ADOLF Heuken is a Jesuit priest from Germany. He is also one of the foremost experts on the history and architecture of Jakarta. Perhaps incongruity is part of Jakarta, a city without a true center, plagued by floods and traffic congestion. Heuken says that the finest piece of Javanese architecture in the city, the airport, was built not by the Javanese but by the French.

In 1963 when Heuken first arrived in­ Jakarta as a young Jesuit priest,