Southeast Asia Spotlight - March 6, 2026 - Excerpt of Conversation between Reto Geiser & Robin Albrecht

The following is an excerpt from a conversation from Pairs 06 between Pairs editor and Harvard Asia Center Graduate Associate Robin Albrecht (March I ’26) with Reto Geiser, associate professor at the Rice University School of Architecture. The conversation centers on the Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Papers Collection’s Bandung Papers, from British town planner and Harvard faculty member Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–1983)’s archive housed at the Royal Institute of British Architects Collection in London. Documents selected for the interview focus on correspondence related to Tyrwhitt’s tenure as a UN advisor to the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia in the late 1950s and early 1960s where she played an important role in establishing Southeast Asia’s first program in city and regional planning.

Reto Geiser
Considering the Indonesian students who were trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and other North American schools in the late 1950s and went on to become the first generation of local planning faculty in Jakarta, it would be interesting to examine how much of Harvard’s curriculum registered in Indonesia. More importantly, how was it influenced by the Indonesian context?

Education is not a direct export of knowledge but rather a question of cultural transfer, translation, and exchange. In the process of teaching, knowledge gets distorted. All of us who teach have been inspired, shaped, and biased by our own educational experiences.

Robin Albrecht
We will have to take a closer look at multiple aspects to answer this question. First, urban planning education at the Harvard GSD was in transition in the late 1950s with the Urban Design program just starting. In Indonesia, until its independence process in the second half of the 1940s and the required departure of Dutch experts in 1957, planning remained a colonial affair. Dutch planning education may have been present in Indonesia via colonial influence at the time. Indonesia, as a multi-ethnic, cultural, and religious nation, was also in transition, forging its own national identity at the time.1

People were jumping back and forth between Indonesia and North America: Harvard faculty coordinated the establishment of Indonesia’s first planning program at the Bandung Institute of Technology and taught there in its early years, and a group of select Indonesian students studied planning in North America to take over teaching duties. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt was one of the Harvard GSD experts staying in Bandung in the spring of 1960.2 In a letter to Harvard GSD Dean Josep Lluís Sert,3 Tyrwhitt updates him about Bandung and describes Walter Hunziker, a student of Sigfried Giedion, as unable to get along with Vincent Rogers van Romondt, a “stubborn old Dutch archaeologist.”4

RG
Tyrwhitt adds, “whom I rather like.” I can give you some context on Giedion here.5 Giedion was a fascinating figure, but he was also an outcast. He was never a full professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), nor at Harvard. In Zurich, he was initially appointed against the will of the faculty. Accordingly, the people around Giedion in Zurich were not necessarily conformists, and his students were far from typical ETH students, as the school had a reputation for being building-focused and largely apolitical. They published in journals and were more outspoken and confrontational in advocating their convictions. They were also involved with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) Junior Groups and thus a bit ideologically influenced.6 Unsurprisingly, they pushed back against what were considered older ideas.

RA
Their distaste might be a generational aversion.

RG
It is interesting that building new schools somewhere else can be a cultural and generational reset. Tapping into the next generation is critical. Some of the Indonesian students trained in North America may have exhibited a similar nonconformism when they returned to teach in Indonesia. If they had trained an older generation already working on planning in Indonesia, they likely would have been far less open to taking on new pedagogies and different ideas because they had already solidified how they work. In that sense, generational differences were likely equally as decisive as their origin, if not more so.

While there was an export of knowledge from North American institutions, it is important to recognize that it was not a direct, one-directional export. Harvard faculty initially taught in Indonesia as foreign experts, but the long-term goal was to train others to teach, which allowed for a much stronger transformation of knowledge. From the Indonesian side, the exported knowledge was received, distorted, and translated into their own context. The productivity of sending Indonesian students abroad lay in how they internalized what they learned in North America through the lens of their own lived experiences in Indonesia. The way they absorbed information abroad was already changed by their own perception, and upon returning to Indonesia, the knowledge was once again adapted when imported. Architectural knowledge was filtered and transformed through the Indonesian students’ way of processing it. […]

RA
The 1950s were an interesting moment of transition at the Harvard GSD. Tyrwhitt was brought to Harvard by Sert and then appointed Professor of Urban Planning in 1954. Sert had just begun his deanship a year earlier and involved her in the Urban Design Conferences which laid the groundwork for establishing the Urban Design program in 1960 shortly after her return from Bandung.9

RG
On that note, I have a question for you, since you have studied Tyrwhitt’s papers related to Bandung. I am curious if and how the transitions at the Harvard GSD also resonated in its outward-facing programs and initiatives. For example, the process of supporting the establishment of a planning program in Indonesia. Was there a translation of some of the shifting curriculum at Harvard, now under Sert, to the Indonesian context? To what degree were ideas used, tested, or even pushed there and later brought back to the Harvard GSD?

RA
The Bandung curriculum showed an emphasis on design, with students required to take studio-based, design-focused courses every semester. Tyrwhitt believed that one could not plan a city without physically designing it. In one of her letters to Indonesian Harvard student Tan Sioe An—who would go on to become part of the first generation of Indonesian planning faculty at the Bandung planning school—she writes that she is pleased to hear that Bandung’s architecture department had approached the planning department, noting that she is “one of those who believes that planning must face in two directions: one toward Regional Science and the other toward Architecture, and both are of equal importance.”10 […]

I want to get back to the letters between Tyrwhitt and Tan. They are interesting because they span a decade beyond her original engagement at Bandung. You can see that their relationship was friendly on a personal level, like in a quote where Tan’s daughter called her Granny Tyrwhitt. One quote from Tyrwhitt’s letters sticks with me: She offers to send journals, funds, and so on, showing her generosity and enduring commitment to the school even after her tenure ended. In the 1985 memory edition of Ekistics on Tyrwhitt, Tan writes: “For those who got to know Jackie, she was more than just her work at school;­.­.­.­[s]he gave us all her time, whether taking a visitor around the place or finding someone a new job to pave the way for a better future.”

RG
That’s a beautiful quote! Cultivating other educators is a rare treat and takes more than just a curriculum to run with. It becomes beautifully evident in the example of Tyrwhitt and Tan that nobody is just born as an educator. It’s based on experience, and sharing expertise with others is a critical part of that. Tyrwhitt was one of those perfect role models who didn’t put herself to the fore but rather helped people grow as educators through mentoring. She set her own scholarly output aside, which is a reason why she hasn’t been well-known for the longest time. Obtaining a solid education at Harvard is one thing, but it’s also about tagging along with someone, first observing, then assisting as teaching assistants, and eventually taking on more responsibility. That’s how someone’s pedagogy gets absorbed, adapted, and proliferated. All of this is grounded in personal relationships, encouragement, support, and feedback which is only further instigated by opening and creating opportunities to visit other places, collaborating with people from different contexts, and expanding one’s horizons on how educators work. […]

RA
It seems that looking at how ideas of modernism travelled from one place to another only through the export and import of buildings is a limited understanding of how ideas of modernism were disseminated globally. The interactions of people at specific institutions at specific moments seem even more important. […]

RG
Considering this, I am wondering if dissemination through publications was also relevant in the Indonesian context. How did the program’s output gain traction locally and regionally, and what impact did it have on other schools in the region and beyond?

RA
There was discussion about getting printed textbooks to Indonesia and making the knowledge in those textbooks relevant for the Indonesian context. One interesting item in Tyrwhitt’s archive is Tan’s term paper where he relates his coursework assignments at Harvard to Indonesian topics. At a weekend conference held at Harvard in 1961, the six Indonesians studying in North America reflected on how to make their American and Canadian course materials useful to the Indonesian context. It was suggested that they produce a bilingual English-Indonesian publication to demonstrate the scope of planning as a discipline and “impress” Indonesian officials of the importance of design in planning.

RG
The fact that Tyrwhitt kept Tan’s term papers in her personal papers rather than having them end up in an overlooked institutional archive suggests a sense of ownership. I imagine she invested sharp editorial feedback in some of these texts. From a historian’s perspective, it would be interesting to see how they addressed working with foreign sources and how architectural theory was eventually translated between contexts.

Recently, an exhibition in Zurich looked at the impact of Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture on Chinese architectural history books.20 Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture is a highly visual architectural history book based on an argumentative comparison of images. His excellent illustrations were not a given at a time when the production of plates made the reproduction of photographs very expensive. It’s interesting to see that Chinese history books adopted Giedion’s images, but they don’t appear in the carefully orchestrated juxtapositions and visual narrative as found in his book. Instead, liberated from the original, Chinese history books used them to fit their own historiographic argument, annihilating Giedion’s voice. Driven by the pragmatic search for the best image source that can be reproduced, Giedion’s thinking wasn’t imposed on them, but rather the book turned into an image repository that was used to construct a different history. It wasn’t the arguments presented in Space, Time and Architecture that were impacting Chinese architecture students’ understanding of architectural history; it was the represented projects and their photographic reproduction. Accordingly, Giedion’s selection of projects still had an impact, and this brings up a broader question of how architectural history is taught today and on what sources such teaching is grounded.

RA
This is also related to building a new planning library and slide collection at Bandung: what books to include and how to ensure that knowledge is relevant for the local context.

RG
Building a library from scratch in a different cultural context carries the risk of imposing Western perspectives. The selection of sources can be contentious because it shapes architectural understanding in that context. It came up as a conversation a while back, but it’s still a pressing question: Is there a canon, and what should it include? I don’t believe you can teach architectural history with just one textbook because it inevitably introduces a strong bias. A polyphonic and pluralistic approach is essential to open the field. There is never enough time and space to cover everything we would like. There is a question of what students must know as a common basis in their educational context. At the same time, how we can broaden perspectives to be more inclusive? What does this mean for libraries and textbooks? What do they include and exclude? […]

The research for this interview was made possible thanks to funding from the British Architectural Library Trust. The full interview is available in Pairs 06. Limited copies of Pairs 06 are available for purchase in the Frances Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. It will be available worldwide through Harvard University Press in May 2026.

1. Indonesia declared independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1945, but full recognition by the Netherlands only came in 1949. In 1957, amid tensions over the Netherlands refusal to cease control over New Guinea, Indonesia implemented a policy requiring certain Dutch nationals, though not all, to leave the country, many of whom had remained important in various sectors even after Indonesia’s independence.

2. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–1983) was a British town planner, editor, and educator who was also known as the “mother of modern urban design.” While teaching at the Harvard GSD, as part of a United Nations technical assistance mission, she advised the Bandung Institute of Technology in 1960 to set up a program in regional and city planning. Prior to Tyrwhitt, in December 1958, Harvard GSD faculty members Martin Meyerson (1922–2007)—who later became the dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and the president of the University of Pennsylvania—and William Doebele (1927–2024)—who would go on to become a full professor and the inaugural curator of the Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard GSD—served as advisors at Bandung.

3. Josep Lluís Sert (1902–1983) was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1953–1969 where he is credited with establishing the world’s first urban design program. He was previously the president of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne from 1947–1956.

4. Vincent Rogers van Romondt (1903–1974) was a Dutch archaeologist in Indonesia and one of the few Dutch experts not required to leave Indonesia in 1957. He headed the School of Architecture at Bandung. Walter Hunziker (1929–2022) was a Swiss American architect who studied at ETH Zurich and in Atlanta, and taught at Bandung.

5. Sigfried Giedion (1988–1968) was a Swiss architectural historian who taught at ETH Zurich and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was first appointed at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor in Poetry for the aca demic year 1938–1939 and was also the first secretary-general of CIAM. He is known for his books such as Space, Time and Architecture (1941). After a hiatus, he was brought back to the Harvard GSD under Sert’s tenure in 1954. For more, see Reto Geiser, Giedion and America: Repositioning the History of Modern Architecture (Zurich, Switzerland: gta Verlag, 2018). An open access version of the book is available through gta Verlag.

6. The Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (1928– 1959) was an international organization that organized congresses advancing modernist principles in architecture and urbanism.

9. The Urban Design Conferences at Harvard marked the beginning of the discipline of urban design and the pursuit of urban design as distinct from architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. For more, see “The Origins and Evolution of ‘Urban Design,’ 1956–2006,” Harvard Design Magazine 24, S/S 2006.

10. Regional Science is an analytical approach to regional problems that include spatial economics, economic geography, land use, and so on. It is the non-design end of planning. For the letter from Tyrwhitt to Tan Sioe An from August 17, 1963, see The Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Papers Collection, TyJ/33/5, RIBA Collections, London.

20. For the book, see Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th rev.­ed. (Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2008). The exhibition in Zurich Look at a Leopard Through a Pipe: Visualizing Sigfried Giedion’s Modernism in Chinese Book Culture 1952–1982 was held at the gta exhibitions at ETH Zurich from February 26 to May 9, 2025. Curated by Wang Yulin with Lu Di, Yang Jun, and Zhang Tian, the exhibition explored the intersection of modern architectural discourse and Chinese pedagogical narratives.