Honai

The Baliem Valley, Highland Papua

A honai is the house of the Dani in the Baliem valley: one round room walled in close-set timber under a thick grass dome, with a fire at the centre of the floor and a sleeping loft above it. What makes it worth building here is the problem it answers. The valley is sixteen hundred metres above the sea and on the equator, and its nights are cold — so this is the only building in the project whose whole form is an answer to temperature. Small, low, round, windowless, and entered by stooping. The sun in this model is computed for the Baliem valley, 4.08° S and 138.95° E.

This building can never prove itself. The project has no material properties and will not acquire any, so the checks here test form that follows from a thermal argument and never the argument itself — precisely the limit the Nias pack states about its triangles. Beyond that: every metric figure is the author’s estimate; the blanket is expressed in layers because that is how it is added rather than because any source gives a thickness; and Highland Papua holds many peoples with different buildings — this is a Dani house in the Baliem valley and not a “Papuan house”, just as the rumah kaki seribu is an Arfak house and not one either.