T
he site is an hour east of Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city, in a village
called Abetenim where the NKA Foundation has a small amount of land.
Here, eighty percent of houses are built using earth- the majority of which
are destabilised due to a lack of foundations, or poor construction leading
to erosion by the wind and rain.
The project had three primary aims:
• To create a house that was affordable enough to be reproduced elsewhere
in the country
• To test different construction methods so as to reduce the amount of
cement used in the build- therefore lowering the cost as well as the environmental
impact
• To provide an opportunity to practice and make literate all involved in the techniques
used in the house – whether local worker or student volunteer. This allows for the
findings of the project to be passed on after the build had finished.
The house uses a lesser known and perhaps more experimental technique- poured
earth. This technique was chosen because it can be mixed and poured quickly to
give monolithic walls, its compressive strength can be near that of concrete, and the
height:width ratio is smaller than that of rammed earth walls.
The house itself contains three bedrooms, a large communal area with a double height
space above it and a bathroom, as well as several outdoor spaces defined by the roof of
the building which can be appropriated as extra covered cooking or social areas when
temperature permits.
The poured earth walls define the ground floor of the house, whilst the upper floor takes
the form of a series of wooden a-frames clad in a combination of oil drums and zinc
corrugated sheeting, giving two very different construction phases and allowing for a
Watch a time-lapse video of the construction
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africandesignmagazine.com