Braga

Braga Street (official name in Indonesian: Jalan Braga) is a small street in the center of Bandung, Indonesia, which was famous in 1920s as a promade street. Chic cafes, boutiques and restaurants with European ambiance along the street had made the city to attain the Paris of Java nickname. The street starts from a T-junction with the Asia-Afrika Street (or De Groote Postweg during the colonial times) to the north until the city council (balaikota), which was formerly a coffee warehouse.

The first name of the street was Karreweg. The city residents dubbed it Pedatiweg, from the Indonesian language of horse-drawn carriages (pedati), because it was a narrow street (about 10 m or 30 feet wide) that only carriages could pass through. The street was built only to connect the major Great Post Road with a coffee warehouse, owned by a Dutch coffee plantation owner Andries de Wilde (the warehouse is now the seat of the city administration or balaikota). In 1856, when Bandung was the capital of Priangan Regency, some colonial houses were built along the dirt road of Braga Street with their houses thatched with reeds, alang-alang grass or other straw materials.

In the 1900s, along with the Dutch East Indies government plan to move the capital from Batavia to Bandung, the government included Braga Street into part of town planning. In 1906, the city council began replacing stone by asphalt and applying a new rule of designing new buildings at the street. Art Deco buildings began to decorate the street and about 50% of which are still present with their original architecture.Starting from the south entrance, the Gedung Merdeka (Independence Building) stands at the corner, known as the venue of the 1955 Asian–African Conference. Built in 1895 as a clubhouse for the wealthy, the building was first named as the Concordia Society. The building was renovated twice in 1920 and 1928, the last of which was designed by two Dutch architects, Van Galen Last and C. P. Wolff Schoemaker. It is now used as a museum of the conference.

At the southeast corner of the cross-section between the Naripan Street, an eight-stories building is noticeable for its distinctive oceanwave style. Designed by Dutch architect A.F. Aalbers in 1936, the radical modern architecture building was used for the DENIS (De Eerste Nederlandsch-Indische Spaarkas or the First Dutch-Indies Savings) bank. Aalbers applied the Amsterdam School architectural style with its strong expressionism dialect, shown by the rounded curves along the horizontal side and one vertical façade in the middle, but he put also the modernist architecture for the interior design.