Timor Leste - Notes from Presentation

• Friendly people so long as you don't talk about land or land ownership
• Hot arid country
• Many young and old people but very few middle aged because of all the conflict
• Concrete blocks are the fastest way to build in timor leste
• The site has great sea breezes & has its own micro climate which is much more pleasant than the hot and humid climate of Dili
• Diverse cultures live in the area
• Long timber poles used for construction of traditional dwellings
• Raised buildings
• Portuguese part of local history for 400 years
• Keen to build out of bamboo
• Lulic = spiritual person / house

*Images Pinched from Google

From the presentation I gathered that there was still a lot of tension within timor leste. As Ian said most of the fighting is either political or for land as so much of the official documents and land titles have been either destroyed or lost in the fighting.

The Portuguese were in timor leste for over 400 years so there is a lasting impression on the built environment.

13 different states all with their own cultures, customs and laws. This makes unification of timor leste a daunting prospect.

The traditional Timor Leste houses are very much in tune with the local environment and the landscape they occupy. Vernacular architecture has always been a great interest of mine because it is everything that modernism is not, it is unique, it is sensitive to the local environment, it an evolutionary process not a mass produced and finite product. How can you make a flat pack system that is fundamentally a mass produced product into something that responds to the genius loci of a place?

Sketch Development

During the initial stages of my flat pack concept I was very much focused on ideas of construction, material and community. My original idea was that a flat pack structure should be quick and easy to understand, assemble and disassemble. At the same time, however, the design of the flat pack system should also take into consideration the local environment, culture and materials and utilize them in the finished structure.

Since the structure of a building generally requires the highest level of technology and man hours to construct I focused on this element as my flat packing system. Initial ideas revolved around a lightweight steel arch made from triangular trussed elements which could be assembled quickly and easily by only one or two labourers.

The other major aspect of the system was the cladding which could be made from any readily available local material such as palm fronds or bamboo. Local labour and skills would be employed to ensure that there was a physical and tangible connection between the building and its occupants, which is particularly important in a community centre. I looked at traditional ways to join bamboo together and how that might be utilized in a cladding system, in particular a flexible system that could react to the climatic changes throughout the year. Another material that i focused on was the plastic bottle. In Timor Leste there is an abundance of plastic bottles due to the lack of fresh water, my aim was to incorporate these bottles into the foundation of the structures in order to create voids in the foundations and therefore save on materials.

Part of the inherent nature of flat pack architecture is that it has to be "packed" then transported. I looked into various methods of transportation and how might they be utilized for different cargo requirements and delivery times. For example a large heavy shipment of materials and tools would best be sent via shipping container, while a small lightweight structure or component that is needed quickly might be best sent via air freight.

EXPERIMENTAL MODELS

Flat Pack Rant

Flat pack is Ikea. Ikea is the idea that complex objects such as furniture can be simplified and standardized to a degree that will allow the average person to buy, transport, comprehend and assemble them by themselves, with limited tools and technical knowledge.

Can you do that to the same degree with buildings? If you can, how would it help or hinder an aid project like timor leste? On the one hand you have a product that can be quickly and easily assembled by a group of people. On the other hand the finished product is very generic and not suited to the physical, social or cultural context because everything is imported and it does not help the economy of the country as there is limited need for local materials and labour.

How can something be flat pack and still use local resources and skills and labour? Do you flat pack part of the building and leave the rest up to the locals? Are the locals competent? Coming from an advanced western culture we have little faith in local labour forces of developing nations. To an extent this is justified because they don't have access to the same materials and technology as we do, however, if construction methods are kept simple and clear then local workers are equally as qualified as international ones.

So what do you do? The structure of any building is usually the most labour & technologically intensive so it would make senes to fabricate this in Australia and flat pack it over to Timor leste. Regardless of what type of structural frame you make it needs to be assembled on site. Chances are there will be an abundance of manpower and very little mechanical power (ie cranes and earth moving equipment) so the structure should be able to be assembled by people only.

Workshop Tutorials - Timber

The timber and metal working tutorials run in the workshop were a great way to quickly learn and/or familiarise yourself with the properties and possibilities of each material. I found that after the tutorials i was much less inhibited when working with materials or asking for advice because I now had a very basic understanding of what was possible in the work shop. From this rudimentary understanding of how to join timber and how to fold, cut and join metal I was able to build a greater base of knowledge through experimentation.

After completing the tutorials I though, how valuable would this basic knowledge have been first or second year? We would have ceased to see the work shop as the realm of the industrial and interior designers and started to experiment ourselves.

Testing?

Ok now lets see if this sucker really works .... go go gadget blog!