Open Architecture Network

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Design Intent

This project aims to provide support to a community in health care crisis by designing a beautiful, contextual series of spaces for the people of Sanfe Bagar. The pavilion module can be used in a campus design, as in this entry, or scaled down to one building for satellite purposes. This design will bring the community together, advance residents’ health education and recruit much-needed healthcare workers to remain in the Achham District.

Distinctive Challenges of Site and Culture

The design team took the current quality of living to heart in their approach to the campus design of Sanfe Bagar’s Telemedicine and Community Center. Seeing the severe challenges that people of Achham District face, we became determined to create a thoughtful project to support the people in their culture. Our approach embraces a flexible design, imparting numerous entries to common areas and multiple spigots on the community cisterns.

The technical and logistic challenges of the site and building design included:

• Protection of structures from monsoon rains, earthquakes, and mudslides
• Availability of building materials and plausible transportation to the site
• Meeting the needs of the Achham District in this community and others in the region by creating a flexible design with a kit of parts that can adapt to a range of site conditions or programmatic needs.
• Providing the framework for programs and lifestyle that attracts and retains health workers to the rural villages of Far Western Nepal.

Critical Design Issues & Principles

• Meeting the Needs
• Sustainability
• Modularity
• Ease of Construction & Design Frugality

Meets needs of community
It is important for the people of Sanfe Bagar to become invested in health education and involved with the construction of telemedicine facility from its inception. Our additions to the suggested program provide amenities and experiences that are novel yet full of tradition. This site affords a number of communal spaces, inside or out, for people to gather. The entry to the buildings is accessible from the farmers’ footpath. A series of smaller buildings are organized around an open-air courtyard that might sponsor anything from a training session to a weekend market. The rainwater collection cisterns, available to the public at any time, will be a healthy source of filtered potable water for the townspeople. An amphitheatre has been created so that educational films and other forms of popular entertainment might be projected for the masses to congregate and really embrace the site. The technology found in the computer training rooms and modernized toilet rooms will be a further draw to the site.

In addition to health education, these structures were designed to forever protect their occupants by withstanding the monsoon rains, mudslides and earthquakes of the region. It is our hope that this method of construction will be a helpful tool for ongoing growth and construction in the region.

Sustainability
Incorporating a sustainable approach to building and operating this facility is of strong importance to this team. Integration of passive systems occurs at the building scale as well as the larger scale of the site planning.

• Water
  • Water Harvesting: A network of roof gutters collects rainwater and delivers it to cisterns placed on site for potable uses, providing a safe source of water year-round.
  • Storm Water Protection: The retaining wall along the back of the amphitheatre curves around the building sites directing storm water away from the structures. A trench drain at the base of the bermed amphitheatre drains water collected off the slope. The bamboo grove behind the wall helps with erosion control and serves as a potential building product for the community.
• Energy Production: For more reliable electricity, the power of the sun is being harvested by rooftop photovoltaic panels. Each building can be energy-self-sufficient with the power from its PV-powered battery pack. Roofs are oriented to capitalize on the southern exposure.
• Daylighting: While electricity will be a reliable energy source for lighting, ample window openings and clerestory windows in the pavilions provide inhabitants sufficient daylight to operate during daytime hours.
• Passive Cooling
  • Shading: Shade trees, wing walls and oversized rain gutters shade interior spaces and facades reducing heat gain. Thatch applied over the corrugated metal roof disallows direct sun exposure to the metal roof thereby preventing it from conducting heat down into the interior.
  • Cross Ventilation: Opportunities for cross ventilation occur at nearly every pavilion with the operable screen types and shutters. Shutters have louvers so that even if the user closes them for privacy, air can still flow through.
  • Stack Ventilation: Stack ventilation can be induced by opening low vents placed in the southern walls and high vents on the northern facades.
• Passive heating: During the cooler winter months, heat absorbed by the thermal mass of the stone wing walls will reradiate to the pavilions’ interiors providing passive heating into the evening and early morning hours.
• Local Resources: Specifying materials that can be gathered or fabricated locally provides a boon to the local economy and allows the building context with its site. It is the intent of the design team that local labor be used to construct the facility as well. The use of timber was minimized to prevent excessive deforestation. Instead, highly renewable bamboo constructs walls, shelving, partitions and roof supports. Stone, mud and thatch should all be locally sourced.

Modularity

Each individual pavilion in this campus design uses the same materials from a list of common components. Locally sourced building materials combine to form these components. Building components act as singular modules in their relationship to each whole pavilion. Each pavilion acts as a component to the size and organization of the site, as it was based on the footprint of a singular pavilion module.

By creating a modular design the project can be easily phased over time. Initially one, two, or three pavilions can be constructed and then expansion may happen as necessary. Also, modularity affords the pavilion to be duplicated at other locations as the telemedicine network expands to other villages. Further, the building type may be expanded by repeating wing walls and extending the structure by one dimensioned bay.

Ease of construction and Frugality of Design
Another important aspect of design is the ease of construction. The method of construction used on the wing walls is one that was taught by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, to his students at Taliesin West, by placing stone next to a formwork and infilling concrete to keep the stones in place. This method results in sturdy, earthquake-resistant, and beautiful structural elements. The partition walls utilize a local method of construction using a grid of bamboo, chicken wire and mud plaster on either side. Openings are cut for shuttered penetrations. These easily constructed, lightweight partitions are intended to fail in case of earthquake, leaving the sturdy structure to be closed-in once again.

Materials:

• Locally collected stone and aggregate
• Concrete
• Steel reinforcing bars
• Mud brick and plaster
• Chicken Wire
• Locally harvested wood
• Bamboo
• Local textiles
• Sheet metal
• Thatch
• Metal hooks, fasteners and connections

Modularity, integration of local materials and ease of construction are key aspects to this design. These features serve to unify the buildings on the site while making construction, growth and expansion incredibly efficient. Nothing has been added that doesn’t serve at least two purposes:

• Stone wing walls are the defining design element of the campus. They also provide shade, structural and seismic support.
• Gutters collect water for potable uses and shade the facades, keeping buildings cooler in the warmer months.
• Bamboo grove helps control erosion, shades the amphitheatre and courtyard spaces, and cultivates a renewable construction product for use by the organization and community, perhaps as a source of revenue as the program expands throughout Achham District.
• Retaining wall supports the contours of the grassy amphitheatre, aids in storm water management and is a strong design element in the organization of the site.

Note: The construction technique and passive environmental systems are more thoroughly detailed in supplemental file, 1193_supplementalimage_1.