Sustainability in building is rapidly gaining significance in the Middle East Africa region – particularly among female professionals and young graduates in architecture and engineering. This was clearly seen at the prize-handover ceremony for the regional Holcim Awards in Nairobi, Kenya. The majority of the 11 prize-winning projects dealt with education and the contemporary promotion of traditional manual skills.

The playful and colorful explosion of forms in the project illustrate its focus as a space for children in the Center for Nodding Disease in Odek, Uganda. The building is planned as the second phase of a larger complex dedicated to the care of children with Nodding isease, an affliction about which little is known but is widespread in Uganda. This “playground-as-campus” is the result of a participatory design process that incorporates the formal vernacular of traditional architecture as filtered through the drawings of its future inhabitants. The buildings will be constructed using local labor and traditional techniques with the aim of showcasing a post-conflict architecture, allowing inhabitants to rebuild their lives and homes.

The jury greatly appreciated the “Alice Through the Looking-Glass” strategy of tilting, coloring, and exaggerating the vernacular architecture of the region into something both new and exuberant. Further appreciation was given to the consideration the project gives not just to its main inhabitants but to using the project as a catalyst for community rebuilding after decades of war and displacement. By building up social and physical infrastructure and keeping the project by means of local ownership, the project is a contribution to the healing not just of children affected by Nodding Disease but of the village community as a whole.

Local financing model for sustainable building process and maintenance regime

The financing model is a combination of stakeholder inputs. The engagement built a sense of ownership among the local residents, and these families and local leaders have donated land for the project and are making bricks for the construction phase. The local government is giving policy and installations support, the core structural components be funded by Hope for Humans NGO, the maintenance and operation costs are bore by the community, while central government has pledged support for several medical functions. In order to lower material and logistic costs all materials are locally sourced. The design provides for exibility to meet the changing needs of the society in the future. The training center and form is a reinterpretation of the village huts, and the savannah landscape.