Rumah Tambah
1 A roof-lifting demonstration for the first storey of the pilot rumah tambah (expandable house, in Bahasa Indonesia). The roof can be manually elevated with quick-release fasteners and a jack system. Another two floors can be added upon fixed foundations. Income-generating functions (such as a shop, café or workshop) can be integrated as the house expands.
4 The project taps on locally available materials including fibreglass, which is central to Batam’s shipbuilding industry. Fibreglass handling and crafting capabilities are therefore readily available. By doubling as a skylight, the pilot’s fibreglass gutter will be crucial in admitting light if multiple homes are terraced.
2 This housing model allows flexible financing. The developer or state housing agency provides the roof and foundations, and residents construct extra space as required and as their budget allows.
The house can develop in different ways depending on local social, cultural and environmental conditions.
5 The kitchen has been designed as a mobile unit to allow the flexibility of transforming the home into a food stall for income generation. Water is supplied from a storage tank for harvested rainwater. Rooftop solar cells provide a proportion of the energy requirements of the home.
3 Cairns and his team were unable to trace the source of the local timber to verify that they are grown in a sustainable manner, so they selected trees one by one, logged and dried them for use in the pilot. Cairns describes the use of timber in the project as ‘propositional’ due to the difficulty of verifying sustainable sources in Batam.
6 A bamboo nursery and vertical kitchen garden make Tropical Town a productive landscape. Integrating food and building material production capacity locally helps to further diversify the resource base of the residents. The FCL’s Alternative Construction Materials group has developed a bamboo composite material that will be applied on upper storeys of the pilot.