The lord mayor of Sangha, Aly Inguo Dolo, has asked to the Association Dogon Initiative (ADI) to realize a Practical Training College in Sangha for 800 students. ADI has accepted this mission. The College will provide the area with a construction and agricultural education facility. The architecture is in line with local culture and building traditions. At the same time the design provides a solution to the new scale of a large school in a village setting which is part of the UNESCO World Heritage.
The project consists of various ensembles of classrooms, hangar-workshops, teacher-residencies, and technical service buildings, all surrounded by gardens and stone walls. They create a ‘new neighbourhood’.For now, the first cluster of classrooms, the residencies, and the administrative cluster are functional. The first one hundred of what will be a total of eight-hundred students are presently receiving technical training to become masons or electricians.
The barrel vault roofs, constructive and no-supportive walls, and floors are made of the same material, found at and taken from the construction site itself: earth. The earth is being processed on-site by mobile machines that produce hydraulically pressed earth-blocks, thereby heavily reducing the costs of transport and source-material. These HCEB-stones, that also provide optimum cooling climate, have certainly proven their usefulness. But with every project, the technology and application processes are being optimized and further developed. Recently, the first dome-roofs made from HCEB-stones were finished.
The young masonry-students, of which one third are women, will soon themselves build the third and last cluster of buildings, purposed for agricultural education, in fulfilment of their practical internship requirements. They will be given some liberty to feed from their architectural traditions and aesthetic intuition. Each design will obtain its own personal character.
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