The number of students attending Universities in Kenya is growing exponentially and has more than doubled since 2012. In the US, an average of 25% of the student body lives on campus, however Kenya averages around 8%—and much of that housing is poorly constructed with inadequate daylight, ventilation, security and reliable potable water. Limited off-campus housing options leave students living in overcrowded apartments or slums. Despite great demand, one of the biggest challenges to developing student housing is a high level of risk that must be tolerated by the development team during a lengthy and unreliable finance approval process. To reduce risk and accelerate the development process, DLR Group’s modular design enables developers to quickly test sites and pair site information with a market study to assess a project’s viability without investing months in a design and documentation process. The design for the hostel is based on a 7m x 7m x 7m cubic module. Each cube supports 8 beds or 49 square meters of student amenity space. This module is repeated multiple times to form a flexible grid that can be easily constructed from cast-in-place concrete, the local structural material of choice in Kenya. Modular components are added to the structural frame based on site adaptation considerations and financial modeling. A key component of site adaptation harnesses sustainable design opportunities of each site, including local materials, daylight harvesting, rainwater collection, natural ventilation, and solar collection.
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