Architects:supertecture gUG

Year :2019

Collaborators : Patrizia Children Foundation

City : Shankharapur

Country : Nepal

After Nepal‘s century quake in 2015 we have been invited to come up with a design for the school extension in the Himalaya mountain village „Dhoksan“. The school was in need of four additional rooms: three classrooms and a multifunctional library.

In order to display some of Nepal‘s unlimited possibilities for reused, recycled, regenerative and circular construction technologies we decided to build every room as an individual house - every „classhouse“ from different innovative and underestimated materials: free donated „earthquake“ bricks, earth+bamboo+straw, "earthquake“-rocks + rocky slades , 700 old „earthquake“windows.

In Nepal‘s first brick-crowdfunding we convinced hundreds of households to donate some of the bricks from their earthquake-ruins. Finally we collected more than 14.000 bricks of 50 different types. For every individual type of brick we have designed a unique bonding. Even the roof consists of two different tiled pitches.

The second classroom is made of rammed local earth. Since the people of Dhoksan have not been very confident of using this free material we decided to build our house from five different layers with mixtures ranging from very simple to rather sophisticated earth aggregates: First we mixed earth with a little bit of cement, later with straw, needles and even cow shit. The building‘s roof is made of locally treated bamboo and it is covered with straw. Both: treatment of bamboo and straw had to be reinvented in „our“ village.

Some years ago almost every traditional building in our village's neighborhood was built from rocks covered with rocky slades. After many houses collapsed during the latest earthquake no one is rebuilding these traditional houses anymore. Reinforced concrete skeleton structures are replacing traditional architecture and former grace of cities and landscapes. By using all those collapsed rocks again and by inventing round rock windows we tried to make rockhouses "en vogue" again. All rocky materials in our classroom have their origin in former local rock buildings.

Nepal's latest earthquake destroyed more than 800.000 buildings. Many of the incorporated windows have later been dumped in stocks for old windows and wood. We managed to collect around 700 old windows and to refurbish them. They became both: facades and roof of our multifunctional window house. It features a library, a multipurpose room in the upper floor and a convenient students slide towards their homes.

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