BAMBOO BABE

I met Tonia in Maumere. She was the tall one with the wild tangle of hair and the willow body. She was sitting eagerly gripping a karaoke mike at the party; leaning forward into the song as if wind was blowing from the TV.

Maumere in Flores is not the place one would expect knockout architecture. But there it was : Tonia's characteristic abode with its long, sailed roof. It is funky, intimate and playful at once, and the locals love it!.

Dressed all in white, Tonia leaned out to greet me. Mariatonia Pineda, the Venezuelan architect, who while living in Flores for the past two years, has been working to promote the use of bamboo as a building product, is a warm and lively woman. She drinks moke-Flores own variety of arak (palm wine) and has her male workers in awe of and, I suspect, a little in love with her.

"I had to do a practical for my final test in Venezuela," she told to me. "I was madly interested in mud bricks then - the color, the life, the practically. We had to build a brick factory out of sun dried bricks, but we hadn't thought of how we were going to do the roof. In the car back to Caracas I saw this wonderful grove of bamboo. And that was it. I often say that I didn't choose bamboo. It chose me. Since that time I keep running into bamboo."
"So how did you end up in Flores?" I asked, raising a cup of the heavy local coffee to my lips.

"I was off to Africa where I was going to work with mud bricks.." she explained. "But instead, the VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas - the London based volunteer placement agency, ed.) contacted me and said there was this job in Indonesia. So I ended up here working with my boss Heny Doing. He is an agricultural economist, who spent time in the Philippines where they use many traditional materials in interesting ways. He brought those ideas back. He is an amazing guy", Tonia enthused. "When it all got too much the guys out back didn't like a woman telling them what to do. Heny just told them to get on with it, and since then it's been great.

"I came to Flores after another volunteer who was working with the Catholic Bamboo Foundation, which is linked to the Bali Environmental Bamboo Foundation. When I arrived, I built the church at Sea World ( a local diving resort, ed.). We did some workshops together on treating bamboo, which were great, and got things moving. But things weren't too economically stable here, so when Henry and I managed to get some funding from Germany to built prototypes for low-cost kit houses, we split off and became a separate group. We have three years to make the Foundation self-sufficient. The pressure is really on".

Tonia lives and works in her house. Her drawing board is a no-nonsense reminder of her art, along with the remnants of models.

"I like to play and make models. I so mot like drawing. With a model you can see if it might really work. We use some interesting triangulations and forms. Bamboo is such a flexible material you can try many things. And if it doesn't work, or it falls over, it's no big deal. It's only Rp. 5,000 a piece - It's not like of a brick house falls over!"

I sat munching into some succulent grilled cheese on toast and looked above me at the curved exposed corrugated roof, the tied beams and the mezzanine sleeping platform. Tonia followed my eyes. "This is not exactly and Indonesian house, no? but we wanted to shock, to make people stop and look. It's worked. All the time I have local people coming in to see, to visit. They really like it...But I am not a purist...I like to use bamboo with other things. For instance, bamboo is not suitable for wet placed or places where there is fire. So in the kitchen and bathrooms I use cement and other materials."

next page

[top]
[welcome page]

copyright © 1999 Bali Echo. All rights Reserved
site design by : Access Bali Online