Ar. Achmad Zakaria, IAI
Chief Executive Officer
Achmad Zakaria spent his early career doing what good architects do: solving problems of form, function, and structure at scale. Trained at Universitas Trisakti and registered with the Indonesian Architects Institute (IAI), he worked across typologies that define Jakarta's skyline, high-rise, mixed-use development, large-scale urban projects, to community building project in the heart of Kalimantan forest.
But alongside the work, a deeper question kept forming. Much of what the construction industry builds depends on extraction: materials taken from the earth, shaped into permanence, rarely returned. For Zaka, this was not simply an environmental concern. It was a question about the kind of relationship architecture maintains with the land it occupies.
The shift came through an old idea: that we owe a debt to nature, and that building must eventually give back what it takes.
He co-founded Tata Habitat in 2023 as a direct response. Not as a rejection of building, but as a rethinking of what building owes. The firm works across architecture and urban design with a regenerative approach, circular by intention, grounded in ecological awareness, and committed to the long view.
For Zaka, architecture is not the final image. It is the relationship between a building and everything it draws from, and everything it can, with enough care, return.