MOKHA ART FOR ARCHITECTURE

NEPALI WOMEN HELP REVIVE A DISAPPEARING ARCHITECTURAL ART FORM
By: Mokha master artists Shanti Chaudhari and Khedni Chaudhari, Rotary Club of Itahari Past-President Ramesh Tamraker and Canadian architect Stanley Britton
THE ART
Tharu is the indigenous culture of the Terai plains east of the Koshi River between the Himalaya foothills and Nepal’s southeast border with India. Many families [...]

Abari in Germany

Welcome back!
Its been months since we have updated you. Not that we have abandoned our pursuit to spread the glory of mud and bamboo, its just that we have too busy expanding our resources. In our latest repertoire of natural materials we have added 17th century wood construction tecnique from Germany! Our Abarian Sulava Piya [...]

Kitchen Interior

Here is the interior of the kitchen.  Its 8 meters high, 10 meters wide and 15 meters long. Who says you can not make large structure out of bamboo? You can do anything that cement and concrete can and that too in an ecological, economical and a beautiful way.

Finished Kitchen

After long and arduous battle our kitchen is finished. The tiles looks awesome. They are made on site! They have no embodied energy what so ever- meaning they are not burnt.
During this construction, we have followed a very conventional philosophy i.e. a sound hat and a sound boot is all what you need for protection. [...]

Bamboo Kitchen

 

Bamboo Kitchen

Happy New Year to everyone.
May this be the year of bamboo and mud. Our cantina is in its final stage. The trusses are complete. The structure is about 120 sq. meters in area. It uses locally harvested, locally treated bamboo which are constructed using local labor. Its a nice execution of our motto “think global, [...]

Chuli Building

The more we work with bamboo, more confident we become on the strength and beauty of this  vegetal steel. It  makes one wonder, why isn’t this material used more in the modern construction, as there is nothing it cant do that steel would. Yet, its cheaper, available, beautiful and yet many times more ecological. Here [...]

Truss Fabrication

One of the main reasons for disuse of bamboo in modern construction is due to a lack of skilled human resources. For better or worse bamboo can not be standardized. Bamboo comes in different shapes and sizes which makes it a very difficult material to work with. Bamboos are very hard to produce [...]

Making the bamboo pavilion

Bamboo Pavilion

Bamboo at work. In the the village of Harsar, where bamboo has been used for ages, this demonstration does indeed come as a revelation. The word “truss” is entering the local vocabularly, and indeed the local sceptics of bamboo are thinking twice. The local carpenters are lining up to learn the new techniques.

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