Sources

Sources

Every dimension the house is generated from is below, with its class and its citation. This is the project’s honesty layer, and it is given a room of its own because a smooth 3D render implies a precision the sources do not have.

The dimensions

Bibliography

• heider-1970 · ethnography

  Heider, K. G., The Dugum Dani: A Papuan Culture in the Highlands of West New Guinea (Aldine, Chicago, 1970).

• depdikbud-papua · reference

  Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Arsitektur Tradisional Daerah Irian Jaya (Proyek Inventarisasi dan Dokumentasi Kebudayaan Daerah, Jakarta).

• waterson-1990 · ethnography

  Waterson, R., The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia (Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1990).

Which of these matters most

Nearly every dimension on this page is the author’s own. What the provenance bar does not say is whether that matters. Each row below is computed by rebuilding the house: one dimension is pushed 20%, and the house is measured to see how far it follows. Nothing is estimated — the figures are the difference between two runs of the generator.

1. 1radius10.75 mvolume of the room
2. 2wallHeight3.56 mvolume of the room
3. 3apexRise1.32 mvolume of the room
4. 4loftHeight0.23 mheight of the loft
5. 5doorHeight0.17 mheight of the door
6. 6layerDepth0.02 mthickness of the blanket
7. 7floorThickness0.01 mheight of the apex

If only one dimension could be surveyed, this is the one. This is sensitivity, not uncertainty: it shows what moves, not how likely the value is to be wrong. The 20% is itself the author’s choice.

Invariants

There is no measured drawing yet, so correctness rests on structural truth. These checks fail the build.

• pass
  Bilateral symmetry about Symmetric about the plane of the door, z = 0 — the only direction a round building has

  4312 points; largest mirror deviation 0.00 mm.

• pass
  Every tenon contained in its mortise

  31 pasak, takik and tumpu joints; every one engaged.

• pass
  No joint spans more than one stage

  Every joint engages two parts from the same stage or from consecutive ones.

• pass
  Stage ordering, and nothing below ground

  88 parts, every one bearing on something already standing or on the ground.

• pass
  Mesh integrity: indices, triangles, normals

  5728 triangles; indices in range, none degenerate, every normal unit length.

• pass
  The room is small, and the smallness is deliberate

  About 24.4 m³ — one floor of a mbaru niang alone is some 2.8 times larger, and a mbaru niang has five. Both are round and both are thatched to the ground; one is round to stack five stores inside a cone, the other because a circle is the cheapest wall to warm. Roundness turns out to say nothing on its own. Note what is tested: the form, and never the warmth — this project has no material properties and will not acquire any.

• pass
  Zero windows: the door is the only opening in the whole building

  31 wall posts and one layer of boards close the ring, with one 22° gap for the door and no other gap anywhere. Light comes through that door and through the smoke leaving the roof. Only this building in the project has no window at all — an opening is heat going.

• pass
  The door is too low to walk through upright

  0.85 m high and 0.60 m wide. A person has to stoop, and that is a chosen dimension rather than an oversight: a large opening is heat leaving. The only door in this project like it.

• pass
  Not raised: the floor lies on the earth

  A floor at 0.06 m. The other twelve buildings in this project stand on posts or masonry; this one sits on the earth, because the ground holds heat and raising the house would put cold air under the people sleeping above it. The zero is a decision rather than an absence.

• pass
  People sleep above the fire, because heat rises

  A loft at 1.21 m, directly above the hearth. The building’s thermal argument stated as a plane: not an explanation of why the house is warm, but a floor put where the heat is.

• pass
  The thickness of the blanket is the only rule here that is entirely about heat

  4 layers, 12 cm thick. It changes nothing about who lives here, what the household may claim, or how the building is used — only how long the fire’s heat lasts, and how much grass has to be cut and carried.

• pass
  Every rafter lies inside the dome at its own height

  No point of the frame reaches outside the dome at its own height. A straight rafter under a curved surface stands proud over the middle of its span — a fault this project has now found six times, arriving here as a curve rather than as a moved line.

• pass
  Thatch courses lap with no bare ring, from the eave to the point

  17 courses over 3.06 m of outline.

• pass
  Every part declares the dimensions it came from

  88 parts, every one tagged. By least-sourced input: 0 measured, 0 canon, 88 interpolated.

• skipped
  Checked against a measured drawing of a real house

  Skipped. No measured drawing has been wired in, so there is nothing to compare against. This check will not be made to pass by weakening it.

What a check is preventing

Ten green rows are not a reason to believe anything. So one check is run against a house built to break it, and what is printed below is that check’s own verdict rather than a description of it.

Widen the wall and nothing fails structurally: the ring still closes, the dome still covers it, the door still makes a person stoop, the loft is still above the fire. Every other check in this pack goes on passing. The only thing that stops being true is that the room is small — and a honai that is not small is a round thatched house with a fire in it, a description that fits a mbaru niang equally and therefore says nothing about either. Thirteen buildings, thirteen rules that cannot be carried out. This one fails the way the rumah kaki seribu does: nothing breaks, and the thing stops being what it was for.

The second house is never rendered. It is built during the build, failed, and thrown away.

This bar moves as real surveys are wired in. That movement is the project's progress metric.