Thomas Karsten - Biography

Biography

Raised in a well-educated family, young Thomas Karsten developed progressive and liberal ideas. His father was a professor in philosophy and a university vice-chancellor, while his sister was the first women in the Netherlands to study chemistry. Thomas Karsten enrolled at the Delft Polytechnische School (precursor of the Delft University of Technology) in the Netherlands and initially studied mechanical engineering, before changing to structural engineering following major institutional reforms to the school. Karsten was not among the leaders in his study, but he graduated from a faculty that had only produced between 3 and 10 graduates until 1920.

Karsten's hometown was Amsterdam and in the early of 1920s, the city suffered major socio-economic problems. There was a highly segmented urban environment with extreme poverty, and ethnic (particularly Jewish) segregation and inequality. Between 1908–11, while Karsten was still a student, he was closely involved with the proponents of public housing reform in preparing a new housing project. Thomas Karsten's ideology towards social reform movements was developed during this time. He was a member of Socialische Technische Vereeniging or Association of Socialist Engineers, and later he joined its sister organization in Java. He significantly contributed in a town planning report in the Netherlands, called Volkshuisvesting in de Nieuwe Stad te Amsterdam (1909) or 'Public Housing in the New City of Amsterdam'. Members of this project were socialist reformists, architects and feminists.

To escape World War I in Europe, he moved to the Dutch East Indies (present day of Indonesia), which he saw as a neutral and a far distance place from the war. He went to Java on the invitation of Henri Maclaine Pont, a former fellow student, to assist Pont's architecture firm. Never trained as a town planner, Karsten envisaged the Indies-architectural elements with a town planning approach from scratch. His social vision guided him to reject colonial town planning but to shape colonial urban environment by including native elements. In the 1920s he committed himself to the Dutch East Indies saying Java was his 'home' and that his growing antipathy towards 'Western civilization' helped him to articulate his work. He married a Javanese woman.

By 1918, he had defined a set of principles for his town planning which saw him engaged as a consultant for major cities in the colony. He was a town planning consultant for Semarang (1916–20, 1936), Buitenzorg (now 'Bogor') (1920–23), Madiun (1929), Malang (1930–35), Batavia (Jakarta) (1936–37), Magelang (1937–38), Bandung (1941), as well as Cirebon, Meester Cornelis (part of Jakarta which is known as Jatinegara), Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Purwokerto, Padang, Medan and Banjarmasin.

After long career working privately for municipal authorities, the government recognized Thomas Karsten by appointing him to official committees. First he was in the Bouwbeperkingscommissie (1930) ('Building Works Committee'), and later to the Stadsvormingscommissie (1934) ('Town Planning Committee'). In 1941, he was appointed to lecture at the School of Engineering at Bandung. During the Japanese occupation in Indonesia, Thomas Karsten was imprisoned at camp Baros in Cimahi near Bandung. He died at the camp in 1945.

His building projects included large two-storey homes with steeply pitched roofs for members for elite Dutch citizens, new palace pavilions that were both European and traditional Javanese for indigenous royalty, public market buildings in Yogyakarta and Surakarta, and grand headquarters for companies.