Start of the project

Before the actual start
Gerard van Vloten of D.A.D. Bali (Design and Development), designer/architect on Bali had an idea. He wanted to build a sustainable house in a non traditional way. He wanted a symbiosis between culture and nature, between technology and ecology, between man and his environment. Therefore he was looking for a way to use bamboo as a composites material. Therefore he found a lot of information on the internet, but he also found out that Delft University of Technology was working with natural fiber composites as well. After some time of exchanging information by email, one decided that is was time to start working on it for real. Therefore two students (Chris Feddes and Ramona Steenbreker) of the faculty of Aerospace Engineering traveled to Bali on the 6th of January. Having this multi-disciplinary team, we should be able to combine a good looking design (architect) with a lightweight structure made of natural materials (aerospace engineers).

Start of the project
During the first week, it became clear that the land (with a extremely nice view: see picture) was already available and ready to be used to build on. So the designing of the house could be started immediately. To start with, some already existing designs were looked at. In the pictures below one can see the furniture house of Shigeru Ban (Japanese) and a furniture house designed by Rob Sample (Australian).

Both houses should be built with short fibers. This ‘material’ requires a specific technique and provides a specific look. But working with continuous fibers will be a bigger challenge and the looks will be even more astonishing. In order to be able to use continuous fibers a new design had to be developed. The first idea was to make a cubic house with a cubic sleeping area inside. This is not so new, therefore one tried to changed that concept completely, also to make it a better design for the tropical area it is going to be built in. So we kept changing the design step by step, from cube to container shaped etc. One night we were talking about the way aircraft wings can be built and the next day we changed the design dramatically into a completely different shape. The roof now looked like a wing profile.

This last picture shows the final design (Marquette and 3D impression):