What comes to your mind when you imagine a house to live in? Material? The budget? The model? Who will work on it? or something else? Have you ever thought about the concept of a safe and comfortable home at an affordable cost? The concept of an economical house without draining your wallet by utilizing local resources is interesting, isn't it?

Stube HEMAT Yogyakarta with several students visited a house in Tamanmartani, Kalasan, Sleman, Yogyakarta Special Region to enrich students' knowledge and insight about resilient infrastructure. The students dialogued directly with Iswanti Suparma, the owner of a house with a unique model, different from the common houses found in Indonesia, called the Earthbag Roundhouse (Saturday, 6 May 2023).

The concept of the house came from Iswanti’s wish who knows the condition of the land where she lives is vulnerable to natural disasters, such as earthquakes. She looked for ways to build houses in the prone zone to earthquakes, but her house was not just built but also comfortable to live in. Iswanti searched for literature and Googled the internet until she found a building concept called an earthquake-resistant building, namely SuperAdobe or local resource-based housing. SuperAdobe was designed by Nader Khalili, an Iranian-American architect. Iswanti adopted the concept for her house which is round in shape and made of soil and other elements, such as sand, clay piled in long sacks and arranged in a circle to form the walls of the house.

The uncommon model of the house ignited people’s curiosity, even the workers had never worked for such a house like that. Iswanti needed time to convince them and gave them a new understanding of the building concept through various ways, like discussions, and learning from videos about similar buildings.

The main materials needed are long sacks, soil, barbed wire, sterilized cow dung, and dolomite. One layer of a rounded wall required 24 meters long, while a 1-meter-high wall requires 6 layers of sacks or 144 meters long. So, to build 8 meters high wall, it needed 1.152 meters. The house is round with a conical roof that is adaptive to the wind and tends to be safe when an earthquake occurs because the load is distributed to all directions and the material is not rigid. Another uniqueness of this house is the use of used accessories, such as used bottles, used wood, leftover concrete buis, and tree branches to add aesthetics. The construction process of the two houses took three years until they were ready for occupancy.

Participants were enthusiastic to see and go around the house and find many questions. Iswanti admitted that the construction of this house is not expensive, "The concept of building this house does not require a bulk of money because I did not buy all materials at building shop, anyone can do it even an amateur worker," she said. The students' encounter with Iswanti at the earthbag roundhouse sparked the participants' imaginations to find different and unique house designs that are economical and resilient to disaster threats.

The readiness of a safe and comfortable home or shelter is a form of our concern for life sustainability, therefore, what your dream home looks like? Dare to be different? Create your dream home that is comfortable, strong, and resilient without leaving the local potencies around. ***