Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker (1882-1949) is the Frank Lloyd Wright of Indonesia. Between 1910 and 1940 he designed numerous buildings on Java, including Villa Isola and Hotel Preanger in Bandung, which are among the absolute highlights of colonial architecture. This publication presents his complete oeuvre.

Dutch architects in Dutch East Indies
Histories of Dutch architecture often pass over the architecture of Dutch architects in the former Dutch East Indies. Wolff Schoemaker and Henri Maclaine Pont were the main architects in Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s. They determined the architectural landscape and the discussion of it.

Modernism
Magazines and newspapers between 1923 and 1937 carried a heated debate on vernacular applications in modern architecture. Maclaine Pont translated them into a regionally based architecture, while Wolff Schoemaker developed a new modern language of forms based on tropical conditions and principles. The way in which architects incorporate the history of a location in their design is once again a topical issue, both in Indonesia and in the Netherlands.

Jan van Dullemen is an architecture historian. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Utrecht in 2008 with a thesis on the oeuvre of C.P. Wolff Schoemaker entitled ‘In search of the tropical style’.