Santing - Eat, Trace, Cassava

The industrial development, that has cut off our connection with the food production, minimizes the understanding of our daily food values. Ignorance of how our food are processed has indirectly ruin our own ecosystem, and have led ourselves to the brink of civilization collapse. Food security is the most fundamental thing that can restore our civilization at that time. This final project is an effort to make humans be able to connect with their living place through the process of food processing and create food security. Banjarsari, located in middle of Jakarta’s hectic city life, is a small residential that claims itself to be a small “forest” surrounded by high buildings. Cassava is found to be a wild plant grown in the existing site, yet it does not give any value to the housing residents. By exploring cassava’s unique properties and potential, it is then used as a base for this project’s design. Researches about cassava’s value, by the development of its by-products, results in a circular food cycle by cassava production itself and this extends its role as merely just a grown plant in Banjarsari Housing. The architectural method used in this final project is through means of traces exploration of food processing phase. The by-products of cassava are defined as traces that are used to respond to the site metaphorically to develop the intervention spaces needed for cassava processing, and to develop the true food value of cassava. Material exploration of cassava’s traces acts asa a guide of forming and detailing in the finalization stage of the design.