Seeking Admission to a Doctoral Degree Program

I wish to enroll a doctoral degree program majoring architecture with a specialization in environmental design. I believe this program will enrich my knowledge and skill to successfully understand and practice designing and teaching the built-environment in the urban, metropolitan, and rural setting in Indonesia. Therefore, I would like to comprehend the theory and history of a city with its culture and people, and to identify each overlapping layers of social and physical environment for the better future of built-environment in Indonesia.

Throughout my life, I have spent in a society with distinctive social diversity. People are classified based on their ethnicities, religions, and economics background and the built-environment are divided into amorphous and disorder way. When I started to study architecture, I began to grow the curiosity and interest on how to maintain and to organize urban area. But as I was actively following and researching how people, culture, history, and power mold a city, and also reversely, I saw many obstacles on the way. During my study and work, I have joined NGO [Non-Government Organization] and barefoot architect. This experience taught me directly the significant relation between society and built-environment. And it showed me how the new proposed environment would not be materialized if the society rejected it.

Moreover, in my undergraduate thesis, “Dome for Earthquake Victims at Ngelepen, Yogyakarta: A Study of Survival Living in Assisted House Post Disaster”, I discovered that new environmental design without adapting physical and non-physical context causes people to hardly adapt and dwell. It also alters and degrades tradition, ritual, and social value. Because social order and environmen...

... middle of paper ...

...in those fields are working in the Unites States, such as Christopher Alexander, who wrote that context and form should be analyzed and synthesized using symbols (Alexander, 1964), Edward William Soja, who argued that spatial injustice is a conscious process shaping the city (Soja, 2010), and Sharon Zukin, who contended that culture and capital produce gentry society and its neighborhood (Zukin, 1987). Thus the United States will give a big chance to strengthen my expertise in environmental design. And my proposed research will benefit my country because it creates a contextual formula to solve urban overlapping problems, especially in Jakarta. I have committed to dedicate my work to the Indonesian government, urban planner and designer, academia, and public, so they will get the complete information and formula to effectively choose the fit design in urban scale.