“Building with Nature” Exhibition at Erasmus Huis
20-7-2022 | Indonesiandesign.com
“Building with Nature” is an exhibition that portrays the possibilities of natural building to create a sustainable living environment in the future. It is running from 5 July – 27 August 2022 in the exhibition hall of Erasmus Huis, Jakarta. Indonesia Design talked with one of the designers, Pascal Leboucq, who passionately shared about the concept and the process.
Pascal and Lucas De Man from New Heroes Company had exhibited a 1:1 scale house with 100 biobased materials in the Netherlands in 2021 and earlier this year. The project was called “The Exploded View Beyond Building”. Now, collaborating with Playo and Erasmus Huis, they are exhibiting two smaller houses in the scale of 1:10 as the centrepieces. One is the Dutch house and the other one is the Indonesian house.
The Dutch house is made with over 30 biobased materials, from agricultural waste to sewage waste. The Indonesian house is made with 20 biobased materials, contributed by 20 selected Indonesian designers including BYO Living, Plepah and Studio Dapur. The Indonesian house is made with local materials such as mycelium leather, banana peel bubble wrap, agricultural waste paper, woven bamboo tiles, coconut fibre panel, handwoven mukuna fibre, rattan and many more.
It took 1,5 months from research to exhibition, with Playo bridging Pascal and Lucas to the Indonesian designers. “Erasmus Huis invited us and Indonesian designers to collaborate because there’s still a lot of craftmanship in Indonesia. In Europe, it’s gone. In Indonesia there are still people working manually, they make things with their hands, and that is a good thing,” Pascal said. He believes that if we want to go biobased, we need to make this change. “Sometimes it feels old fashioned and traditional but that’s why we collaborate with designers, to show old techniques and materials can be really sexy and attractively designed. I really need designers to collaborate with craftmanship to see how to implement old knowledge in a new frame,” Pascal added.
This exhibition is like a starting point for this project because the road to even introduce the idea that we can live in a house made with totally biobased materials is still very long. Pascal is happy to be working with passionate designers who really want to bring a good change to the future of their country. “But please don’t try to create this alone because if you really want to create a product on a bigger scale, you really need the support from the industry,” he said. He also believes that changing the future has to include approaching the big-time decision makers like country leaders. The small houses will travel around in Indonesia for presentations, including at universities and at the G20 Summit in Bali later this year.
Photos: Doc of Erasmus Huis