HAVE THE EARTHQUAKE RESILIENT INDONESIAN TRADITIONAL HOUSES BEEN STUDIED ENOUGH?

Abstrak

Indonesia possesses hundreds of traditional house typologies due to its vast cultural diversity of more than 500 ethnic groups. Many of these structures, especially in earthquake-prone regions, have demonstrated remarkable seismic resilience. Despite these ingenious structural adaptations, modern earthquake-resistant building technologies in Indonesia rarely draw inspiration from traditional architecture. This raises a fundamental question: Is there a lack of compatibility between traditional structural knowledge and contemporary building practices, or is the limited technological development primarily due to insufficient research on this topic? To address this issue, this study aims to identify the 'missing link' between traditional earthquake-resistant principles and modern buildings in Indonesia. This study conducts a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed publications to assess the current state of research on the seismic-resistant features of Indonesian traditional houses. Two complementary analyses are employed. The first is a bibliometric analysis of publications indexed in Scopus between 1981 and 2025, examining parameters such as publication trends, citation counts, and journal impact factors. The second is a narrative review focusing on structural aspects, including spatial layout, structural system (substructure and superstructure), and traditional timber joinery systems, to map prevailing discourses and identify knowledge gaps. The bibliometric analysis reveals a total of 38 Indonesian publications compared to 71 Japanese publications, indicating a significant disparity in both quantity and methodological depth. Most Indonesian studies rely on qualitative descriptive methods, while quantitative approaches such as experimental or numerical analysis remain scarce. The narrative review identifies two major gaps: (1) a material–construction gap, where traditional timber-based structures face challenges in modern application, and (2) a methodological gap, where research remains phenomenon-driven rather than systematically quantified. These findings suggest that the limited technological advancement is less a matter of incompatibility between traditional and modern structures, and more a reflection of insufficient, underdeveloped research methodologies in the Indonesian context.