S
aga Collective is a group of five young architects who want to practice
and share their knowledge with people in need. Joe Slovo is located on
the outskirts of Port Elizabeth and is a township which is more or less an
informal area and that was developed during Apartheid to host mostly
poor black and coloured communities. It is a dense area which usually
develops rapidly with no real planning. Access to water and electricity is
limited which makes the living conditions harsh.
The project consists of two buildings facing each other: on one side, the
sanitation building with eight toilets and on the other side, the main hall.
A container is plugged to the main building and hosts a kitchen and a storage room. The
building was conceived to host the children while the architects built the actual pre-school
on the opposite plot (it then became a workshop dedicated to wood and metal work).
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