African project
Korando Educational Center – Kenya
captivate an international audience as well as making it sustainable. It was something
I’ve never seen before and I knew that if we got it right, we would be able to reach out
into the world.
The end goal of this building wasn’t just building another sustainable house. It also
wasn’t just meant to be accommodation. I wanted to create a symbol of hope. I wanted
it to break through the noise and shine out brightly. It is our own Eiffel Tower. A
landmark on the trans-African highway. There’s only one bright yellow dome home in
the entire world, and it’s ours.
But just building a beautiful dome home wasn’t enough. We wanted it to be
sustainable and we wanted to show the local community what was possible with a
low-budget and what advantages a sustainable building would have. If you look today,
the bananas and papayas near the grey-water holes from our bathrooms have become
massive. It’s so simple to direct the water for such a purpose and it only cost some
pipes.
Also our self-built solar heater on the roof is nothing else then an irrigation pipe
rolled around the skylight. I remember the first time bringing the kids and Mama into
the house to touch the hot water. They couldn’t believe it! I love those moments. It’s
real-life science. It’s so simple, but you don’t know what you don’t know, right?
Also during the building process we have been super strict on the reuse of all possible
materials as well as maximized waste reduction. This also helped us to save costs
of course. The workers must’ve been thinking I’m crazy many, many times. I always
wanted things done with the materials we already had around. Some of those timbers
we used to build the foundation in May 2015 are still around today. I wanted to show
them how easy it is to save costs and to break the conventional textbook idea of how
they usually build by using perfectly cut timbers one at a time, etc. It’s been a lot of fun
to improvise and to cut costs all the time. We came up with incredible solutions.
The building team
My team on the ground was 100% local except myself. Sometimes we must’ve had
15 people working. All workers came from the local community. It didn’t take long to
filter out the good ones and we stuck with them for over a year! If we needed more
workers we would just ask them to bring their family or friends.
They always knew of someone who needed work. So we were never short in
workforce, except when construction started on the highway. The road construction
employed lots of people from the community but our core team still stuck with us.
I’d like to tell you about the story of Eric. He has been with us almost from day 1
when we started digging for the foundation in April 2015. Very quickly he showed his
leadership skills and I felt that he had authority within the workers. So I made him my
foreman after a week and directed all tasks to him and he would then split the teams.
It was perfect and he really enjoyed the responsibly while I enjoyed having someone
out there all the time and watching out that things go right. Of course, if things go
wrong he was the one in charge, but he never tried to put the fault on someone else.
Click here to read more about the colour, materials and usage
africandesignmagazine.com
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