Ume kbubu

The Atoni · Soe and Kapan, South Central Timor

An ume kbubu is a round house in the hills of South Central Timor: a dome of thatch down to the ground, one door a person has to stoop through, no window at all, a fire on the floor, and a loft above it where the seed maize hangs. The smoke is the point — it dries the seed, drives out the weevils, and keeps it fit to plant until the next rains. So this is the only building in the collection whose roof has a second job: the other twenty-seven only have to keep water out, and this one also has to keep smoke in. Two more things make it worth building here: the depth of the loft is set by how many harvests a household keeps — the only dimension in this project taken from a length of time — and in the same yard stands the lopo, a round open building with no walls at all, its exact opposite. The sun in this model is computed for Soe, 9.86° S and 124.28° E: the southernmost site in the collection.

The most important thing about this building is its fire, and a fire cannot be modelled here: what is drawn is the ring of stones. The smoke band the whole pack’s checks rest on is the author’s and not a measurement — no measured drawing could settle it, because what decides it is not a dimension of the building but what happens to the seed after a season. Beyond that: the lopo is built as its bare form, without the stepped store and the rat guard it usually carries; real ume kbubu differ from district to district and what is built here is the common form; the maize itself is stated as one depth rather than cob by cob; and not one figure here comes from a measurement, though thousands of these stand and are still being built.