Arkitrek Camp
The Arkitrek Camp delivers innovative and inspirational design to social and environmental organisations. A team of passionate designers are connected with a client organisation and given a live project brief in an challenging location in Borneo. The program is intense and in a short period of time the team must write their design brief, conduct socio-environmental surveys, complete the design process and build their proposals.
The experience will bridge the gap between theory and practical application, giving students new skills and confidence. Professionals will find this an inspirational break from their desk job. All projects are sourced to complement the Arkitrek philosophy of working responsibly in natural areas and building capacity for rural communities to implement sustainable design.
No prior experience of design and construction is necessary, although we try to ensure that the majority of Camp participants are students, graduates or professionals in the construction industry or people with an interest in sustainable development and nature conservation.
Next Camp
Camp3 is from 24th June to 29th July 2012 in the Upper Baram region of Sarawak
Camp5 is from 2nd – 23rd September 2012 on Mantanani Island in Sabah.
Contact us for a detailed project brief and itinerary. Leave your number if you would like us to contact you by phone.
Arkitrek Camp How to book
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Typical Program
A typical program will be to design and build infrastructure for community based tourism operations. This includes introducing sustainable design principles of passive design, responsible materials specification and sustainable use of natural resources. Projects may also contribute to environmental conservation programs, such as the May 2011 Arkitrek Camp which built a Marine Conservation Centre.
Objectives and Origins of the Arkitrek Camps
The Arkitrek Camps deliver innovative and inspirational design to social and environmental organisations free of charge. We can do this by running projects as an educational program. Here’s how the Camps program evolved.
The objective of Arkitrek is to conserve natural resources through design and education. This is our social objective, it pervades our entire business. We don’t have a CSR department because to do so would imply that we have departments which are not socially responsible. We want to be profitable and stay true to our social objective.
The roots of the Arkitrek social objective are in the tropical rainforest of Borneo. Here we began designing primitive buildings in a primeval setting in 2004. For lovers of nature and wilderness it was a dream job; engaged by one of the leading conservation figures in Sabah to support his vision for robust rainforest conservation areas. This was conservation of natural resources in its most obvious expression.
The catch was that the job was voluntary and had to be sustained intermittently by other less fulfilling jobs.
A year or two later we started our engagement with rural villages to design community tourism facilities, village halls and kindergartens. Once again, we work with an inspirational client; a tourism operator whose product is built around culture and environment and whose business model depends upon long term investment in social infrastructure such as; jobs, education, culture & pride.
On such community work the professional fees earned are well below the level on which a profitable business can be sustained. Regardless of the low fees we still want to do this work because it supports our social objective. Rural communities can be the best stewards of the natural resources around them but only if they have a stake in those natural resources and their social infrastructure is healthy.
Now think back to the beginning where we said that “we want to be profitable and stay true to our social objective”. Another way of phrasing this question is to say “How can we take on clients who like those described above, suit our social objective but can’t afford to pay professional fees?”
One suggestion has been for fee-paying projects to cross-subsidise social projects. We have rejected this model because it is effectively a CSR program. We may be forced to take on clients who don’t match our objectives in order to sustain the social projects.
Our solution is to make social projects profitable by running them as education programs.
Our starting point for this was that in a university education there is little scope for vocational and practical training. In architecture and engineering this training is vital because a clash with reality is the ultimate test of a theoretical design. A key principle of our education programs is that students get to both design and build the project themselves. For many students this may be their first experience of that clash with reality and they become more sympathetic and confident designers because of it. Students value this real-life vocational training for the skills, experience and confidence that it gives them.
We have subsequently found that our education model is not just applicable to design students, but that our back-to-basics design thinking approach is equally appealing to professionals and school leavers alike. No prior experience is required and all projects delivered by an Arkitrek Camp are suffused with green building principles. This knowledge of sustainability and conservation of natural resources is a valuable take-home for all Arkitrek Camp participants.
Our clients also gain because many of them will have education and outreach programs of their own which will be furthered by the engagement of an international team of green building enthusiasts on their project. Of course they also get innovative, participatory and inspirational design delivered free of charge.
The final and most compelling reason that we do the work we do is because we love nature and the people we work with are a lot of fun!