Kitset Fale
Elisapeta Heta >

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By Kathy Waghorn
School of Architecture and Planning, March 2010

This product requires assembly, the Kitset Fale by Elisapeta Heta.

Elisapeta Heta is of Maori (Ngati Wai, Waikato), Samoan, Tokelauan and English descent, or, as she says, “that's the simplistic explanation  . . . let's say those are the boxes I tick on the census”. This ‘not fitting the boxes’ indicates a complex whakapapa. In a similar vein the Kitset Fale does not fit into particular boxes in relation to categories of architecture, art, artefact or craft.

On one hand, the Kitset Fale, being laser cut from a single sheet of composite board, is an item of pre-fabrication. Pre-fabricated buildings are efficiently realised in terms of both time and material. They are produced in factories, easily transported, obtained “off the shelf” or ordered from a catalogue, and are then assembled by teams of non-experts. In contrast to this though, the Kitset Fale also references vernacular Samoan building traditions. Itis intended that the Kitset Fale operates as an object of engagement and participation. Elisapeta’s desire is for groups of people to come together to assemble the fale from the kit of parts, rather like a large puzzle. Through this lens then the Kitset Fale makes reference to Samoan vernacular building practices, in which the village members all have roles in supporting the construction of the bespoke fale building, led by an expert craftsman. Finally, being an object at a strange scale further complicates the Kitset Fale. Presented here in Window the Kitset Fale makes reference to the museological artefact, the diorama, even the dolls’ house.

Mass production and the “flat pack”
The 108 individual parts of the Kitset Fale have been laser cut from a single flat sheet of composite board. These two dimensional parts are then assembled to form the volumetric object. Since 1943 IKEA, the world’s largest home products retailer has pioneered and promoted “flat pack” furniture. Rather than being sold complete and whole most IKEA furniture is designed to be assembled by the consumer after purchase. This facilitates a reduction in the use of packaging and in the space required for transportation. The volume of a bookcase, for example, is considerably less if it is shipped unassembled rather than assembled. The IKEA brand and flat pack furniture as a concept is identified with demographics of youth and mobility. Moving from apartment to apartment across the cities of Europe is made easy with this standardised and highly mobile furniture. Unlike Gran’s old oak tallboy, which weighs a ton and takes up a lot of space, flat pack furniture promotes the possibility of movement and migration.

The Kitset Fale appropriates this “flat pack” design language and in doing so references Samoan migration to Aotearoa. Auckland and Samoa are intimately tied together. Goods, people, money and cultural practices move in a constant flow between these two places. This kitset or “flat pack” fale then, through the design and materiality, suggests a desire that cultural knowledge and practices are more easily packaged and dispersed among second and third generation Samoan New Zealanders. When a group of people assemble the Kitset Fale, in a park, or house, or gallery in Auckland, the potential is that over the time it takes to work out the puzzle of it’s construction, stories and experiences will be shared.

The museum object, and the strangeness of scale
However, here in Window, although the Kitset Fale has been assembled by a group (on the opening night), the view most will have of it as they pass by is not one of engagement and playfulness, but instead it that of the museum artefact. The Window gallery operates as a vitrine framing the object in a still and sterile space, the glass plate separates viewer from the object, from its tactility and malleability. The strange scale of the object further implies this reading of the Kitset Fale as a museum piece. At roughly one sixth of actual scale the Kitset Faleoperates as a miniature. Susan Stewart in ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’ notes that the miniature “offers a world (. . .) particularised and frozen in time – it is particularised in that the miniature concentrates on the single instance and not upon the abstract rule, but generalised in that that instance comes to transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances” (p 45). With this statement, Stewart suggests that the miniature acts as a metaphor, it is able to stand in for “all books, all bodies”. The miniature can been seen in its entirety; contained and known, it can be collected and catalogued. The miniature cannot operate as architecture as it relies itself on being contained and protected, by the Wunderkammer or museum cabinet. Returning then to my initial suggestion, the Kitset Fale is not to be easily categorised as building, artefact, art, craft or even toy.

In conclusion, my experiential knowledge of the Samoan fale is only that of a tourist. Without even knowing of the social complexity of the inhabitation of the interior, the physical space alone provides a rich spatial experience. Appearing simple, a platform, some posts, a curved roof, the interior space of a fale in fact sets up nuanced relations between ground, sky and horizon. Held by the darkness and curved volume of the roof, sitting with your back to one of the two solid central posts, the view, directed out to the horizon or to the bush, is framed by the rhythm of the columns at the edge.

In architecture scale models are used to imagine the projected building. Like playing with a dolls’ house we overlay the architectural scale model house with narratives of inhabitation; I will stand there to wash the dishes, we will eat around the table here, and hang coats there. I try then to imagine inhabiting this Kitset Fale. The openness of the vernacular Samoan fale is made extreme in the Kitset Fale by the thin-ness of the particle-board and the lack of thatch on the roof. The central columns’ roundness and voluptuousness is reduced to thin slivers. The posts at the edge are now fins that finely slice the view beyond. What I think of is a pared back state, the flatness of the sheet material only barely allowing for space and volume to emerge. The Kitset Fale is not meant to be an authentic building, nor is it meant to act as a replica. While it comments on craft and community the Kitset Fale is more diagram than building, the two dimensional nature of the material still overrides the volume of the object. But perhaps this is what happens when vernacular buildings are translated across time and place. Without the authentic material and context only the diagram, the drawing that sets out possibility and communicates instruction can remain.