by Russell Boniface

Twenty-one Ball State University students returned March 20 from a two-week rebuilding project in a fishing village in southern Sri Lanka that had been devastated by last December’s tsunami. The students are part of a program called “CapAsia,” a 10-week field study program offered by the College of Architecture and Planning at Ball State that provides both graduate and undergraduate architecture students with experience in world architecture, urbanism, and planning.

(One week after the students and faculty returned home, another earthquake struck the region, but fortunately there wasn’t another tsunami.)

Building to learn
Ball State’s CapAsia’s motto is “building to learn.” It refers to CapAsia’s theory that architecture students learn about themselves and their craft by engaging the people and architecture of other cultures. CapAsia students traveled to southern Sri Lanka to the rural fishing village of Kalametiya, part of a coastal wetland system along the south coast of Sri Lanka, where they rebuilt homes that were completely destroyed by last December’s tsunami. The group altered its original plan during its annual architecture field study trip to go to Kalametiya to help with the rebuilding efforts.

The small village is home to 31 families, including 30 children. The village had a total of 190 people before the tsunami; 11 were killed. After the tsunami, all were living in either tents or wooden beach cabanas that were still standing. Debris and uprooted trees littered the village, a lagoon, and a bird sanctuary. The Ball State students arrived in early March to assist in the construction of permanent houses with local citizens, masons, carpenters, and volunteers. The effort included restoring the lagoon and bird sanctuary and repairing fishing boats.

The layout of the rebuilt village consisted of 30 houses grouped in clusters and public facilities that included a community center, pre-school, library, and shrine. The landscaped common spaces were a village square, playground, memorial garden, and a forested area.

The rebuilding efforts saw students create all 30 single-story houses, each in its own plot of 500 square meters (a little over 5,000 square feet), with a foundation mixture of concrete and rubble. Each new house has two bedrooms and a front and rear verandah, living room, kitchen, bath, and toilet. The homes were made with burnt-clay-brick walls, cement floors, clay-tile roofs on timber frameworks, timber-sashed doors, and windows with stick-grills. With construction now complete, residents can celebrate Sinhala and the Hindu New Year, April 13–14, in their new homes.

Energizing a village
Dr. Nihal Perera, a Sri Lanka native, is the founder and director of CapAsia. “It went very well,” he says. “The whole point of this was to expose our students to a different culture of building. The main question is: ‘Why do they build the way they build’? We are trying to participate in their processes, rather than getting them to participate in our processes.”

Perera explains that he and students became a catalyst for the villagers. “We energized the people. We were able to connect with community there.” He points out one big success was when his students built a small play area for the children. “The children were highly neglected. Not purposefully . . . their parents were involved in bigger things, trying to get a place to stay. Our students used material from the debris to create a small play area for the kids. We brought some paint and drawing paper, and the students made paint brushes from peacock feathers. All of this was pretty much improvised, but it worked very well. The kids started playing and painting and the parents seemed very happy. Then our students started playing volleyball with the younger ones, and then we played cricket with all the children, which they all very much love to play. We all bonded very much. Then, two days later, we started building and all the villagers showed up. All of a sudden, the community came alive.”

Perera says that the original idea was to build a demonstration house. But after two or three days—as all 21 students, 3 faculty members, and masons started building, along with displaced and non-displaced locals—the villagers started digging their own foundations for their own homes. Says Perera, “We had to re-think: ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea just to build a demonstration house if everybody is interested in building. Why not put our energy into helping everybody?’ In a few days all the houses were being built.”

Understanding the culture
Since 1999, CapAsia students have visited Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. Students work to rebuild sustainable homes in these locations using local hand tools and no electricity. Among the highlights have been a three-week “build-design-build” project at the University of Moratuwa in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where students constructed a pavilion made of scavenged wood materials, such as dismantled wood packing crates, disassembled timber pallets, and hand-sawn tree trunks. They also designed and constructed a “mud” pavilion from a sand and cement mixture combined with rubble from demolished campus buildings.

“This is a program that allows students to do projects that are also helpful to local experts,” says Perera. “We send students house to house. They get to stay in one place and understand the culture.”

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