28/04/2026
Landscape isn’t what you add when the building is done. It’s what sets the tone and ambiance of the whole place.
SMA Kemala Taruna Bhayangkara in Gunung Sindur set itself as part of the water cycle. There was already a water canal running through the site, south to north, following the natural fall of the land. We didn’t introduce it. We chose to preserve it, and to let it become the spine of the entire campus. Communal spaces grew along its edges. Buildings oriented themselves around it. The canal wasn’t a problem to solve. It was the design’s starting point.
At the southern end, a retention pond catches what arrives from beyond the site boundary, rain, runoff from higher ground. A biofilter shelf at the pond’s edge slows the water and filters it through living plants: vetiver grass, water lotus, burhead. What enters the canal has already been processed.
The water moves northward, through the campus, past the spaces where students gather, until it reaches the northern pond at the site’s lowest point. There it is held once more, filtered again. The campus passes clean water downstream.
Observatory decks above each pond bring students close enough to watch this happen. Not as a field trip. As a daily condition of being here. The water cycle isn’t a diagram on a classroom wall. It runs beneath the deck they’re standing on.
We don’t always get to design places where infrastructure and understanding can speak to each other. This was one of those.
đź“Ť SMA Kemala Taruna Bhayangkara, Gunung Sindur
🌿 Landscape Architecture: PDW (Pandega Desain Weharima)
