Bale

Ubud, Gianyar, Bali

A bale is one building in a Balinese house compound: a low masonry platform, a number of posts, and a hipped thatched roof, open on its sides. What makes it worth building here is not its form — it is the simplest object in this project — but the way it is measured. Under Asta Kosala Kosali every principal length is a whole number of a measure of its owner’s body, plus a pengurip so that it is never exact. The parts named on this screen — bale, bataran, saka, sendi, sunduk, jurai, alang-alang, murda — are Balinese and Indonesian words; where the author is not confident of the Balinese term, the part is named in Indonesian. The sun in this model is computed for Ubud, 8.51° S and 115.26° E.

Two shortfalls worth stating outright. First: a Balinese house is a walled compound of several bale around a natah, with a shrine in the kaja-kangin corner and a gate you have to turn to get past. This models one bale, not the compound — so the most distinctive thing about Balinese domestic building is precisely what is absent here. Second: there is no carving at all. Carving is not applied decoration on a Balinese building, so its absence is a real omission; but inventing plausible motifs from a vocabulary belonging to particular carvers would be worse than showing none. Beyond that, the ratios between one body measure and the next — how many hasta in a depa — are the author’s anthropometry, not figures from the Balinese literature.