Pak Mandor

Early fifties, thirty of them on site — from labourer to foreman. Hundreds of private houses and dozens of high-rises across Indonesia behind him. He explains why a crack runs the way it does, what a gap is for and what holds a floor slab up, in plain examples that need no blueprints. Calm, hype-free; he names the mistakes of past jobs outright — that is where you see best how a structure works.