For a person, the house is a shelter, a place where
they look for and create their microcosm
made of objects, affections and memories. Home also symbolizes the culture a
person belongs to.
This project develops as part of a rapidly increasing
economy in one of the most thriving African areas.
The house prototype we propose aims at creating a
suitable living solution in urban areas, but also in rural or isolated areas
and emergency contexts.
Our prototype has been carried out so that it can meet
the requirements of a house enlargement in connection with a growing family;
this ensures the highest flexibility according to the changes the African
society is undergoing, more and more often approaching “Western” life styles but,
at the same time, remaining rooted
deeply in its traditions.
This led us to carry out a prototype which mingles the
use of advanced technologies and the use of local materials whose ways of use
have been partially renewed.
As a precise project choice, we decided to use passive
technologies rather than active energy systems; this choice permits to minimize
the use of pipes and installations and makes it easier to build and dismantle
the house, without increasing building costs.
Indeed, we decided to reduce building costs by
rationalizing the living spaces and consequently reducing the size of
encumbrances; that has been obtained, for example, by using the upper part of the
rooms and the gap in the loose stone foundation as a well to replace bulky
wardrobes.
The use of “poor” but decorous local materials permits
to find materials easily on the spot, to set up and dismantle the dry-stone
walls easily and to make the house movable. For this reason the only fixed part
of our prototype is the skeleton,
conceived as an iron profiled frame fastened to the ground through a hand-built
foundation.
The basis is made of a loose stone foundation built by
reusing EUR pallets and OSB panels; a bamboo parquet flooring produced locally
completes the basis.
For the walls we used
a “sandbag” system; the outside
part is made of OSB panels, whereas on the inside insulation is achieved
through a framework of sandbags filled
with soil and fastened with barbed wire; the outside part of the walls are
painted with clay plaster and chalk powder.
Covering is conceived as to minimize the sun beating
down through an internal ventilated gap
and to make rain water collection easier during the copious summer rains. As
for the rooms, our prototype is made of
two bed rooms, a central living area directly linked to the entrance, a wall
equipped as a kitchen and a bathroom with toilet and washing facilities
equipped with shower.
Besides containing the water treatment pipes, the well between the
kitchen and the bathroom also houses two PVC pipes for rain water, which is
directly driven to the bathroom discharge or conveyed into storage tubs dug
under the loose stone foundation. That way, rain water could be reused for
household activities after being conveniently treated with SODIS technology.