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Architects: Brahmawanta Architecteam, cavatinastudio
- Area: 400 m²
- Year: 2022
Text description provided by the architects. The KAKR Bamboo Hall is a multifunction building that adds to the children's and teenagers’ Sunday School in the historical Buluh Awar village. This bamboo building is part of the grand design for revitalizing the ground zero of the GBKP local church. The village was part of a historical salt and trade route carried out by Perlanja Sira, salt bearers walking on foot during the pre-Dutch Colonialism era. Fast forward to the modern era, the village is becoming less developed. No more trade glory. The bamboo is scarcely used in Buluh Awar and even burnt to provide vast land for productive crops such as paddy, brown sugar, and durians.
Buluh is a Karonese term for bamboo in Indonesian or bamboo in English. At the same time, Awar derives from Awaren in Karonese, which means hole on its nodes and allows water to flow naturally for households' usage. Bamboo grows naturally in vast quantities and is of good quality surrounding this village. However, due to the frequent burning of bamboo trees and deforestation, a football-sized landslide disaster occurred in late 2021, cutting off the main transportation to the village.
It is urgent to propose the bamboo hall as a trigger to transform the image of local people as bamboo burners into bamboo preservers. This project is a collaboration between the village leaders and design professionals, bringing the local communities into the building of a church and restoring the once-forgotten bamboo supply-construction chain. In the process, the bamboo hall acts as a training tool for community empowerment and enhances craftsmanship skills and income.
The multifunction bamboo hall was initially designed and completed from 2019 to 2022 as the trigger to educate people about its benefits for environmental issues. Initially, they strongly refused and doubted our idea to use bamboo as the primary material due to its vulnerability to termites and humidity. However, through the socialization of bamboo treatment and site visits to bamboo buildings on Bali Island, they eventually accepted the design to be built. Afterward, bamboo cultivation is an obligatory phase to ensure sustainability work.
