Sustainability on

Works are under way to build a sustainable school in rural Uganda using compressed earth blocks, and on a budget of £2,000 per

classroom. Farah Naz and Chris Soley

explain how

O

ver the past 10 years the number of children in primary education in Uganda has doubled. To meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goal

of giving all children access to primary education by 2015, Uganda has embarked on a countrywide school building programme. A big part of this success story has been due to

the time, money and expertise provided by non- governmental organisations such as Building Tomorrow, an international organisation that supports educational infrastructure projects in Africa. The Open Architecture Challenge 2009 was a

worldwide design competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity, and engineering consultancy Gifford won the Building Tomorrow category of the competition. The aim was to produce an innovative design for a 50-person classroom that can stand alone or be duplicated to form a larger school. Each classroom should cost no more than $3,000 (£2,000). At Gifford, we have been developing the design for

the school over the past few months. Our first school is the Academy of Nakaseeta, situated in a village outside of the Ugandan capital, Kampala. The 500-pupil academy, which measures 43 sq m, will serve a number of villages that currently have no school within 5km. The academy will consist of 10 classrooms, one office and a library room. Our ambition was to design a sustainable school,

We must meet

the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs

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CIBSE Journal April 2010

balancing the social, economic and environmental needs of the individuals, the community and the wider world. In the developing world there is an increased focus on the socio-economic elements of sustainability. What is important to the community is delivering the biggest benefit within a tight budget, and the core of any sustainable design philosophy should be in low- cost enhancements to the types of construction that they are already set up to deliver efficiently. This was our design philosophy when we came to design a school for rural Uganda. Our concept was to take features from exemplar vernacular architecture in similar climates, build with local modern construction techniques, and enhance this hybrid with the good practice design tools and principles that we apply to our work in the UK.

Two of our team recently flew

out to Uganda to help get the project moving on site. We plan to travel out later this year when two classrooms are built, to help with construction and to evaluate and optimise our design – which is intended to be used for another two academies – adding value by closing the ‘reality gap’ between our concept and the constructed classrooms. We envision the research element of the trip as an

important step in delivering the best possible building, which is to be used by Building Tomorrow for a number of future schools – especially for our hybrid wall system and solar roof made from crinkly tin. We intend to monitor the performance and survey

user comfort in the finished building, and its suitability for a traditional classroom in Uganda.

Design philosophy

A school should offer simplicity, serenity and security. The simplest forms are often the most adaptable

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