Rumah kaki seribu

The Arfak Mountains, West Papua

A rumah kaki seribu is the house of the Arfak people in the mountains of West Papua: a raised, bark-walled building standing on hundreds of small poles. Those poles are tied to nothing, buried in nothing, and each leans its own way — so when the ground moves, the whole substructure moves with it. What makes it worth building here is that it answers the same problem as the Nias omo in the opposite way: one triangulates every bay so it cannot sway, the other braces nothing so that it may. The sun in this model is computed for the Arfak Mountains, 1.10° S and 133.90° E.

This is the thinnest-sourced pack in the project, and that belongs at the front. The Nias omo, the Sumbanese uma and the Bugis saoraja each have an ethnographic literature to lean on; this house has, in practice, only the Depdikbud survey volume the author could reach. So its canon list is short and states only what that source states plainly: that the legs are very many and small, that they are not buried, that a clan house divides in two. Every figure — without exception — is the author’s estimate, including the number of legs, which is the single best-known thing about this building. Each leg’s lean is computed from its own position so the model stays deterministic; on a real house that lean is the residue of handwork rather than a formula. West Papua holds many peoples with different buildings; this is an Arfak house and not a “Papuan house”.