Photo: K. Tamang

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 are farmers and labourers. Houses are often built of bamboo-lattice with mud-plaster walls. Mokha art is their architectural heritage.

Mokha art’s sculpted bas-relief designs aim to attract visitors and welcome guests. During Tihar, the annual Festival of Lights, Lakshmi, the Hindu Goddess of Wealth, is said to enter these houses and bless the inhabitants. In anticipation the art is revitalised annually.

The wall plasters are layered mixes of mud, cow dung and straw. Read more

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 recently got back from Germany after a three month long restoration of a 17th century museum in Schliersee, Germay led by legendary skier/restorer Markus Wasmeir and his carpenters team. She was funded by Dekeyser and Friends Foundation.

The restoration primarily used the techniques and tools from the 17th century like wooden nails, dove tail joints, hanging floors, moss mortar, wooden shingels held with stones. Here are some of the pictures of the restoration. Please note the foundation techniques, where they used huge boulders that were just placed on the ground.

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.

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 is delicate, its vulnerable but if used properly can be hardy and durable. 

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, act local” It is built in a remote village called Harsar in the southern plains of Nepal. According to our calculation, the structure costs more than half compared to concrete and steel. Moreover, the structure has become pride of this impoverished but ambitious little village.

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 is one of our offices that is under construction. The cost of construction is about $200 per truss, the span is five meters and total area is about 40 sq. meter. Its a combination of earth (compressed earth blocks) and bamboo. The amount of cement used is is less than 10 percent.

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 in an industrial scale. But we take that as a blessing. Sustainability, we believe, also means scale. It is very difficult to make things sustainable and yet cater to a highly industrialized and consumerist lifestyle. Anyways, to work with bamboo requires lots of patience, creativity, improvisation and obviously skills. One has to treat every bamboo as an individual, as they look and behave differently. With a little bit of encouragement, bamboo can challenge any material. With our primitive tools, we are here fabricating bamboo trusses (10 meters), that are strong, durable and perhaps more elegant than  steel.

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.