A PLACE OF EDUCATION, AN EXTENSION OF COMMUNITY, a typology for replicable, affordable, and sustainable, development.
Kaira Looro 2025 Primary School Design Competition
As part of the 2025 Kaira Looro Primary School Design Competition, the project addresses underserved rural areas of southern Senegal, to ensure children's rights and dignity.
Architecture, we believe, should not be prescriptive, or force a singular notion of use onto space. Rather, architecture and all design of the built environment should afford new thoughts, enabling behavior previously impossible and inspiring the imagination of people who interact with the space. In designing this nursery school, we not only provide improved access to education, but facilitate the creation of a flexible space that becomes intertwined with the daily routine of the community as a whole. The school will be a space where children can be protected, nurtured, and taught but also a space capable of engaging village wide events and gatherings. Our proposed construction model demonstrates the intelligence of Senegalese vernacular architecture which through its use eliminates the dependency on complex systems. Instead, the stakeholders have agency to maintain, repair, and change the architecture to their evolving needs. This is amplified by the programmatic and formal organization of the site which facilitates a connection to the community as a whole. These two parts together aim to generate a feedback loop of self actualization through the construction of space that is more than a school but a natural and vital extension of the village or town in which it resides.
Designed by Lincoln Ruiz-Truong and Nick Grosh