The project ” Bamboo and Bamboo workers”, supported by the Advisory Council of the Design Professionals of the Fetzer Foundation based in the USA, As part of its work to “furthering awareness of the power of love and forgiveness in all areas of human endeavor “, is mainly involved in finding ways to demonstrate bamboo’s versatility as a building and furniture designers, on one side, and the traditional bamboo craftsmen, on the other. The opportunity is also to study the living conditions of the bamboo workers and explore ways to enhance their employment prospects.
A US NGO had given an interesting task to an Indian person, Kirtee Shah (founder of INHAF), who had immense knowledge in the construction of large-scale housing projects for poor people in India and in Sri Lanka. He went on to work with URAVU, an NGO for whom IN:CH had designed and built small houses using local materials with the help of local workers. The project was to design an eco-resort. The whole process was developed right from the program with typology analysis, students’ workshops, test planning development, movie concept and budget planning. The idea was to make an exhibition with two prototype houses and a community center. To ensure that the cluster form planning would be the most efficient, a proposal with additional housing models was made. An infrastructure that incorporated rainwater harvesting, solar energy production, and waste management was included in the exhibition.
The demand for housing was so high in Wayanad that statistics confirmed the need to build around 68,000 units for marginalized persons. This meant that every cluster needed around 12 houses, one school for around 12 clusters and one health center for around 24 clusters.
A regional level of planning in cooperation with the government would be important to achieve this. All of the above information was communicated to the people in charge and those responsible from INHAF and URAVU.
As with the case with many building projects with multiple partners involved not everything that is proposed go into execution. The result in this case being, the model prototype house, which was meant to be accessible to all, was assigned to a two-person family to live in. This negated the whole point of the prototype house, which was built to be further studied, modified and worked upon to optimize its functions. The cluster housing prototype and the community center wasn’t realized. The community center that was eventually built had no kitchen, no toilet, no dormitories as had been given in the initial proposal.
