Original Story Published by: Cameron Sheppard for The Daily Evergreen
Photo Source: ©The Telegraph
Seven pairs will submit their layouts late March for Malawi judges to decide.
Architecture students at WSU will compete against other students and professionals for the chance to design a boarding school in Malawi, Africa.
Ayad Rahmani, associate professor of architecture at WSU, says the goal of the competition is to design a self-sustainable living facility and school in Malawi, Africa on Wednesday at Carpenter Hall.
Seven pairs of students from WSU will each design their own layout for the school, and these designs will be submitted in late March before judges in Malawi decide on which should be built, said Ayad Rahmani, associate professor of architecture at WSU.
Louis Shannon, a junior architecture major, who is competing with his partner, said the designs will be large scale. He said the proposed layouts will not only include a school and classrooms, but a whole complex with dormitories, faculty housing and perhaps even a livestock or gardening area.
Rahmani said the goal is to design a school and living facility that will be almost fully self-sustainable, using solar and wind energy as well as rain water runoff.
“This is not just because it’s a good thing to do,” Rahmani said. “It is because they have no other choice.”
He said many of the resources must come from the site itself because the site of the school will have no municipal water or electricity supply.
Rahmani had his students research the climate and environmental conditions of the site to understand what resources were available, he said. They found that there was plenty of rainfall, wind and solar potential at the site of the school.
“It makes sense to capture and harness this energy,” Rahmani said. “These resources are plentiful [in Malawi].”
