When: Thursday, 21st of October at 6pm
Where: Room M416 + Livestream, School of Architecture and Cities , University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS
Livestream Link: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/fc7cfc71b9534b29830ec5e4ae564d16
Before air conditioning, people paid attention to materials and orientation for the natural regulation of heat.
Nzinga Mboup
Senegal’s traditional dwellings were made of earth, but that construction method has slowly been abandoned. Dakar’s sidewalks today are littered with piles of sand and stones that are mixed with cement to make cheap building blocks.
Worofila and Mboup were inspired to use modern earth bricks made from soil and very small amounts of cement and water to create a mixture that is cut into blocks, compressed with a hand-operated machine and left to dry in the sun for 21 days. Unlike concrete, earth bricks require very little embodied energy to produce. Worofila have worked with Elementerre on the construction of private homes, offices and part of a train station. Elementerre, is an earth brick manufacturer founded by Doudou Deme in 2010.
This reimagining and reengineering of earth construction remains niche and it currently costs more than concrete with many clients still unaware of this as a building material. Worofila has recently been longlisted for an Ashden Award, a British prize for climate solutions, which it hopes will raise visibility of this ‘age old’ but actually very new age natural material – locally sourced and with excellent thermal performance, which acts to moderate the internal temperature and humidity of the architecture.
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For details contact: Will McLean
w.f.mclean@wmin.ac.uk