More than a sustainable prototype. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz
03/06/2022.
[Batam] Indonesia
metalocus, JAVIER ARIAS
metalocus, JAVIER ARIAS
Expandable House designed by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns with Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz, Dioguna Putra and Sumiadi Rahman, is a new sustainable dwelling prototype designed to be flexibly configured around its residents’ (often) precarious resources over time, in Batam, a small island in the Riau Archipelago of Indonesia, in the South China Sea.
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 building is one of twenty shortlisted projects for the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
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 building is one of twenty shortlisted projects for the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Dio Guna Putra
Site plan. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Site plan. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Section. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Section. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
Axonometry. Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz.
The accelerated growth, fueled by a new free trade agreement and Batam’s proximity to Singapore, followed by an internal migration influx, made Batam the fastest growing city in the world by 2015.
In this context, Stephen Cairns and his team at Urban-Rural Systems designed the expandable house, a new sustainable dwelling type designed to have a flexible configuration for its residents, often precarious resources over time.
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 building has a steel-reinforced concrete frame, an aerated concrete block cladding on the ground and composite bamboo cladding or retractable bamboo screens above.
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris.
In this context, Stephen Cairns and his team at Urban-Rural Systems designed the expandable house, a new sustainable dwelling type designed to have a flexible configuration for its residents, often precarious resources over time.
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 building has a steel-reinforced concrete frame, an aerated concrete block cladding on the ground and composite bamboo cladding or retractable bamboo screens above.
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris
Expandable House by ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns and Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz. Photograph by Carlina Teteris.
Project description by Urban-Rural Systems
The expandable house (rumah tambah in Bahasa Indonesia, or rubah for short) project by Future Cities Laboratory's Urban-Rural Systems team, has been recognised as the "Best Living Space" in the Indo-Pacific region in the Inde.Award 2020call_made. Aptly, the Expandable House, led by Prof Stephen Cairns, is designed as a new dwelling type that can be adapted to different locations in rapidly urbanising regions, such as Batam in Indonesia, where the project is based. In this sense, it is intended as a ‘seed’ capable of generating many different kinds of dwelling rather than being a singular, one-off design.
It has been designed specifically for regions around the fringes of cities and towns in Asia, where the impact of rapid urbanisation is most directly felt. In these regions, the land is still relatively cheap, new industries and associated jobs are springing up, rural migrants often first arrive in the city, and infrastructure (for transit, water, energy and waste) is often inadequate to support them.
The expandable house tries to respond to this dynamic situation by allowing the dwelling to be flexibly configured around the fluctuating patterns of resource consumption and expenditure, or metabolism, of its residents. Practically this means understanding the patterns of household income generation and expenditure, water, energy and food consumption, as well as waste production. As this metabolism is usually uneven and often precarious, it is important that the architecture can be a dwelling and income generating unit, that manages its own waste, water and energy locally.
The expandable house is designed around the following five principles:
(1) Sandwich section. The house provides a roof that can be hoisted, and a 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.
(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) 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.
(4) 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.
(5) Seed Package. The expandable house is designed as a seed package, containing technologies, material strategies and planning guidelines that can develop in different ways depending on local social, cultural and environmental conditions. We intend those diverse tropical towns will grow from the common seed package.
The expandable house project involves three phases:
- Phase 1 involved design and experimentation at the FCL in Singapore.
- Phase 2 began in 2018 with the construction of a demonstration project in the village of Kampung Batu Besar in Batam, Indonesia. The project began with the first floor (36m2) and has now expanded to its planned limit of three floors (108m2).
- Phase 3 of the project involves conducting post-occupancy studies on the demonstration construction, with the resident community in Batu Besar. The team will also pilot the neighbourhood and township elements of the project at 1:1, such as alleyways, courtyards, public spaces, district cooling, water retention and peer-to-peer energy sharing systems. The team is working with developers in Indonesia to secure a suitable site for a larger-scaled and commercial implementation of Phase 3, which we call Tropical Town.
More information
Architects
Urban Rural Systems. ETH Zurich / Stephen Cairns with Miya Irawati, Azwan Aziz, Dioguna Putra and Sumiadi Rahman.
Design team
Miya Irawati, Chen Ting, Azwan Aziz, Dio Guna Putra, and Sumiadi Rahman
Community Co designers: Alwi, Batam Municipal Planning Authority, Rahmat Kurniawan.
Collaborators
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.
Engineers.- Foundations Contractor, A Square Engineering, Teddy Tambuan, and Johannes Müller.
Bamboo Composites.- Alternative Construction Materials group, FCL Singapore, Dirk Hebel, Alireza Javadian, and Nazanin Saeidi.
Engineers.- Foundations Contractor, A Square Engineering, Teddy Tambuan, and Johannes Müller.
Client
Batam Municipal Planning Authority and community leaders of Kampung Batu Besar neighbourhood.
Area
108 m².
Dates
Completed.- 2019.
Location
Batam Riau Islands, Indonesia.
Materials
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.
Photography
Carlina Teteris, Dio Guna Putra.
Stephen Cairns
Stephen Cairns completed an undergraduate degree in anthropology and classical studies at the University of Otago. He trained in architecture at the University of Auckland, and practiced as an architect in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific, designing the award-winning Headquarters for the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Noumea. He subsequently undertook doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne, where he wrote a thesis on the colonial architecture in Java, with an emphasis on aesthetics and the politics of representation.
Upon completion of his PhD, he was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Melbourne. He took up a Senior Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and was appointed Professor of Architecture and Urbanism there in 2009. He served as Head of Department of Architecture, and Director of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He is currently based in Singapore where he is Programme Director of the Future Cities Laboratory.
Research
Stephen Cairns’ research is focused on architecture, design and urban planning, and takes theoretical and practical forms. His books include Drifting: Migrancy and Architecture (edited) (Routledge 2004), and The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory (Sage 2012, edited with Greig Crysler and Hilde Heynen). His co-authored book (with Jane M Jacobs) Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (MIT Press) was published in 2014.
His current work is focused on the complex patterns of settlement emerging in the predominantly rice-growing hinterlands of many large cities in Southeast Asia, India and China. His practice-oriented research takes the form of the Tropical Town project, a planned/unplanned low-energy, high-density settlement for such urbanising hinterlands.
This work builds on a number of research projects funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Environmental and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). These include Cultures of Legibility: Emergent Urban Landscapes in Southeast Asia (2007-2010) which investigated so-called ‘desa-kota’ landscapes on the fringes of the city of Jakarta; Difference and Repetition: An Investigation of the Residential High-Rise as a Global Form (2004-2007); and Orienting the Future: Design Strategies for Non-Place (2005-2006).
Material from these projects was published in journals such as Urban Studies, Journal of Architecture, SLUM Lab and Geographical Research, and was exhibited at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) in 2010 and 2012, and at the AEDES Gallery, Berlin in 2013.
Upon completion of his PhD, he was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Melbourne. He took up a Senior Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh and was appointed Professor of Architecture and Urbanism there in 2009. He served as Head of Department of Architecture, and Director of the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He is currently based in Singapore where he is Programme Director of the Future Cities Laboratory.
Research
Stephen Cairns’ research is focused on architecture, design and urban planning, and takes theoretical and practical forms. His books include Drifting: Migrancy and Architecture (edited) (Routledge 2004), and The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory (Sage 2012, edited with Greig Crysler and Hilde Heynen). His co-authored book (with Jane M Jacobs) Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (MIT Press) was published in 2014.
His current work is focused on the complex patterns of settlement emerging in the predominantly rice-growing hinterlands of many large cities in Southeast Asia, India and China. His practice-oriented research takes the form of the Tropical Town project, a planned/unplanned low-energy, high-density settlement for such urbanising hinterlands.
This work builds on a number of research projects funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and the Environmental and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). These include Cultures of Legibility: Emergent Urban Landscapes in Southeast Asia (2007-2010) which investigated so-called ‘desa-kota’ landscapes on the fringes of the city of Jakarta; Difference and Repetition: An Investigation of the Residential High-Rise as a Global Form (2004-2007); and Orienting the Future: Design Strategies for Non-Place (2005-2006).
Material from these projects was published in journals such as Urban Studies, Journal of Architecture, SLUM Lab and Geographical Research, and was exhibited at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) in 2010 and 2012, and at the AEDES Gallery, Berlin in 2013.
