architectural portfolio
This project was undertaken in 2015 as part of the Honours Degree Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand.
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Project Brief
We were tasked with designing an animal hospital in the poor rural town of Semonkong, located high in the mountains of Lesotho where the surrounding farming community lacks access to medical care for its considerable animal population. The allocated site is a large undeveloped property located at the top of a hill, a short distance outside the main town.
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As a community project funded by an NGO, the project had to have a positive impact on the local environment while also being cost effective. It therefore had to deal with a lack of locally available raw materials and skills as well as the excessive costs of bringing materials and skills in from outside. A key requirement of the project was its integration with a group research project, unearthing as much relevant information as possible while on a week-long research excursion to the area.
Research
The focus of my own research was on Semonkong’s locally available materials. I developed a sophisticated rating system targeted at rural architectural projects, allowing materials to be compared based on a range of relevant criteria weighted for importance on the project in question. The results, which created a departure point in the design process, clearly indicated which materials should be used for the walls, flooring and roofing of my own design in order to provide the best combination of cost, proximity, insulation, etc.
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Concept
Based on the abovementioned research, the majority of the walls have to be constructed of rammed earth. One of the challenges of rammed earth is that it requires formwork which is not available locally. What is available though, is corrugated metal sheeting which is used on most roofs in the area. Because of the corrugated profile, the sheeting would need to be turned vertically for rigidity which would give the rammed earth a unique corrugated aesthetic. In addition, both the walls and the formwork would be strongest if curved on plan, so it was decided to use mainly curved walls to make up the structure.
In order to extract enough quality soil to produce all the rammed earth elements in the building, a large amount of excavation would be needed. It was thus decided to dig into the sloped site to level up the building area and drop the northern side below an embankment. This would also help shield the building from the harsh wind which blows from that direction and was identified through the research to be one of the big challenges on the site. By extending the curved walls beyond the enclosed spaces, wind breaks could be formed to further shield the doors, windows and useable spaces from the harsh conditions. The wind data from the site was used in computational simulations to study how the wind would flow around the building, how wind speed would be affected in relevant areas and how much surface pressure the wind would apply to the shell of the building. In this way, the buildings forms and curvature were adjusted until the simulations confirmed that the harsh wind would not be a problem.
The roofs, which were determined through the research to be rammed earth tile barrel vaults, had the implied characteristic of applying outwards pressure on the supporting walls. Part of the reason for choosing curved walls was the improved ability of curved walls to resist being pushed over, but it was deemed that this alone would not be enough. To counteract the outwards forces, the plan form allowed the barrel vaults to be placed next to each other with common walls. In this way the forces caused by one vault would be counteracted by those of the neighbouring vault. Conventionally, the outermost walls would still need to be buttressed as the last vaults have no neighbouring vault to counteract its forces. The rammed earth process, however, only extract the finest soil for use and discards a large portion of the soil. This discarded soil can thus be used as berms to replace buttresses at the ends of the building and allow the building to blend into the landscape. The walls in these areas are to be constructed of the local volcanic stone which is watertight instead of the rammed earth which would degrade if constantly exposed to water.
Workflow
During the conceptual phase, the process included a lot of back and forth between hand sketches, physical maquettes and SketchUp models. At all stages, SketchUp models were imported into Autodesk Flow Design to simulate wind conditions. The final design was modelled in SketchUp, drawn in AutoCad and rendered in Lumion and Photoshop. The research and design reports were compiled in Adobe InDesign.