Made Wijaya has been writing about Balinese architecture, gardening and landscaping for over 30 years. His body of published work, which includes passionately opinionated essays, newspaper and magazine columns, has had a long and hard-fought evolution.
The author knows his subject well. Upon his first wet landing on Bali in 1973, he was taken under the wing of a Brahman family, bestowed with a Balinese name, and then threw himself into the study of Bali’s complex culture and religion. Mastering the language, he learned his trade first-hand from local artisans and Balinese master-builders, the priest-architects known as Undagi.
Filling the role of an unofficial and untiring spokesperson, for the next three decades Made championed the glory of Bali's architectural achievements with the same enthusiasm and intensity that John Coast, Beryl de Zoete and Colin McPhee discovered and then popularized Balinese music and dance to the Western world.
Unable to interest a publisher, Made Wijaya’s first publication consisted of photocopied typewritten pages into which he cropped and pasted his own photographs, then went on to distribute the publication himself. This now coveted and unwieldy elephant folio, Balinese Architecture: Towards an Encyclopedia, was the prototype from which sprang his monumental "Architecture of Bali." In this, his latest and most ambitious publishing effort to date, Made Wijaya has made himself proud. Co-published with the preeminent art publishing house Archipelago Press (an imprint of Editions Didier Millet), the Bali-based architect has come fully into his own with a voice that is unmistakably authoritative and self-confident.
I'm not a student of architecture, but I know a good book when I see one. I've also been building a house on Bali for over a year now and have been sensitized and bloodied by the experience. Though I value the book as a resource by which I can make decisions on materials, styles and ornamentation, it is more than just a source book, as its subtitle belies.
This is an art book - it does not deserve to be called anything less - a virtual tour d' force of the entire cultural and historical universe of Balinese architecture as seen through the lens of a well- traveled professional whose celebrated tropical gardens and structures can be seen from Morocco to New York and from India to Singapore.
I knew the author when he was Michael White in his bicycle-riding struggling-student days in the early 1970s at the University of Sydney. I count myself as one of the lucky few to have beheld his first creation, an ordered tropical jungle in the yard of his rental house in the Glebe Point Road area of Sydney, a cynosure of peace and beauty which delighted all who saw it. Already the boldness, iconoclasm and the prickly eccentricity which would later become a signature of his character and his work all over the planet was in evidence.
The book is a microcosm of the larger world of architecture. To shine such a bright light on the man-made structures of such a small area of the earth’s surface - a tiny island practicing a highly distinctive form of frontier Hinduism - is to bring Asian and even global architecture into sharper focus.
Caption-writing in itself is an art and the hundreds of captions are precise and entertaining, each serving to compliment and enhance the 660 photographs, illustrations and diagrams. The magnificent black and white archival photographs lend a powerful gravitas to the text.
Bali’s humble forest huts and village walled courtyards, its elaborate open-air high court pavilions and awesome religious structures have inspired a whole generation of internationally acclaimed architects and designers. This handsome and useful coffee-table book is a visual encyclopedia that honors the island’s long and illustrious building tradition.
Architecture of Bali: A Source Book of Traditional and Modern Forms by Made Wijaya, Archipelago Press and Wijaya Words, Singapore 2002, ISBN 981-4068-25-X.
Available for Rp 470,000 at Periplus Bookshops in the Bali Galeria in Kuta, Warung Made in Seminyak, Ngurah Rai Airport, in Gramedia bookstores and in the Matahari in Kuta Square.
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