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?)
1 comment:
Joanna,
Designing a school in the context of the efforts of Village Hope sounds wonderful. The scale of the project seems manageable and your immersion into construction of a project will make your efforts in thesis meaningful.
However, it would be wise to draw a clear distinction between the purpose of your thesis and that of the work that the group will be doing in January. The January project appears aimed at testing construction technique against cost. Your thesis has the opportunity to take the lessons learned from the January project and extend it a bit further into the study of better school design, using an efficient and sustainable building product. Your result may not be the least expensive (you should be conciencious, you need not tie your hands by cost at this early a stage in the study), but it should offer potentials for an improved school model that merges cultural context, educational pedagogy, climatic sensitivity, and construction technique.
You might begin by assemblying and reveiwing research materials to address the following questions,
1) Educational Model
a. In the Sierra Leone school, who is being taught? What are they being taught? What is the teaching model? Are there other teaching models to consider?
b. How does it fit into the history of issues for designing educational environments, from the little red schoolhouse, to the industrial model, to the interactive model, to integrative learning model, etc…? There is a lot of interesting material out there.
2) Environmental Design
a. What is the climate of the context?
b. What are the important physical qualities of a building site?
c. Will you choose a specific site, or is the design going to be an adaptable prototype?
d. How are the climatic conditions best met in the most sustainable manner?
3) Cultural Patterns
a. Identifyable building patterns and their meanings?
4) Construction Techniques
a. What is the construction method?
b. What are its values generally and in this application?
c. What are its structural principals, properties and limitiations?
d. What is the range of its formal opportunities? And how might they relate to its use in the school models.
5) Criteria:
a. What is going to be your criteria to judge a successful design approach?
b. List the issues?
Thoughts in general and for each one of the questions above? Please forward these by next Wednesday.
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