Biophilia meets Bali at Jia Curated 2026's architectural spotlight show

There is a reason serious design fairs tend to avoid the word ‘community’ – it usually signals the absence of one. Jia Curated, the Bali-based annual gathering founded in 2022 by Budiman Ong, Rudi Winata and Yang Yang Hartono, is an exception. Built around the Indonesian principle of gotong royong – communal effort, the kind that once brought villages together at harvest – it has quietly become one of the region's most anticipated creative appointments. The 2026 edition relocates to Pengembak Beach in Sanur, where 15,000 square metres of coastline threaded with mangroves and pine trees frames this year's theme, Nature Weave.

Explore Jia Curated's 'Architecture at Scale' show

Among its returning programmes, 'Architecture in Scale' stands out. A maquette showcase curated by Charmaine Chan, Design Editor, Culture at the South China Morning Post, the exhibition gathers 25 models from practices across Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan – including Kengo Kuma + Associates, andramatin, Elora Hardy's IBUKU Studio and Cheng Tsung Feng – each selected on a single curatorial diktat: that biophilia is load-bearing, not decorative.

Chan’s personal pick for the show's defining work is revealing. Elok House, completed in Singapore in 2007 by Chang Architects, crams a three-dimensional landscape into a narrow terrace plot just off Orchard Road, with light wells running down both flanks, a retaining wall that doubles as a waterfall and trees growing through apertures in the floor.

‘A squirrel once wandered in carrying a mango seed, which eventually took root in a wall and grew a sapling,’ Chan says. A model may struggle to capture that particular detail, but its spatial logic, she argues, shows you exactly how that could happen.

‘You can't really see a building when you're standing inside or beside it,’ she says. ‘A model cannot lie in the same way. If a building needs to breathe through a certain void, or a roof needs to shed water towards a specific point, the model must show how.’ At a scale small enough to see the whole system at once, a building's relationship with its site becomes instantly, completely readable.

For a fair committed to positioning Indonesian and regional design beyond the anonymity of craftsmanship into something more fully its own, Architecture in Scale makes its argument without rhetoric, using twenty-five maquettes, each a quiet proof of concept.

'Jia CURATED 2026' runs 13–17 August at Pengembak Beach, Sanur, Bali

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