Laafi Nursery School
LAAFI NURSERY SCHOOL
Albert Faus Architecture
ARCHITECTS
Albert Faus Architecture
STATUS
Built
BUDGET
$50K - 100K
AREA
0 sqft - 1000 sqft
YEAR
2013
LOCATION
Burkina Faso
CATEGORY
Educational › Nursery
At the lower end of the parcel that the Koudougou city council donated to the LAAFI association in 2008 there was a neighborhood landfill.A group of NGO volunteers cleaned up the site before the project started.
The layout of the volumes of the school maintains the idea of creating relationship patios between buildings, as happens in traditional houses in the villages of the region.
The classrooms are arranged following the east-west axis, exposing as little façade as possible to the violent eastern storms.
They are moved to the east of the land, freeing up the sheltered space to the west where evergreen acacias are planted to provide year-round shade for the play area and common activities.
The construction proposes a reinterpretation of vernacular architecture, trying to improve it with the use of higher performance materials.A ventilated façade is erected with an exterior stone wall and an interior, load-bearing wall, of adobe.
The ceiling is made of reinforced concrete beams and slabs where perforated ceramic vessels are embedded to allow the hot air that accumulates under the roof to escape.
The building is topped off with a parasol-umbrella, by means of a double ventilated roof.
The bulk of the construction has been carried out with a team of young masons, neighbours of the school.
A women's group has been responsible for the interior plastering of the adobe walls.
100% of the materials are local, most of them from Burkina Faso.
The stone quarry from which the thousands of laterite blocks for the facades have been extracted is 4km away and the earth for making the adobe bricks is just 500 meters away.
