get trouble.
Cultural Affairs Minister Fadli Zon pushed back on all of
it, and pushed back hard. The land being dug up, he said, was empty. It had
always been empty. Nothing historic stood on it, nothing was being touched,
nothing was coming down. The Palace, he explained, was simply out of room—the
kind of practical, unglamorous problem that never makes it into the postcards.
Cabinet meetings under canvas tents on the lawn, like some kind of
state-sanctioned camping trip, because there was nowhere indoors left to put
everyone. A multipurpose building, he suggested—maybe something like that—though
the particulars, he admitted, would ultimately fall to the State Secretariat
and the Cabinet Secretariat to work out.
We really are short on space, he said, and if you’ve
ever tried to host forty people in a room built for twelve, you understand that
particular flavor of desperation.
So which is it? Sacred ground being violated, or an empty
lot finally being put to use? The argument, like most arguments that matter,
depends entirely on what you think you’re looking at when you look at the
Presidential Palace in the first place.
Here’s the thing most people get wrong, and it’s a natural
mistake, the kind of mistake that comes from never actually having to think too
hard about a place you drive past all your life: they think “the Palace” is one
building. Singular. A monument, frozen the day it was finished, the way an
insect gets frozen in amber—perfect, unchanging, done.
It isn’t. It never was.
What sits behind those gates in Central Jakarta is 6.8
hectares—call it seventeen acres, if acres mean more to you than hectares do—bounded
by Jalan Medan Merdeka Utara on one side and Jalan Veteran on the other, and
inside that boundary is not one building but a whole small neighborhood of
them, laid down one on top of the last like sediment, like the rings inside a
tree that tell you not just how old the tree is but what kind of years it
lived through.
The oldest of them is the Negara Palace—Rijswijk Palace, in
the old tongue, back when the Dutch still ran things and gave the place a name
that sounded like a cough. It stands back-to-back with the Merdeka Palace,
facing north toward the slow brown water of the Ciliwung, and it started its
life not as a seat of government at all but as the private home of a Dutch
businessman named J.A. van Braam, built out near the end of the 1700s when
Rijswijk was still just a neighborhood where the wealthy went because the air,
they said, was better there than in the fever-thick streets of old Batavia. Better
air. That’s how empires start sometimes—not with a flag planted in
conquered ground, but with a rich man deciding he’d rather breathe easy.
These days the Negara Palace hosts the ceremonial stuff—the
swearings-in, the state banquets, the moments when a country puts on its good
clothes for company. But it has not always worn a banquet face. Within those
same walls, General de Kock once bent over maps and troop counts, plotting his
campaign against Prince Diponegoro and Tuanku Imam Bonjol—men fighting, in
their own fashion, for the same ground the Dutch were busy naming after a
suburb back home. And it was here, too, that Governor-General Johannes van den
Bosch signed the Cultuurstelsel into being—the forced cultivation system
that would grind against the backs of the archipelago’s farmers for
generations. Buildings remember things, or maybe it’s truer to say buildings
don’t remember anything at all, and that’s the horror of it—they just stand
there, patient as those excavators, hosting whatever gets asked of them,
banquet or battle plan, and keeping no opinion on the difference.
To the south, facing out toward the green sweep of the
National Monument park, stands the Merdeka Palace itself—Paleis te Koningsplein
in its old life, or Gambir Palace, built later than its northern twin to keep
pace with a colonial bureaucracy that, like all bureaucracies, only ever grew
and never shrank. This is the one you’ve seen in photographs without knowing
it: the venue for Independence Day, the place foreign leaders get walked
through with cameras trailing them, the place ambassadors present their
credentials like students handing in homework they’re desperate to get right.
Inside, the rooms have kept their old names and their old
weight—the Credentials Room, the Jepara Room, the Raden Saleh Room. And then
there’s the one that means the most, maybe, precisely because it doesn’t look
like it should: the Heritage Flag Room, which used to be Sukarno’s bedroom, and
now holds the original Heritage Flag and the actual, physical, ink-on-paper
text of the Proclamation of Independence. A president’s bedroom, repurposed to
guard a nation’s birth certificate. Somebody slept there once, a person
might think, walking through, and now the whole idea of the country is what
sleeps there. There’s a shiver in that, if you let yourself feel it.
Both the Negara Palace and the Merdeka Palace carry official
protection now, designated cultural heritage under a 1993 governor’s decree—the
two fixed points, the anchors the rest of the complex has grown up around like
a coral reef grows around a shipwreck. And grow it did: the Bina Graha Building
east of the Negara Palace, the president’s working office through the New Order
years; the State Guesthouse on the west courtyard for visiting heads of state;
the Baiturrahim Mosque, built at the tail end of the 1950s and still standing
open for prayer to president and staff and state guest alike; the State
Secretariat Building; and beyond that, the unglamorous connective tissue of any
working government—security posts, service buildings, art studios, pavilions,
gardens. A city grows a palace complex the same way it grows anything else: not
by plan, exactly, but by need, one addition answering the last, decade
after decade, until nobody quite remembers a time when it looked any different.
So how did a rich man’s country house become this—this
sprawling, layered, seventeen-acre argument about what a nation owes its own
history?
Slowly. That’s how. It always is.
Construction on the original house began around 1796 under
Governor-General Pieter Gerardus van Overstraten and wasn’t finished until
1804, under his successor Johannes Sieberg—eight years for one man’s home,
which tells you something about how they built things then, brick by patient
brick, with no deadline hanging over anyone’s head like a blade. The colonial
government bought the place outright in 1816, and by 1820 it had become the
official residence of Governor-General G.G. van der Capellen. The private house
had become the machine.
By 1848 the machine had outgrown its housing. The upper
floor came down. The front was pushed outward. Wings went up on either side for
coachmen and aides, because a government, like a family that keeps having
children, never stops needing one more room.
And still it wasn’t enough. By 1869, Governor-General Pieter
Mijer was standing in those same halls, looking at floors that sagged underfoot
and cracks that ran up the walls like something trying to get out, and what he
felt—by his own account, given three years later before the Dutch House of
Representatives—was fear. A real, physical dread, the kind that settles
into your chest when you understand a structure might fail you without warning,
might simply give way one ordinary afternoon and take you down with it. That
fear is what put the new palace on the drawing board—the Koningsplein-facing
building we now call Merdeka Palace—designed by Jacobus Bartholomeus Drossaers
and raised between 1873 and 1879 at Governor-General James Loudon’s order, a
neoclassical pile that cost 360,000 guilders and stood, when it was finished,
as proof that dread, properly channeled, builds things that last.
Then 1942 came, and with it the Japanese occupation, and the
whole complex changed hands and changed purpose the way conquered places always
do—Gambir Palace and the old Rijswijk grounds becoming the residence of the Saiko
Shikikan, the supreme commander, three different men rotating through those
rooms before the war finally burned itself out.
What came after was better. On March 25, 1947, inside the
Negara Palace, Sutan Sjahrir and Dr. Hubertus van Mook signed the Linggajati
Agreement—a Dutch newspaper that same day reporting, almost offhandedly, that
the ceremony would take place that Tuesday afternoon at the “Rijswijk” Palace
in Batavia, as though it were just another appointment and not a hinge point in
the birth of a nation. Two years later, on December 27, 1949, sovereignty
itself changed hands at Gambir Palace, the Dutch flag coming down for good—and
it’s worth sitting with that for a second, the strange quiet violence of a
name-change: Gambir Palace becoming Merdeka Palace that same day, Rijswijk
Palace becoming Negara Palace, the old colonial words simply erased, the
buildings themselves unmoved, unchanged, standing exactly where they’d always
stood while the whole meaning of them turned over like a coin.
Sukarno kept building. The State Guesthouse went up between
1962 and 1964, six stories of dining halls and suites for visiting heads of
state, designed by R.M. Soedarsono. In 1958 the Baiturrahim Mosque rose on the
west side, seventeen steps built into its design on purpose—one for each day of
the month the Proclamation was signed, August the seventeenth, a piece of
architecture that is also, quietly, a piece of memory, the kind you can climb.
Under Suharto, the land east of the Negara Palace—once home
to the old Hotel der Nederlanden and, later, the headquarters of the
Cakrabirawa guard—became the site of the Bina Graha Building, begun in 1969 and
finished the following year, conceived (so the record has it) from an idea
floated by Pertamina director Ibnu Sutowo. It became the working heart of the
New Order government, and it kept getting added onto, renovated, expanded,
clean into the early 2000s.
And then the Reform era, and the quieter kind of change—not
new wings this time but new wiring, new security, new systems humming under the
old floors, the twenty-first century arriving the way it always does:
invisibly, in cables and servers, rather than in stone.
The complex has never stopped evolving. Say that
sentence slowly and it stops sounding like a defense and starts sounding like
the plain, unglamorous truth. Every era left its mark. Every government that
ever sat behind those gates found the space it inherited wasn’t quite the space
it needed, and so it built—a little, or a lot, but always something.
Which brings us back to the excavators, and the yellow arms
swinging in the heat, and the question nobody’s fully answered yet: is this
addition just one more ring on the tree, or is it the year the tree got sick?
The government’s case is a practical one, and practical
cases are always the hardest to argue against with pure feeling, however strong
that feeling runs. The old buildings, they say, weren’t built for this century.
Narrow halls that were never meant to empty a crowd out fast in an emergency.
Materials that catch and hold fire the way old materials do. Wiring installed
for gaslight and candle-load, now asked to carry the electrical hunger of
laptops and servers and every other device that makes a modern government run.
You can love an old house and still admit it wasn’t built to survive what you’re
asking of it now. And the land in question, the government notes, was never
inside the heritage boundary to begin with—empty ground, east of the gates,
never protected because it was never, in any legal sense, historic at all.
It isn’t as though palaces never grow. The White House got
its West Wing under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, its East Wing under Franklin
Roosevelt forty years later—bricks and mortar keeping pace with a country’s
swelling need for room to work and room to hide. Buckingham Palace got its East
Wing in 1847, Queen Victoria’s commission, Edward Blore’s design, more living
space for a growing royal family—and out of that addition came the balcony, the
one everyone pictures now when they picture the British monarchy at all, though
nobody thinks of it as an addition anymore. It just looks like it was
always there. That’s what time does to new things. Given enough of it, new
things stop looking new.
But precedent isn’t permission, not on its own, and
Indonesia has its own law to answer to—Law No. 11 of 2010 on Cultural Heritage,
Article 83 of which allows adaptation for contemporary needs, but only on the
condition that the work preserves the original character of the building, the
surrounding landscape, the architectural style, the construction methods, the
whole fragile aesthetic harmony of the place. Adding facilities is permitted.
Limited spatial change is permitted. What isn’t permitted—what the law was
written to prevent—is the quiet erosion of a place until one day you look up
and realize the thing you were protecting isn’t there anymore, not really, even
though the walls are still standing.
So the question isn’t really should the Palace ever
change. It always has. It probably always will, one government’s need
stacked on the last, all the way back to a Dutch businessman who just wanted
better air to breathe.
The real question—the one that actually matters, the one
hiding under all the noise from the phones and the tents and the excavators—is
smaller and harder and far less romantic than “heritage versus progress.” It’s
just this: did anyone follow the process this time? Was there a
feasibility study. Was there a public accounting. Did the heritage experts get
their say before the ground broke, or after.
That’s the trouble with process, in the end. It’s boring. It
doesn’t photograph well. Nobody’s phone lights up over a properly filed
environmental review. But it’s process—not sentiment, not law professors
quoting Article 83 at each other on television, not the government’s word
against an architect’s—that will actually decide, months or years from now,
whether this new building settles quietly into the tree rings of the place, one
more year in a two-hundred-year story, or whether it becomes the year people
point to and say: that’s when it started going wrong. That’s the ring that
doesn’t match the others.
Nobody knows yet. That’s usually how it goes, right up until
the moment somebody finally does.
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