Constructing the Pacific Hut

Abstract

Building the Pacific Hut The search for a history and theory of architectural origins is characterised by propositions of foundational acts and technological moments. These events are framed as essential for both an unquestionable need for shelter and as a necessity for a discussion about architectural origins. Common to these moments are the idea of the unsheltered human, the necessity for enclosure and the notion of a technical and creative genesis. Nineteenth century theorists, Rousseau, Sempre, Laugier, Riegl and others writing from a continental and industrial perspective propose that the act of creating shelter is a germination of technological and aesthetic thinking, an architectural ground zero, and that architecture and shelter is essential for providing the stasis of settlement. In the Pacific as Rwkwert’s discussion of the Japanese Ise temple seems to suggest other circumstances might apply. Equally in the Pacific ,where the need for shelter as the Western world understand it is not an inevitable , an architecture might have other contexts than the enclosing wall, the cliff and the cave and the reproduction of nature itself . This paper argues that instead of the stasis and enclosure that is embedded in western architectural origins, in the Pacific an architecture that emerged from mobility and sought openness might be found and, that, rather than being an origin of technical practice, in the Pacific, architecture might itself be the result of transformation from other technologies. Specifically this paper seeks to connect the tectonics of the Pacific building to the technology of the canoe and the spatial openness that it operates on. With detailed reference to the construction of the Fale Samoa and the Haus tambaran from Papua New Guinea, this paper proposes a architecture from the Pacific that is technically and conceptually different from the west.