Excerpt of Conversation on the Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Papers Collection’s Bandung Papers

Letter from Jaqueline Tyrwhitt to Josep Lluís Sert, April 1960. For more, see William A. Doebele, “Education for Planning in Developing Countries,” Town Planning Review 33(2): 95, 1962 | Photo by RIBA Collections. ©­Daniel Huws

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