Marae DIY

Whare Maori Title Page

So yesterday, my wife, son and I were sifting through our recorded programmes on our MY SKY when we found an interesting programme my wife had recorded - it was called Whare Maori - it's a series shown on Maori Television at 8pm on Sunday's - it looks at Maori architecture - what it is and how it came about, it also looks at the role it has played within the community.

Anyway, we all took an interest in it.  I remembered we had some old balsa wood lying around the house - and have been looking for activities to do with my boy during the holidays - so I thought we could design and build our own Whare Maori.

So, off to the library we went - Papakura Library has an awesome Maori section - even has the framework of a whare inside the library, that gave us a few ideas in itself.

We found a few books and took them home, we looked at them together - of the ones we found the best were Maori Architecture by Deidre Brown and Meeting Houses of Ngati Porou o Te Tai Rawhiti by David Simmons.  My son even noticed a few of the Ratana churches he had seen before up in Te Hapua and Te Kao. 

Good book!

I put together a simple question and answer sheet and had him write down things like what he had noticed - the plan was to get him thinking about what kind of shapes etc, he could use in the construction of his Whare Maori model. 

Little notes - "But I just wanna build Dad!"

It was pretty clear he had his design set in his mind and he just wanted to build.  So we made up a draft plan of what our Whare would look like, then we started to build.

My son's plan with carvings

My rough sketch

We used balsa wood that I had purchased for about $12 from a book store a couple of years ago, there was a good mixture of wood, skinny long pieces perfect for beams and posts, flat wide pieces suited to roofing and flooring.  I had an Xacto blade and a cutting mat which I had used for other crafting in the past.  We found some super glue lying around - we were set!

Laying the foundations

The safety aspect of using the Xacto blade and the fragileness of the balsa wood meant I had to do a lot of the cutting and inserting my son - but he really enjoyed being the foreman and telling me what to do, how to cut it, where to put it etc haha - he also did all the glueing - which was entertaining seeing him work with super glue for the first time - I lost count of the number of times he glued his fingers together haha.

Glued his fingers to the Whare lol

The finished product - two mean Whare!  My son took heaps out of it, wanting to show all his whanau what he had built, now he wants to build Whare from a different culture!  Hopefully we've instilled an interest in architecture in him so that one day he can build his parents a castle!!  Half a day well spent!

My son's finished Whare 

 My finished Whare