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Traditional building materials play an important role in the construction of sustainable built environment. Clay bricks as traditional materials have been made with traditional techniques handed down across generation in many countries. The traditional process has become an integral part of the social and cultural life of the local society which forms the ecological relations between architecture and its context. The presence of the traditional process of brick making is currently challenged by the more modern industrial brick production. Some concerns have been raised regarding various environmental and health hazards from the brick making process. On the other hand, as a production process that has been handed down across generation, the brick making process is embedded with various ecological values that are attached to the environmental and cultural context where the production is performed and where the material resources are originated. This paper attempts to review ecological aspects that are involved in the traditional brick making production. In particular, this paper presents a preliminary analysis to identify the ecological aspects in brick making process in Pedurungan Kidul, Central Java, Indonesia. The findings suggest the need to consider the traditional brick making process as a comprehensive ecological system and therefore several research agendas are proposed for further investigation.

Moving towards a world with higher environmental awareness, the concept of ‘ecology’ has become particularly relevant for current architectural discourses. Studies about ecology sometimes are directly translated to sustainability because of its focus on efficiency of material and energy process. This paper argues that understanding ecology requires an ability to reveal the intro/interrelationship within the complex yet flexible ecological system. Demonstrating how ‘ecology’ is incorporated in the first year of architectural education, this paper aims to explore how ecology could be the basis of in developing an analytical tool towards the grounded understanding particular issue of the ecological system and its role as input in creative processing architectural education. The result of this study suggests how ecology has the potential as an analytical tool for reading the interrelated system.

Building material has been one of the aspects in architecture that directly relate with the overall building performance. Nowadays, porous traditional building material, such as bricks, stones, concrete, is still preferred due to its performance of porosity that supports passive cooling and reduces the building’s energy consumption. However, the porosity of building material could also cause many problems, such as damp, fungal and moss growth, that could cause deterioration of the building leading to the practice of coating. This paper questions how the act of coating often seen as a way of keeping the building in perfect condition with disregard to the building material’s porosity. It investigates how the different mechanism of porosity in building material in turns triggers a different act of coating. Furthermore, this paper argues that the act of coating should consider the performance of porosity to achieve a better building performance, not just regarding the energy efficiency but also the ecological sensibility towards the environment.