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Traditional Dwellings: Master Liao Zhide and the House That Breathes

General News By Emily Carter 0 views

If you could build a house yourself, what kind of house would you want to build?

The question is a broad one, and the answers could be full of personal dreams. But back in reality, we often have no way to build the house we want just as we please, and the biggest constraint is usually the budget. Besides the money needed to build the house, the land it sits on also needs money.

I have discussed with some friends before whether it might be possible to build a house on a budget of under 1 million. It seems possible, and the budget could even be lower.
At the end of last month, I made a special trip to Tainan to attend an Energy Education 2.0 and Community Transition Workshop held by Earth Passengers and the Delta Electronics Foundation. Of course, a workshop like this inevitably offers plenty of stimulation and reflection, and I also joined in order to see Hui-yi, a good friend of Earth Passengers and a graduate school classmate. But the highlight of the workshop was the final session: a visit to a bamboo pole house (zhugao cuo) under construction, and to the nationally renowned master carpenter Zhang Gao, Liao Zhide, who passes on this house-building technique. A little after 3 p.m., Mr. Lin Zhenlong, the owner of the Earth House who is learning to build a bamboo pole house from Master Liao, came first to share the process of building it; by then the frame of the bamboo pole house was largely complete. Mr. Lin said half-jokingly that with 50,000 yuan, you can build a house that will not decay for a thousand years.

Thirty minutes later, everyone drove to Houbi to visit Master Liao Zhide. Master Liao had used a 200-year-old banyan tree and recycled materials on this site to build a house that breathes. In fact, if you had not seen the relevant materials beforehand, most people would probably not realize that this house was built from recycled materials.

Compared with contemporary houses that use large amounts of high-energy-consumption building materials such as concrete and rebar, which are expensive and easily absorb heat and raise indoor temperatures, traditional houses use materials that can decompose and return to the earth, cost less, and breathe, making them a more environmentally friendly choice.

I hope that one day I truly become one of those owners who builds a traditional house.

(This article was originally published on the author's blog)

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