Cassia Coop Training Centre is the public face of Cassia Coop, a cinnamon business on Sumatra. The owner, Patrick Barthelemy, contacted Tyin with an open brief – he wanted to develop a socially sustainable operation, and set new standards in fair trading and worker welfare. The training centre is a school for local farmers and workers.
The main concept is a light timber structure on a heavy base of locally crafted brick and concrete. This strategy has already allowed the building to survive several earthquakes of over five on the Richter scale. The combination of thermal mass and a lifted roof structure with deep eaves allows the building to be naturally ventilated. The timber is cinnamon wood, a conventionally low-status material. The entire project uses only ten different details.
The project was planned and built in three months, with the help of architects and architecture students from Norway as well as local workers, craftsmen and water buffalo.
The "Tyin touch"?
The first of Tyin’s projects appeared in 2008. By the time the images of their beautiful ”Butterfly Houses” in Thailand had done their tour of the international architectural press, Yashar Hanstad and Andreas Gjertsen had built a few more projects, won more awards, and even found time to finish architecture school.
"We want the choices we make in our projects to be understandable," says Gjertsen. "Our projects are beautiful because we have worked them through very intensively," says Hanstad. The structures are simple, but that doesn’t mean they are based on easy decisions. Nor that they are always successful, even though the Cassia Coop Training Centre seems to fulfil expectations.
Tyin have built in Thailand, Uganda and Indonesia, but they do not know how their experience from around the work will transfer to a Norwegian construction environment. "We just haven’t built enough yet," says Gjertsen. "I think perhaps our most important contribution has been to inspire our local collaborators to see their own neighbourhoods in a different way," says Hanstad. "When it comes to Norway, we’ll just have to see."