Studio Stuff

So our project is going really well and we still need to work out some things but I think we have a solid concept and are working towards making it work completely. Our site is an Iban village in Borneo and it faces the river which we took to get there. There are also two existing long houses on the site. We are supposed to be building a visitors center because there are a lot of people coming to visit but they have no designated space for them. This is a huge source of income for the Iban so this addition would hopefully help them. On the other hand a large amount of us don't think anything should be built on the site because it might further interfere with their culture and way of life. From this our group has taken a few stances. One being that we are not recreating a long house. We want the visitors to know the difference between our built structure and the original Iban structures. Secondly, we want to minimize the built environment that we do put on the site so that the visitor is drawn towards the rest of the village and will only be coming back to our site to sleep. Thirdly, we are not giving the visitor a 5 star accommodation space because we feel that if you drive 5 hrs and boat 1 hr to get there you want to experience the village and the culture... not a large visitors center. I will be attaching some of our basic diagrams along with initial sketchups of the site. Basically our concept stems from their tradition of weaving. By laying down a grid based on site forces we have set up a modular system so that the Iban can continually change the site and construct these modules when they have the time. The grid is based off their system of measurement called a Depa. One depa = 6 feet = about 2 m. We set up a 2 depa system although the grid can deviate for landscape, entry, etc. Hopefully the pictures help... remember we have only been working for 2 weeks!