Aesthetic visual signs for the public building facade design of Dutch East Indies architectural heritage in Malang City

During the reign of the Dutch East Indies, the phenomenon of developing architectural designs with a diverse variety of forms filled the developmental history of early modern architecture in Malang City. The offer of various aesthetic elements in the various design included the design of public buildings to meet the increasingly complex activity of city life. The aesthetic element is a visual sign that is closely linked to the context of dynamic society development and contemporary architecture development in a particular place. The study will explore how aesthetic visual signs appear in the central zone of Malang City, with two cases of important public buildings in that location. The method used is a qualitative descriptive analysis method in which the syntagma-paradigm relation analysis model is used to find visual signs in the form of a relationship between the aesthetic elements of the building and the context involved. The results of this study show that aesthetic visual signs have a potential and a hierarchy that contributes to the diversity of designing public architectural designs of the Dutch East Indies period in the new city center zone of Malang.


Introduction
If viewed historically, the architectural development of Malang City began in the second decade of the 20th century when the status of the region was designated as gemeente by the Dutch East Indies government in 1914. Since then, the process of accelerating urban growth and the productivity of architectural design creativity looks more significant and dynamic than the era previously in order to anticipate the growing needs of the city which is getting higher. Physical development through the addition of new public functions became a channel for the entry of various architectural design creativities so that people were ultimately exposed to offers of design products with a more pluralistic aesthetic value content [1,2]. The city structure and its various architectural design creativity were not found in other former Dutch East Indies cities built by the Dutch, because there were two city centers that were formed during the development era of the region. The city structure with two centers has a major influence on the characteristics and character of the city so that it produces a distinctive form of transformation that must be maintained in Indonesia. One of the city centers planned, designed and, developed by the Dutch East Indies government in Malang City was a new city center located north of the old city center, known today as Malang Tugu Square. Two important public buildings in the area, namely the city hall and train station, have played a major role in the character of the new downtown Malang area both in terms of function and architectural visuals. These two functions of public buildings are manifested in the architectural façade of the building which at first glance looks different. Each of them has an expression that contains certain aesthetic content, implying certain values related to the context of the building's existence such as function, location, social, political, economic, and cultural [3,4].
At first glance, aesthetic products in the form of architecture are seen as markers of a form of community life at that time with certain cultural rules and dynamics [5][6][7]. The nuances of the diversity of forms and styles of buildings as an expression of the aesthetic values adopted at that time were applied by architects to the buildings they designed, forming visual signs because they were a marker of certain values that were currently prevailing in society [8][9][10]. Therefore, it is important to know the visual elements that act as signs. Contains an understanding of signified and signifier, so that visual elements are not only understood as visual aesthetic elements physically but as elements that have a certain meaning and provide deeper knowledge regarding the context behind them [11][12][13]. The architectural heritage of the past, in this case, is the architectural legacy of the Dutch East Indies, really needs to be interpreted as something that carries a message through a visual sign, in which aesthetic value is contained as a manifestation of its immaterial nature. This message will be read clearly through visualization that integrates the visible and invisible aspects because these two aspects are both contained in an object and have an inseparable relationship [14][15][16]. Thus the study aims to 1) explore how visual aesthetic signs appear in the new central zone of Malang City, with two cases of important public buildings in that location 2) explore how the potential and hierarchy of visual aesthetic signs contribute to the diversity of heritage public building designs architecture from the Dutch East Indies era in the new city center, Malang.

Methods
This research includes 3 stages accompanied by the operationalization of the following methods:  Data collection stage: observing the aesthetic elements of the two research object buildings (Malang City Hall and Malang City Hall) based on the scope of observations in table 1.
Observations were made through direct observation or secondary data media (historical data).  Analysis stage: graphic analysis supported by qualitative descriptive analysis based on the conceptual framework of figure 1. Visual aesthetic signs are expressed through structured relationships between components within the framework.  Interpretation stage: carried out with coding techniques, tabulation, and pairing.

Syntagma (composition themes) on the building facade
Based on the framework of figure 1, through graphic and descriptive analysis, the syntagma (composition themes) found in the two research objects in the railway station and city hall public building categories is tabulated into table 2 and table 3. In addition to syntagma, table 2 and table 3 shows how much the significant potential of the unit in building up aesthetic visual signs on each building facade. This potential is known by calculating the intensity of the appearance of each significant unit in each theme, then proxied based on the weight of its role when paired with other significant units in shaping the theme. The results of the exploration of the city hall building facade are tabulated based on the results of qualitative descriptive and graphic analysis (table 3), showing that there are 6 composition themes. The six themes of the composition build up a building facade syntagma as a form of relationship between the aesthetic elements of the building facade. The syntagma on the facade of the city hall building covers 6 composition themes that are the same as those of the railway station building facade (except homogeneity), but with different levels of complexity of relations between different elements. For example, the theme of firmness on the facade of a city hall building is much more complex than that of a train station building (12 significant units/ variables versus 3 significant units/ variables). All 6 themes are formed from the relationship between 16 significant units (variables), consisting of 6 1 st level significant units and 10 2 nd level significant units.  Based on table 2 and table 3, it can be seen that the syntagma on the building facade was built by the existence of a paradigm. The paradigms that play a role in forming the facade syntagma of railway station and city hall buildings are tabulated based on their hierarchy, as follows (table 4). After being tabulated, it can be seen that of all the syntagma formed, 2 paradigms contributed greatly to the formation of the building facade design of Malang City Hall, namely the facade area (49.76%) and the shape (19.55%), as seen in table 4. Likewise, the same results apply to the building facade design of Malang City Hall. Facade area (32.05%) and shape (20.55%) are the 2 paradigms that contribute the most to the formation of the building facade syntagma.  Table 4. The potential and hierarchical paradigm in building facade syntagma.

Railway Station
City Hall 1 st level significant unit 1 When the existing results at the city hall juxtaposed with the railway station, as the visualization of the schema above, it turns out that the significant units that have the highest hierarchy are the same, namely the facade plane and shape, although with different percentages. The emphasis on this city hall is that the complexity of the relationship between units is more complex because the resulting phrases are 105 phrases, which is bigger when compared to train station phrases which only amount to 47 phrases. This suggests a little for a while that visually this building has the potential to dominate the visual experience of the observer's eye moving in the area.

Visualization of the dominant aesthetic visual signs on the building facade
The similarity of visual signs with the highest hierarchy between the station and city hall is shaped by the theme of a balanced composition. However, the relationship between the visual elements between the two buildings in forming a balance is built by different visual elements.  The balance at the city hall is the strongest visual sign because it has the highest hierarchy in terms of phrases and variables, built by visual elements of the facade plane, shapes, dimensions, and axes ( figure  3). These visual signs are the visual signs that contribute the most to the area, emphasizing the strong relationship between the function of the area and the function of the building as the city center and the center of government. The visual diversity and visual dynamics in the area are characterized by balance -regularity of the station building facades along with more varied visual elements than the city hall visual elements (figure 2). The theme of the dynamic composition between the station and city hall is relatively different from the hierarchy, which also reinforces this statement.

Conclusion
 The similarity of highest potency and hierarchy of aesthetic visual signs from one building to another can serve as a visual binder between buildings in an area.