Rumoh Aceh

The Acehnese · Aceh

The rumoh Aceh is a tall raised timber house, long and jointed without nails, with three parts across its width. What makes it worth building here is where its rule comes from: the ridge lies east–west because prayer is toward the west, and that was the first rule in this collection to arrive from outside the archipelago — the Madurese tanean lanjang later turned out to place its langgar for the same reason, so what is particular here is that the doctrine turns a whole house plan. And the ladder must have an odd number of treads — the only parity rule in the project, and one that fails by one. The sun in this model is computed for Banda Aceh, 5.55° N and 95.32° E: the northernmost and westernmost site in the collection.

Carving is the part of a real rumoh Aceh given the most attention — on the bargeboards, the tulak angen at the ends of the ridge, the window lattices — and there is none of it here, for the reason the other houses give. A real house has far more posts than this one and sets them out on counts this model does not carry. The qibla from Aceh is in fact about 293° rather than due west; what this model states is the east–west axis the sources give, not a computed bearing. And not one figure here comes from a measurement.