Bedford Scholarship West Yorkshire Society of Architects

Uganda June-Sepetember 2012Rebecca NixonUniversity of Sheffield

‘Evaluating the appropriateness and success of the approaches to sustainable architecture by western bodies in Uganda’

Why Uganda?

I lived in Uganda from September 2010 to August 2011 teaching in a rural village and managed to grasp the culture and the lan-guage; so after my 1st year of architecture I was keen to visit Uganda again. This time using my previous experience to explore how cultur-ally contextual architects are, when designing and constructing in Uganda. When I decided to go to Uganda for architectural research, a lot of people were confused as to how I could find anything vaguely worthy of architecture to re-search about within Uganda. If you don’t study architecture you probably would think it’s a slightly bizarre location to choose for such research and before 1st year so would I. But from 1st year I began to understand that ar-chitecture embodies an array of aspects that people would not consider. It is true though, rural Ugandan housing typology ranges from mud thatch huts to clay bricks with tin roofs with the occasional timber components. The capital Kampala comprises of a mixture of vast slums made from whatever is going, to Brit-ish colonial buildings, Gaddafi’s giant stone mosque and the enormous corporate skyscrap-ers; all confusingly nestled among each other, occupying every available space. But what is interesting about Uganda, is the way in which it manages to be far more sustainable than the UK, without even realising it. I am also intrigued by the increase of architects from the west constructing in Uganda, a completely different vernacular and culture from their own.

I decided to do a sketch journal as part of my report to add interest to hopefully encourage other architecture students to travel and experience different cultures. Evaluating context is of such importance in the design process that through seeing the vernacular of architecture in one country, you begin to understand the vast array of considerations that are necessary when designing. In the original proposal for my trip I decided to concentrate on the following themes:

1 Response to context within the vernacular2 Appropriateness and success of materials and construction methods3 Community involvement and distribution of skills for the future

As I started to visit projects and explore these themes I began to discover that the communication between the people involved within these projects was a complex process and started to look more into how western charities, organisations and architects adapted to working in a culture dissimilar from their own and the management and monitor-ing systems put in place to aid construction. This interests me greatly as the school I lived and taught at during my gap year was funded by an English Charity and throughout the year I was able to understand the difficulties in communicating from both perspectives. By the end of my year I was also capable of understanding the cultural ways and could understand the local language, Luganda, enough to interpret what was being said around me. At first it was difficult trying to understand what was going on around me with a completely different set of social norms and generally the way and time scale in which things get done. I value the understanding of the culture that I managed to gain, because as a white person (muzungu-which translated means someone rich-but is a general term for anyone white) it is often difficult to go about your daily business as a Ugandan would do. The perception of white people by the majority of Ugandans is also interesting in considering how western bodies are able to design and construct in Uganda. White people are often stereotyped as being weak physically and Ugandans will usually assume you can’t dig or carry large jerry cans. Ugandans are the friendliest and most welcoming of people but constantly try to con each other and most definitely try to con white people; this is not something I get annoyed at, as if you have very little then why not?- it’s worth a shot! How does this perception of foreigners affect communication during construction and how do foreigners design and build in a culture they have not lived in?

There is also the subject of law enforcement, which Uganda suffers from the lack of, with bribing being the main way of doing anything, from having the chance of getting a job in a factory that pays 50p a day, to getting out of jail if you just tried to rape a 2 year old girl. With this lack of law, how easy is it for a western architecture firm to translate a design and then construct it on foreign soil, without been conned along the way? In this research I aim to explore these questions through examples, whilst integrating my original themes. How much genuine good do charities building in Uganda actually do? Does the construction of a new and innovative build-ing create the transferable skills for the design to be recreated for the benefit of Ugandan architec-ture and its communities?

The Nakaseeta Academy is to support 450 children in the immediate proximity who are without access to a permanently built classroom. It is Building Tomorrow’s third academy to use inter-locking soil stabilized blocks (ISSB) which are produced on site; a technology that is assessed later in the report. The ‘Ugandan Rural Classroom’ designed by Gifford, describe their design with the following in mind: ‘Sustainability encompasses the social, the environmental and the economic, and the most beneficial solution will be the one that best balances these aspects. We propose to enhance a simple form with features that optimise sustainability and can readily be applied to future designs.’

PROJECT 1 NAKASEETA ACADEMY

The first Project I visited was the Nakaseeta Academy in Namataba; this Project was designed by Gifford, a small structural engineering firm based in the UK and the design was the winning entry of the ‘rural classroom addition’ category of the 2009 Open Architecture Challenge. The school is being built for Building Tomorrow, a charitable organisation based in the USA who have built 15 academies across Uganda. When I visited the site, people from Building Tomorrow had just visited the project and were expecting completion. The design was nearing completion with final installations of windows and doors to be added. I visited some of the local people neighbouring the site, to ask if local labour had been used and what they thought about the classroom design that ventured from the usual classroom form. Local people had been used in labour alongside builders brought in from Kampala, who were also staying nearby the site. I visited a Moze (respectful name for an old man-similar to grandad) called Nsubuga George Willliam who lived next door to the site; he thought that the buildings were fantastic and was the one that informed me that the ‘Bazungu’ had been to Nakaseeta only a few days before. As it was a weekday morning, I asked him where the builders were, he chuckled away to himself and told me they were resting as the Bazungu were gone now. This got me thinking about monitoring and I wondered how strong the communication infrastructure between the builders, Building Tomorrow and Gifford was. With so many different people in three continents involved, monitoring must be quite challenging. George and I had a long chat sat on his porch and his son Zziwa Ronald came out to say hello; he had recently finished his teaching degree at Makerere University and I told him that he should try and get a job at the Nakaseeta Academy when it was completed. George also started talking about labour costs in Uganda being so much cheaper than the building materials and I started to wonder how propor-tionally different the labour costs in correlation to material costs, would be in the UK in compari-son to Uganda

The design considers a flexible teaching environment, com-munity use, daylight and solar shading, thermal comfort, ventilation, acoustics, rainwater protection and security. After teaching in a typical Ugandan classroom for a year, it was interesting to read through the design considerations for a structure aiming to create a ‘comfortable, stimulat-ing and usable environment’ and even more intriguing to visit the structure nearing its completion. The standard brick box structure with either barred or no windows and a thin sheet metal roof, causes many disruptions and discomfort during the teaching year. Firstly temperature, the temperature varies from 25-30 degrees Celsius throughout the year during the day, but in the evening when most children have evening preps it can be considerately less. The Ugandan Rural Classroom maximises the amount of thermal mass, without increasing the cost of embodied energy through the use of fired bricks, daub and cob/adobe. Teaching during the day means high occupancy density and a need to remove heat as rapidly as possible; the design envelops many features to improve ventilation. This is achieved through the addition of high and low level open-ings, creating a passive stack effect; the main windows and high vents are situated on opposite sides of the structure to encourage cross ventilation. The lack of ventilation and freedom to adjust temperatures can cause discomfort in the classroom, so the design from Gifford maximises the amount of controllable openings to improve comfort. The mono pitched tin roof is an important feature and a shallow plenum is formed between it and the false ceiling; which is hoped to passively exhaust air from the space. The false ceiling also becomes an acoustic barrier between the class room and the tin roof, removing the disturbance of heavy rain pounding down on the tin roof during the rainy season, which makes teaching very difficult. The mono-pitched roof will also be beneficial in channelling rainwater for collection and storage, especially during the dry season.

In the dry season solar glare disrupts teaching and in the rainy season lack of light creates a difficult learning environment. With availability to electricity limited, class room designs have to maximise sun and daylight in an appropriate and efficient way. The Ugandan Rural Classroom aims to create an optimum balance between natural daylight and solar gain through various design features. The roof forms an overhang-ing, reducing solar gain into the classroom and provides shading during breaks for the children. The design also illustrates recessed windows aimed to allow the low sun from the East and West to be controlled; however upon visiting the site I noticed that this recession had not been applied to the extent shown in the original design drawings. When visiting the project the tall windows, used to maximise day light penetration were quite striking in comparison to the usual Ugandan class room. The original design incorporates a large open door, which acts as a display area, on site this hadn’t been applied and instead there were just normal sized opening for a single door. This change in design could be because of the doors being insecure or the design was lost in translation between Gifford and the builders. The original design also illustrates the windows to be timber or bamboo slats, there was only one window installed when I visited Nakaseeta and it was a metal bolted one, which is typical of Ugandan vernacular; although most buildings have glass windows, with bars on the inside for security. This also brings the issue of convincing people to edit the vernacular; this applies to a variety of the innovative design considerations made in the Ugandan Rural Classroom design. For example the flexibility of the learnt envi-ronment illustrated in the construction drawings our aimed to provide the teacher with a freedom to use the space for exhibition, performance, active learning, games, group work, arts and crafts and play; but the Ugandan teaching style is uniformly, stationary dictatorship from the front of the classroom with none of the previous listed activities used. For this kind of class room to be utilised in its intended way and the space to reach its maximum potential, workshops are necessary to try and encourage different teaching styles. This is a countrywide protocol and in all the schools I have visited across Uganda, I have only ever seen an art lesson that has tried to change the space within the classroom. If a structure is successful in design for function, but then the function is never accessed then surely the structure has not been successful? I think that this highlights the importance of architecture as a continuous process even after completion.

2 ST ZOE PRIMARY, SECONDARY AND VOCATIONAL SCHOOL.

The next project I visited was St Zoe School, in Kagoma, Mubende District. This project was started in 1995 by Manchester based Charity, HUGS (Helping Ugandan Schools) and a family who live in Kagoma. St Zoe is the school that I lived at for a year; I chose this project because it has helped me to understand a lot about people working in an unknown culture and the fundamental difficul-ties involved in construction in Uganda. Dur-ing the year, it became apparent how difficult it is to find local builders who are not corrupt and when you do, because of the slow pace of Ugandan life, lack of efficiency, motivation and initiative, things are still slow to get started. All of these factors delay the construction process and result in confusion for people who live in a culture, where things run on time. Often communications between the different groups of people involved becomes like a game of Chinese whispers. Through visiting Uganda for a short amount of time, you can get a good idea of cultural etiquettes, but it is difficult to grasp properly how things work. To be able to design a piece of architecture and then con-struct it, it is important that you understand the context you are building into and the people you are aiming to benefit; otherwise as seen in aspects of the Gifford design, design elements may be changed.

St Zoe Primary School

St Zoe Secondary School

There was one event that really stuck in my mind that I feel illustrates this point. I was at one of the projects and there were people from the UK visiting to see how the project was progressing. It was the visitors last morning before going home and we went on a trip to look around the school land; during the trip the head teacher received a phone call and suddenly looked serious and wanted to go back to the school. He hurried off to-wards the car and started talking to his colleague; I heard the word meaning ‘to cut’ in Luganda and was worried about what was going on. The other visitors seemed complete-ly unaware of the swift exit. As we entered back onto the school premises, there was a line of villagers walking across the school field into the school. I thought this was really unusual, as why would all the villagers be going into school in the middle of the day in the middle of a lesson, in a big line? The car with the visitors in stopped at the top of the school and we carried on down, the school children were all out of class and in a large semi circle on the top of a bank looking down to the nurses office. At the nurse’s office there was an elderly woman in blood soaked clothes with two extensive cuts across her head; she had been picking ground nuts when a boy had slashed her across the head with a panga repeatedly, someone had then found her. They changed the woman into a clean dress, wrapped her head and got her in the car quickly and then drove straight past the visitors and on to the hospital. The visitors left happily, completely unaware of anything that was happening, even though it was so obvious, it just made me realise that al-though they were doing a brilliant, charitable thing, constructing in Uganda, they didn’t understand the culture they were building in. As they drove off in their car, a group of vil-lagers ranging from small boys to old men armed with pangas, hoes and sticks marched through the school into the bush hunting for the boy. The headmaster came back from town with a police dog, which followed the scent of the boy , which led him to the pack of villagers hunting for the boy. Incredulously the boy had slashed the woman, gone back into the village and joined the hunt for himself. When questioned, he claimed that the decrepit , shoeless and toothless woman from the village had paid him 5000 Ugandan Shillings (£1.25) to do it. She was questioned and it turned out the boy was not lying; earlier that day on my way to school she had asked me for money to buy sugar for her husband, which I didn’t give her, but only because I didn’t have any money on me! The old woman was guilty and so was the boy, they were not convicted and were back in the vil-lage within the next week; the woman who was cut luckily survived and was also back in the village the next week; and that was the end of it.

St Zoe also has a lot of small scale design pro-jects that are supporting sustainable solutions. The Director of the School is Ssempijja Andrew; he is on the board for the Uganda Domestic Biogas Programme and is an individual with a lot of initiative for microfinance programmes. Like most rural Ugandan villages, Kagoma suffers from drought during the dry season, lack of electric-ity for lighting during evening preps and lack of firewood for cooking. Unlike the majority of Ugan-dans, Andrew thinks about depleting resources and is trying to provide sustainable, affordable solutions for the village around him. With the support and dedication provided by HUGS the school harvests all the rainwater from the roofs in large water tanks and uses biogas for cooking the school children’s meals.

Although most Ugandans manage to be sustain-able without even thinking about it, St Zoe is an exemplary school in terms of small scale sustain-able solutions. A large proportion of the country struggles desperately in search of water during the dry seasons, but then as you travel across the country, passing the thousands of houses that line the main roads it is difficult to spot a gutter. A lot of schools have started to purchase water tanks, but with a large proportion of board-ing students, it is a serious necessity. It is not active systems that Ugandan architecture needs to put in place but the spread of knowledge to put a simple gutter made from a piece of misshapen scrap metal, on the side of their home with a jer-rycan at the end of it for rain water collection.

While I was at St Zoe I also went to visit one of my ex-students to see the brick making that takes place in the village. Locals rent a small piece of land from an old man in the village; every day they go down and mix water in the dug out pits to make the clay and mud soft enough, the clay is then slapped into a mould and placed on the ground where it dries for a week. My pupil and I worked out that for every 100 bricks made, 10 bricks go to the landlord for rent and the cost price for a brick is 150 Ugandan Shillings (3.5p).

In the dry season the school children take it in turns to walk a mile to collect water for cooking the school lunch.

On our way through Mubende we visited the stunning Nakayima tree, a sacred site sitting on a plateau above Mubende. The site cel-ebrates a tree ‘with breasts; the base of the tree creates small coves filed with women smoking pipes surrounded by steaming pots.

The view from Nakayima

3 LAKE BUNYONYI CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY SCHOOL

I was excited to visit this school, with well known UK architects involved. The Lake Bunyonyi Christian Community Vocational Secondary School was set up in 2006 by the local community and in 2008 the Richard Feilden Foundation got involved in association with Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. Alongside FCB Studios, Buro Happold provide expertise to train locals, creating transfer-rable skills for the future. Located on the hillsides of Lake Bunyonyi the school occupies a steep, terraced site, posing difficulties in suitable land for building, access routes through the school and drainage down the slope. A master plan was designed in order to tackle the complexities of site and expand the school in a sustainable and beneficial manner; four of the phases have now successfully been completed.

PHASE 1 (2008) – Dormitories and School HallPHASE 2 (2009) – Toilets, rainwater drainage, retaining walls and stepsPHASE 3 (2010) – Dormitories, Laboratory and LibraryPHASE 4 (2011) – Central dining and assembly room

drawings by FBC Studios

drawing by FCB Studios

I arrived on site on a boda with my friend George and we met Patrick Tumwijukye, Director of the School. Once again I was welcomed into a project in the friendliest and most welcoming manner and I started the tour of the school; within three hours I had seen an array of projects, buildings and systems embracing sustainable design and creating skills for the future in the surrounding com-munity; I was very impressed. All the structures and systems, from the retaining wall to the toilets follow the vernacular, using locally sourced materials. When I arrived at the school I met a group of students on the vocational brick laying course, working away in the school, mixing. The Richard Feilden Foundation have encouraged vocational training, something which many Ugandans view as not important, as there is a real focus on academic studies and going to University, even though there are very few jobs for graduates. The future development of Uganda will depend on construction and infrastructure, therefore it is crucial that people are trained in construction and introduced to new technologies. The students on the vocational course are currently building the new staff quarters and have contributed to many of the other structures in the school, which is an excellent sustained way of training the students and developing the school.

The central dining and as-sembly room is an impres-sively innovative structure able to accommodate around 300 people, using locally sourced materials with a stunning view open-ing across Lake Bunyonyi. The structure creates a dynamic and flexible space that can be used for as-semblies, village meetings, debates as well as a dinner hall; the roof structure also works well acoustically, so there is not much noise dis-turbance during heavy down pours. The construction of this project was completed with an architect from FCB Studios helping in con-struction; this is exactly the kind of monitoring and guidance that designs vary-ing from the normal Ugan-dan building forms need. As a result of such interaction, the project was success-ful from the design stage through to completion.

I was also introduced to the Bam-boo bicycle project, which is part of the vocational training, funded by an American Organisation. The bamboo is grown on an island nearby and the sack of fibres used to bind the bamboo frame is bought from Kampala. The bamboo frame takes a week to make, is sold for 1,000,000Ush and the materials per frame cost 100,000Ush. This is an incredible profit per bike, but I am sceptical about the demand for such frames in Uganda, especially at that cost and Patrick informed me that the frames were being shipped to America for sale. This was disap-pointing news and completely goes against the project in terms of helping the community and sustain-able sensitivity. During my time at the school I was really impressed to see students encouraged in Art and creativity, something rarely seen in Uganda.