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.