Rumah betang
Dayak · Central Kalimantan
Plate T.07
Dayak
Palangka Raya · 1.7° S
Computed from the rules
The elevation, drawn from the model’s parts at its default rules.
- Households
- Length
- Width
- Length : width
- Partitions
- Floor height
A rumah betang is a longhouse: one building on tall ironwood posts, with a row of family rooms behind and a single common gallery running along its front. What makes it worth building here is not its shape but its length — or rather the absence of one. It grows by adding bilik one at a time, one for each household, so its length is a census and not a proportion. It is the only building in this project with no characteristic size. The sun in this model is computed for Central Kalimantan, 1.68° S and 113.38° E.
The shortfall most worth stating is not about dimensions. “Dayak” is a name for many peoples across Borneo speaking many languages, and their longhouses are not one building: Iban, Kenyah, Ngaju and Ot Danum houses differ in plan, in material and in practice. The terms on this screen lean Ngaju and Ot Danum. A single rule pack quietly averaging a dozen traditions into one “Dayak house” would be doing exactly what this project exists to refuse — so this pack states its lean and does not pretend to stand for the whole. Beyond that: the cap of twenty households on the control is a limit of the model and not of the building; there is no carving at all; and not one figure here comes from a measurement.
Orientation
A betang stands parallel to the river with its gallery facing the water — the river is the road, and the front of the house faces the road. Its long axis is named from the river too: upstream and downstream, and a household’s standing is read from where it sits between them. So the orientation rule here does two things at once that none of the other six do: it faces the building, and it orders what is inside it. This model puts the gallery on −X and upstream on +Z. There is still no control that turns the building.
Provenance
- Measured0
- Canon7
- Interpolated27
This bar moves as real surveys are wired in. That movement is the project's progress metric.