Abstract
According to local wisdom, vernacular houses are believed to be able to adapt to their environmental conditions, and this is the case for the vernacular timber houses of the Arfak tribe. Known as the “house of a thousand piles”, these houses are indeed built with many piles, which are embedded into the ground to support their structure. Besides this, they also have a symmetrical geometric form and seven layers of intersecting beams that create very stiff floor diaphragm. All these piles and beams were tied together using rattan ropes. They are believed by the locals to be earthquake resistant but unfortunately their reliability performance has hardly ever been proven scientifically. Therefore, this paper focused on efforts to provide an overview of the structural reliability of the houses of the Arfak tribe in West Papua through a loading test conducted at the site. This test was in the form of a static monotonic test where a 3 m by 3 m house module was tied with steel rope and then laterally pulled by a truck equipped with a load cell as the source of lateral force. The force was applied alternately in the X and Y directions with and without a live load. The module was then loaded until collapse. Through this experiment, the natural period and lateral stiffness of the module were calculated. The experiments also showed the types of structural damage suffered by the module, which can help to improve the housing quality and could be one option for locally based mitigation to meet the needs of sustainable housing.
Published Version
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