When Laura Sussman ’08 IA spent a month in Tanzania during the summer of 2007, she didn’t anticipate that the experience would spur an independent project at RISD. But while she was working in the village of Pommerin — a full-day’s drive from the closest city, Dar Es Salaam — the head of the Pommerin Secondary School heard that she was an interior architecture student at RISD and asked for her help in redesigning the school’s dining hall. Sussman took a closer look at the existing facility, analyzed the site and did a few quick sketches. But what she really wanted, she told the headmaster, was to collaborate with students and faculty at RISD to address the problem more comprehensively.
As a result, Sussman teamed up with architecture senior Elliott Olson BArch ’09 during her final semester at RISD to focus on the challenge through an independent research and design studio. Working with Professor Liliane Wong, the two set out to design a new dining facility for the school that could be built by the students who would use it, for $15,000 or less. They also hoped to suggest a new sort of indigenous architecture for Africa — one that connects to the openness of village life and doesn’t “look like it was built by Lutheran missionaries.”
“To do a project like this, which involves designing a solution for people living in a totally different culture and under totally different circumstances from those our students are familiar with, you need to really get yourself into someone else’s skin,” Wong explains. Her own studios tend to focus on design for inclusion, requiring students to go beyond their own milieux to come to grips with how design can be used to address the tangible needs of the poor and homeless, for instance. For the project in Tanzania, Wong helped Sussman and Olson to “immerse themselves in the mores of the culture,” to fully weigh the construction capabilities of the children who will be building the dining hall and to “look at modern precedents in Africa” in terms of materials, structure and form.
“We thought a lot about how to utilize mud bricks and other local materials,” Olson explains. They also worked to address two perennial problems in that part of Africa — water supplies and ventilation. “When I was there the kids would carry water up from a small river in buckets,” Sussman explains. “But it’s hard work and depending on the season, the river can almost dry out.” She also learned that a ventilation problem in the kitchen had led to the death of one of the cooks.
After multiple design iterations in which they stripped their complicated idea for the facility down to its essence, Olson and Sussman are satisfied with their final proposal Ð for an open-sided dining pavilion with earth flooring and an enclosed kitchen. Simple and aesthetically appealing, the roughly 3,200-sf dining hall features a cantilevered corrugated tin roof that allows rainwater to run off and collect in a cistern below. This will then be used for washing and other grey-water needs. They also propose sliding panels of corrugated tin to provide variable protection from the elements around the periphery of the pavilion, which is built from simple wood framing and local mud bricks for the enclosed kitchen area.
“The design takes advantage of every single economy possible and is much stronger as a result,” Wong says. She now hopes to help her students to apply for grant funding to build the dining hall on site with the 900 Tanzanian students who will make use of it every day.
