Singkawang Cultural Center is located in Singkawang, a small city in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The city has been a home to ethnically diverse community for many generations, with three major ethnic groups of Tidayu: Tionghoa (Chinese-Indonesian), Dayak & Melayu. This diversity enriches Singkawang with abundant art & culture. The annual cultural events are later developed as Singkawang tourism highlights, such as: Cap Go Meh Festival, Gawai Dayak Naik Dango, Ngabayon Dayaknese Festival, Malay Art Festival, and Ramadhan Fair.

In the beginning, the Singkawang Mayor wanted to create a breakthrough project in order to inject new vibrant energy to the city. Despite its cultural richness, its population is mostly considered to be “low-income”. Responding to the problems yet lifting its multicultural richness & values, we proposed the idea to revitalize an old inactive cinema to be a cultural center as a pioneer project. It gives new spirit to its people by activating communal activities and events. The primary purpose of the architecture is to combine public space and tourism showcase to connect people and to portray Singkawang in concise view.

In the process of designing Singkawang Cultural Center, we’re highly appreciate the existing condition in both site and building itself. We took adaptive reuse as our design approach and performed M.I.T (Modification, Intervention, and Transformation) method as minimum as possible in order to preserve the spirit of place, memory and authenticity of the old cinema. The combination of brick and steel create a new skin – façade style in the city without intervening the existing form of the old cinema. We used Singkawang local bricks as the main material whose industry has been started since the beginning of the development of Singkawang area along with pottery industry. Singkawang local brick contains iron oxide, giving it a distinct rust hue in pink-orange-red; and kaolinite, giving it hairy soft white tone with hard texture. The kaolin substance is what induces its unique characteristic, robust, and distinctive, compared to other bricks in Indonesia.

Thus, it was concluded that the Singkawang brick has many advantages ranging from historical, aesthetic, to quality values so it was appointed as the main material of SCC and aims to improve or re-establish the beauty of Singkawang bricks to the public.