[Excerpt …] The colonial condition brings into sharp focus the problems of continuity and change within a society. Those problems are illustrated especially well in architecture and town planning, for, as Thomas Karsten wrote in De Taak1 in 1920, "Architecture is a very social art, bound by many links to materials, to industry, to working methods." He described the general condition of contemporary architecture in the Indies2 as "lacking intensity ... confused ... and lacking unity," which he ascribed to a lack of unity in society. Herman Thomas Karsten, born in the Netherlands in 1885, had studied architectural engineering at the Technische Hoogeschool3 in Delft and graduated in 1909. He went to the Indies for the first time in 1914. In the same De Taak article already quoted he went on to say, "The schism, no, the absolute, inevitable, insoluble duality, lies in the essence of the colony: the contrast in tradition, degree of development and aims between dominating European and dominated indigenous life.... A successful architecture must express a unity of the spiritual and material needs.... [The colonizer's need] to satisfy what is inborn and learned from the West goes against his need to adapt to the environment, to nature, the primary source of all emotion." Karsten then pointed out that the colonizer's assertion of Western style leads to his growing isolation. By imposing "the imperialistic Western ideas of the East working for the West," the colonizer confirms the existence of that split which eventually stimulates the rebellion of the colonized, with "every tukang" (workman) potentially a member of "a rebellious proletariat." In these conditions indigenous skills become "spiritual weapons"; every building asserting foreign domination can provoke a reaction and may be "a step toward an Indies architecture of their own." 

• 1. Thomas Karsten, "Bij de eerste Indiese Architectuur Tentoonstelling" (On the occasion of the first Indies architecture exhibition), De Taak 3, no. 33 (13 March 1920): 301.
• 2. In general the phrase, "the Indies," refers to the Dutch concept of their colony, the Netherlands East Indies. When the word "Indonesia" is used, it refers either to the present Republic of Indonesia or to the concept of cultural and political identity that developed with indigenous nationalism in the last decades of the colonial period.
• 3. The Dutch word hoogeschool refers to a tertiary institution, in this case the Technical University at Delft