Nongsa, Indonesia
Stephen Cairns and his team at Urban-Rural Systems designed the expandable house (‘rumah tambah’ in Bahasa Indonesia, or rubah for short) to be one part of a sustainable response to the challenges of rapidly developing cities like Batam, in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago.
Once a collection of sleepy fishing villages of a few thousand inhabitants, Batam developed to be a cosmopolitan city of over one million people in less than 40 years.
The accelerated growth, fueled by a new free trade agreement and Batam’s proximity to Singapore, followed with internal migration influx, made Batam the fastest growing city in the world by 2015.
The expandable house project focuses on the challenge of housing by allowing the building to be flexibly configured around the fluctuating patterns of resource consumption and expenditure, or metabolism, of its residents.
Through the understanding of flexible, uneven, and precarious metabolism, patterns of household income generation and expenditure, water, energy, and food consumption, as well as waste production, informed the architecture of rubah as a dwelling and income-generating unit, that manages its own waste, water, and energy locally.
The expandable house is designed around the following six principles:
1. Seeding
The expandable house is designed as a seed package, containing technologies, material strategies, and planning guidelines that can develop depending on local social, cultural, and environmental conditions.
The common seed package intends to facilitate the diverse growth of tropical towns.
2. Domestic Density
The house encourages domestic densification in the vertical dimension.
This supports the benefits of co-location of dwellings and employment. It also helps to reduce the settlement footprint on arable land, and the demand for expensive infrastructures (roads, electrical and potable water networks).
3. Sandwich Section
The house provides a roof that can be hoisted, and floor and foundations (the bread) that can support up to three additional floors (the filling).
This system allows flexible financing whereby the developer or state housing agency provides the roof and foundations, while the residents provide infill as their circumstances require and budget allows.
It also helps accommodate crucial income-generating functions (shop, café, garage, cottage industry) along with dwelling.
4. Decentralized Systems
Rainwater harvesting and solar electricity generating technologies, sewage and septic tank systems, and passive cooling principles are integrated locally with the expandable house, avoiding expensive and often unreliable centralized, or ”big pipe,” approaches to infrastructure provision.
5. Productive Landscapes
The expandable house integrates food and building material production capacity locally. This is achieved by integrating bamboo plantations and kitchen gardens into the planning logic of the house and helps further diversify the resource base of the expandable house.
6. Public and Private Spaces
The expandable house, in combination with other elements of the tropical town, helps to secure clear relationships between public and private spaces.
Almost all of buildings around the site used batako or concrete brick as the main material for the wall.
The local people bought directly from handmade brick maker, not far from the site in Kampung Melayu.
The architects tried to observe how The Batakos were treated and combined in various ways by local people to their house buildings and environment.
This observation is a part of material and local wisdom study as a precedent for Rubah.
Project: The Expandable House (“Rumah Tambah”) Part 02
Architects: Urban-Rural Systems
Architect In Charge: Stephen Cairns
Design Team: Miya Irawati, Chen Ting, Azwan Aziz, Dio Guna Putra, and Sumiadi Rahman
Community Co designers: Alwi, Batam Municipal Planning Authority, Rahmat Kurniawan
Bamboo Composites: Alternative Construction Materials group, FCL Singapore, Dirk Hebel, Alireza Javadian, and Nazanin Saeidi
Mycelium: Mycotech, Bandung, Adi Reza Nugroho, Herlambang Ajidarma, and Miko Bahtera Nusantara
Engineers: Foundations Contractor, A Square Engineering, Teddy Tambuan, and Johannes Müller
Client: Kampung Batu Besar Community
Photographers: Carlina Teteris and Dio Guna Putra
