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| Building
tsunami houses the Ban way
“I got three inquiries from Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. The reason I chose Philip Bay’s Sri Lanka project was that his object of the project was clear; it was for a smaller community and a minority group in a more difficult situation,” the 48-year-old award-winning architect said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times last week in Colombo. Bay is based in Greece as regional director for global real estate developers, Colliers, which is funding the project. Architect Ban, a brilliant, Paris-based Japanese national who has built homes for the rich, temporary shelters for the displaced and is currently building a museum in Paris, finds airports and inside planes the most comfortable environment to work in. “This is where I can relax; this is where I get my ideas. When I’m in a plane, I don’t belong to any country,” he laughs during one of his quick, low-profile visits to the island. Sri Lanka should be privileged – in a way – to have an architect of Ban’s calibre helping victims of the tsunami in the southern village of Kirinda. Ban, an expert on designing temporary houses for disaster sites across the world and creator of ‘paper’ buildings, is developing homes for a small Malay community of 67 families whose breadwinners are mostly fishermen or divers near the Kirinda harbour. “I love working with small groups, minority groups,” said Ban who jets between Paris, Tokyo and New York and in between comes to Sri Lanka on project visits. “I am always on the move and when on the ground hardly have time to relax.”Joined often on the Sri Lankan trips by Bay, the duo resides at a Geoffrey Bawa-designed home while in Colombo. During his visits, Ban goes straight to Kirinda from the airport, often accompanied by Pradip Jayewardene, trustee of a foundation set up to coordinate this project, and then returns to Colombo for just a day before flying to Paris or elsewhere. Such is his busy schedule. It was Jayewardene who picked the site after Bay expressed interest in a tsunami project. “I drove down the coast all the way to Kirinda. When I went to the Kirinda temple, I realized that this was the place mentioned as the area where Vihara Maha Devi landed after what was probably the last known tsunami in our history. What better place to rebuild? I sent the pictures to Philip with a description and he was very moved by what he saw,” said Jayewardene, a pioneer in the solar power revolution in Sri Lankan villages. Winner of many international medals, accolades and the subject of numerous international media interviews, Ban is not worried about protecting his designs aimed for the disadvantaged group saying, “I have no problem if this (Kirinda) design is copied. Normally architects don’t want it copied but I am happy if (locals) copy the designs.” In fact some other tsunami-unaffected villagers at Kirinda excited by Ban’s amazing architecture want their homes built the same way. In further support to the community, he even designed a new mosque for the one that was destroyed. Like all his work in helping disadvantaged communities through his own non-governmental organisation, the Voluntary Architects Network (VAN), his efforts in Sri Lanka are entirely voluntary. His work with global communities affected by natural disasters is immense. Last week, just before coming to Sri Lanka he told a UK-based Guardian newspaper journalist in an interview that he was discussing with a British Pakistani benefactor about re-housing some of those devastated by the recent Kashmir earthquake. "I'm like the Thunderbirds," he joked in that interview. "They always find me somehow.” The cost of the Kirinda project is Rs 100 million for which Colliers has raised enough for the first and second phases of the project. This year they hope to complete 35 houses excluding two model homes. Ban has worked in disaster areas since 1994 designing temporary shelters in Rwanda for UNHCR during the civil conflict and homes for earthquake victims in Kobe, Turkey and India. Apart from his generous contribution to housing disadvantaged communities, he is globally recognized for using paper in construction. “In 1986 I created paper houses much before the environment lobby got started,” he says. He has built homes, pavilions and churches, some of them permanent structures using essentially paper tubes that often come in fax rolls or cement. According to one newspaper report while working for the UN, he shipped paper log houses to Turkey and Rwanda. “The Japanese pavilion he created for the EXPO 2000 in Hannover, Germany, was a huge undulating grid of paper tubes enclosed, like a covered wagon, with a paper canopy,” another newspaper said. Ban
won the bid for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center and
was recommended by the panel of judges, but the Mayor of New York
City and the Governor of New York awarded the project to an architect
from New York. Ban and Bay arrived in end January 2005 and after discussing with the Kirinda community their needs, Ban began designing a house that would suit the people. “They wanted space to repair nets, boats, etc,” he recalled, adding that this is the first time he was developing a permanent structure for an affected community. His designs – works of art by any standards – create spaces for residents. The two-bedroom house has a high roof, with a large covered space interspersed between the sitting room/dining/bedrooms with the kitchen/toilet, open to the garden on either side. “Communities here like to live amongst nature and blend; that’s why you find the kitchen and the toilet outside the house. I have created that environment except that the space is covered.” Philip Weeraratne, the local architect in the project, said they were using earthbricks and an interlocking process developed in Oruville in south India. “This bricks are compressed earth with a little cement mortar for binding,” he said. Ban said they used treated rubberwood for the doors and windows for the first time in Sri Lanka and installed pre-fabricated furniture – shelves and cupboards in the 800 sq-foot house. The shelves and cupboards double up as walls, saving space and the need to obtain furniture. “In Sri Lanka, houses are built with multipurpose open space. It connects nature with space very much like what we have in Japan,” Ban said adding that tsunami victims have suffered a lot mentally and space is an important element in their recovery. “I
have been amazed by the culture, the climate and Geofrey Bawa’s
work,” Ban said, when asked whether this experience has enriched
his work and life. |
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