The KAKR Bamboo Hall is part of a grand design for revitalizing the historical ground zero of a local church in Buluh Awar Village. Buluh is a Karonese term for bambu in Indonesian or bamboo in English, while Awar derives from Awaren in Karonese, which means hole on its nodes and allows water to flow naturally for households usage. Bamboo grows naturally in vast quantity and quality surrounding this village. The village was part of historical salt and trade route carried out by Perlanja Sira, salt bearers walking by feet during the pre-Dutch Colonialism era.

Fast forward to modern era, the village is becoming less developed. No more trade glory. The bamboo is scarcely used in Buluh Awar and even burnt to provide vast land for productive crops such as paddy, brown sugar, and durians. Things got worse due to massive illegal logging and deforestation which eventually caused huge landslide of football sized hole and cutting off the main road entering the village. The villagers had to improve other road as an alternative solution.

The multifunction bamboo hall was initially designed and completed since 2019 to 2022, as the trigger to educate people of its beneficial for the environmental issues. At the beginning, they strongly refused and doubted our idea to use bamboo as main materials due to its vulnerability to termites and humidity.

However, through socialization of bamboo treatment and site visit to bamboo buildings in Bali Island, they eventually accept the design to be built.

During the construction phase, the involvement of local villagers were strongly recommended through community empowerment and participatory design, rather than using the Contractor. This was meant to foster their sense of belonging to the bamboo buildings and to ensure the long-term maintenance and operational.

Furthermore, we architects educate the local villagers that they will have the opportunity to enhance their craftmenship skill in construction and in the same time, to achieve new income opportunity from bamboo  products they creatively made.

To provide the availability of the bamboo materials supply for the construction and the handicrafts, we encourage the local villagers to stop burning the bamboo plants, but rather campaigning on bamboo cultivation programme. Some agreed on providing their lands surrounding the village. This eventually ensure the massive quantity of bamboo plants reserve for future usage. The bamboos grow at least three to seven years, and ready for harvesting, treatment, and construction. 

This series of programme eventually creates impact for the environment quality and sustainabiity. We believe that this will avoid threats of landslide due to bamboos' strenght in preserving the soil from moving.

After three years of mentoring and assistance, we surprisingly obtained several numbers of local villagers to be the environtmental and tourism camphions. They have successfully transformed from bamboo burners to bamboo preservers. They have also become bamboo tour guides for hundreds of architecture students and lecturers who came to learn the bamboos.

In 2019, the great leaders of the local church invited an Architect named Ar. Boy Sembiring to design the Grand Design of the historical Buluh Awar village. Then, Ar. Boy Sembiring invited Ar. Franky Simanjuntak and Ar. Freddy Simamora for a collaboration. We surveyed the village to identify its potential, problems and issues. 

We met the village priest named Wilson Tarigan who was also in charge in running the tourism programme. He explained that the tourism was not in a good shape since the local villagers were less in participation.

Meanwhile, we explained that the involvement of the villagers were the key to achieve greater vision of community based tourism. 

Therefore, we arranged several numbers of FGDs with the local church, the villagers and the government. We educated that the community based tourism and bamboo optimization were the approriate solutions.

Fortunately, we gained trust for collaboration from the respective stakeholders. After the grand design was approved, we started to prepare for the KAKR bamboo hall as the trigger for convincing action.

The local church committee initially proposed to select  Contractors to bid since it was the usual method they carried out. But we insisted to involve community in the construction as we selected three local villagers as the management team helped by an architectural freshgraduate to daily supervise the work while we the architects do the mentoring.

In addition, we invited a skilled bamboo expert from Java to train the local villagers. After three months, the expert left and the villagers continued until its completion.