Rumah woloan

Woloan, Tomohon, North Sulawesi

The Minahasa timber house is a pegged, raised house, and around Woloan it is a commodity: built to be sold whole, dismantled, carried by road, and re-erected somewhere else. What makes it worth building here is that it is the only building in this project which must be able to *come apart*. The consequences are checkable: no member is longer than what can be carried, and the sequence that raises it has to run backwards. The sun in this model is computed for Tomohon, 1.33° N and 124.84° E — the second site north of the equator in this collection.

What is modelled here is the frame and how it goes together, not its face. A real Minahasa house carries carved bargeboards, turned veranda posts, double-leaf windows and a carefully made veranda rail; none of that is here, for the reason the other houses give. The knock-down trade itself is largely of the last century, while the pegged joinery and the raised floor are far older — this model states both at once without separating the old from the new. And not one figure here comes from a measurement, the haul length the whole building is measured against included.