Final Presentation and statement

Draft Board

This is the PDF of the draft board I prepared for thesis prep. Below is the Thesis statement and other information that appears on the board:


Statement:
After many years of civil war and economic instability, communities in rural Sierra Leone are struggling to overcome poverty and improve their health and education systems. Only 35% of their population is literate and most villages don’t have permanent school structures because the current school construction methods adopted in other parts of the country are costly and do not provide suitable learning conditions. This project aims to develop several low-cost, sustainable prototypes for elementary schools. To confirm the effectiveness of the study and its feasibility in real life, I will work with the organization Village Hope and 6 communities in the zone of Lunsar in northern Sierra Leone. The people from these villages will be interviewed to learn what their goals and expectations in education and the new schools are. Different educational models and the spaces ideal for their implementation will be studied in depth as well. The designs aim to reduce costs by more than 60% through the use of abundant local resources such as earth and timber. Earth in particular, will be studied as a sustainable construction material and its many design opportunities will be explored. The school design will use daylighting solutions to reach the ideal luminosity for reading and writing, new spaces will be developed to make room for modern and non-conventional teaching practices, natural ventilation and heat gain will be taken into consideration to increase thermal comfort, and the building will effectively withstand heavy rain during the wet season.

I believe that good design does not have to be expensive, that it can be ‘hand-made’ and still have excellent architectural qualities and spaces. This project will help prove that low-cost does not mean unsightly, inefficient, or uncomfortable. Furthermore, the prototypes could potentially revolutionize the way schools are constructed in the country and the surrounding region.

Program

4500 people > 33 villages > 6 communities > 6 schools

1 school

> classrooms for 300 students
> open public gathering space
> office
> storage and equipment room
> bathrooms/ latrines
> headmaster’s residence


Schedule

December > study earth construction

January > site analysis and interviews in Sierra Leone
build test of earth construction methods

February, March > research, analyze test results

March - May > design prototypes

October - ? > build schools

research

projects
-Casa en Arruda dos Vinhos
-Red Hill Residence
-Tebogo Home for Handicapped Children

readings
-Earth Construction Handbook. Gernot Minke, 2000
-Earth Architecture. Ronald Rael, 2008
-Apuntes: Arquitectura en Tierra.. Vol. 20 No. 2, 2007
-BBC Photojournal: Getting an Education in Sierra Leone
-Africa's future, Africa's challenge : early childhood care and development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Garcia, Pence, & Judith, 2008

People
student- Joanna Rodriguez-Noyola

advisor- Jan Wampler

readers-
John Ochsendorf
Les Norford
Jonathan Bart (Village Hope president)

Some thoughts on earth construction

I began a some of my research on earth construction as a building material and here are some of the things I found out.


You can build with earth in three ways:
1. Mud brick/ adobe: unbaked bricks (these could be used for walls, vaulting, etc)
2. Soil block: Compressed, unbaked brick
3. Rammed earth: compacted in formwork, could be reinforced with things like bamboo. Monolithic and has some possibility of curved surfaces, probably harder to make roofs out of...


I understand Village Hope has managed to obtain a brick compressing machine, which would be interesting to play around with and experiment. But what we need to do now is figure out the contents of the soil in our site. To take maximum advantage of the natural resources and the sustainability potential of earth, it would be ideal to only use earth excavated from the site itself. However, there earth has to have a good ratio of sand, silt, and clay... the desired mixture should have plenty of the latter. On the other hand, if it has too much clay, sand and gravel might have to be brought in and mixed in.

Apparently some criteria that could be considered when design for earth are:
-High humidity regulation and absorption
-High thermal mass index (to regulate temperature)
-Can be coated to become less permeable
-Lends itself to use of green roofs (look at the funky earth house in Switzerland designed by Peter Vetsch)
-Can build vaults with the bricks (consider methods like Nubian vaulting or Ramon Aguirre's Mexican vaulting that don't require formwork)

School Construction in Sierra Leone

This summer, I was in contact with our professor John Ochsendorf from the building technology dept. In our discussion about possible undergraduate thesis topics, he helped me find one that was just what I was looking for:

1. SMALL scale design project: bigger than a sofa, smaller than an office building.

2. FEASIBLE: One aspect I did not like about thesis and school design projects in general was the fact that I know many of them are not realistic, I always wanted to have the feeling that I would be able to build something after designing it.

3. Incorporates BUILDING TECHNOLOGY: I wanted to design something that used daylighting, ventilation, structure, etc. to its advantage and actually "crunch" some numbers and test out the effectiveness of my design.



The project that I have agreed to work in is in the design of several schools in Sierra Leone.
I will be working directly with Jon Bart, the founder of Village Hope, the foundation that is organizing the project.

Right now they have been building the schools as four simple concrete walls and metal roof. These methods are not only expensive, they are bad teaching environments as well.


Can good design lower the cost of these schools considerably while improving the quality of the spaces for the purpose of teaching?

Things to think about:

- Local resources, materials, and crafts
- Earth construction (rammed earth, mud bricks, etc.)
- Different school designs
- Rainfall (heavy rainfall problems in this region)

We plan to travel to Sierra Leone in January along with a group of professors (and possibly students?) to begin construction in one of the schools, the design will be very simple and basic, it will serve to test the feasibility of the construction method (how long it takes to build it, how much work, how well it stands the rainfall, how much was saved in cost?)