5th Earth Architecture Competition

Description

Nka Foundation announces a call for entries for its 5th Earth Architecture Competition: Designing a Rural Arts Center for Senegal, an international architecture competition open to professionals and students of architecture, design, urban planning and others from around the world. Your challenge is to design a unit of a rural arts school for construction in a village in the Casamance region of Senegal.

OBJECTIVE

The objective is to design a modern mud type to be built as a unit of an artisanal village, a residential vocational training center for unemployed rural youths of ages 16 to 25 years to undergo a 2-year skills development training in the vocational arts and design. We want the school plan to emphasize sustainable architecture and cost efficient construction. Thus, we want the buildings to fully integrate earth architecture and passive solar design.

The challenge is to design one of the following types for the school: a classroom type, cafeteria type, office building type, dormitory type, group toilet type, cafeteria type, dormitory type, dwelling type for the local teachers, and guest house type for our international visiting staff. Contestants are to design the school type for construction by maximum use of earth and local labor. Total costs of constructing the design entry is not to exceed $10,000 (USD) for materials and labor. The construction site will be Diakounda village in Sédhiou Region of the Casamance in Senegal.

HOW TO DESIGN WHAT IS BUILDABLE?

The construction of the top design entries in the Earth Architecture Competition is our priority for two reasons: (1) The building workshop will serve as cultural exchange as you build your unit of the school with the local youth trainees and local artisans; and (2) because at Nka Foundation, we have come to know that a means for a young designer to learn to design what is buildable is by providing you with the opportunity to design and build your own design. Thus, from February 2018 to July 2020, we will be collaborating with some of the design teams in the competition to organize construction workshops to build their design entries based on site at Diakounda village in Sédhiou Region of the Casamance, Senegal.

The competition promotes open source design, which implies that the submitted designs will be available for all to appreciate, use, or improve them to generate more practical and contemporary design solutions for the region. In light of this, the competition entry needs to be a type that can be replicated in another village in tropical Africa such as Gambia, Ghana or Tanzania. Our long-term goal is to enable the rural population and lots of other places, to overcome the stigma that mud architecture is architecture for the very poor.

CONSTRUCTION METHOD

What is the preferred construction method for the winning entries? The method to be used to build your design can be poured earth, rammed earth or another earth construction technique such as mud bricks. Mud brick construction is common to the region. Roof design should involve metal roof with such as corrugated zinc or aluminum roofing sheets, which are the conventional roofing materials in the region. Other roofing methods such as vault roof, tiled stone, ferro-cement roof and canvas roof are all possibilities but not duly tested to stand the region’s rain storms. However, keep in mind that we are designing for the tropical climate; devices such as natural ventilation, setting the house foundation at two feet above the ground level, and designing the roof to overhang by at least three feet will therefore be in order.