Description

With its labyrinthine structure, narrow passages, horseshoe arches, inwardly oriented buildings, unadorned surfaces and perimeter wall, the architectural language and overall disorderly effect of the SOS Children’s Village in Tadjoura, Djibouti, are immediately reminiscent of the Islamic medina – a voluntary reference, and one that has been acknowledged by lead architect Urko Sanchez. Just as the traditional city structure reflected the ancient nomadic convention of living in a family group or tribe, so too the Children’s Village is held together by asabiyyah (the spirit of kinship or solidarity) and strictly separated from the outside. ‘We are one big artificial family’, says its director Ali Aboubaker Houmed, who currently welcomes 92 children aged three to 13. The wide age gap is explained by the fact that the Austrian NGO behind the project, SOS Kinderdorf, does not split up siblings. The brief specifically set out the project’s programme requirements in terms of floor areas, stipulating the design of 10 living units, each welcoming 10 children and a dedicated member of staff, a so-called ‘mother’. As Tadjoura mostly consists of buildings of one or two levels, the architects rapidly eliminated the multi-storey option, ending up with little room for manoeuvre in the restricted site dimensions. Just as in the traditional medina, it is hierarchical degrees of privacy that structure the compound. The only fully enclosed volumes, with four walls and a ceiling, are the most intimate spaces – the bedrooms, bathrooms and staff offices. Coming out of the bedrooms, the houses’ kitchens, living rooms and courtyards all blend effortlessly into one another, connected with concrete block screens and large physical openings, with a step up or down now and again.  Each of the 10 family dwellings benefits from the same attributes, but their spatial configurations differ slightly, and the ever-changing sequences of uninterrupted space contribute to the impression of intricate disorganisation while allowing for air to circulate throughout. Some of the hottest temperatures on earth have been recorded here in the Horn of Africa, and the project’s natural ventilation was a determinant design factor. But despite the architects’ careful wind-flow studies and the elegant chimneys added to enable air circulation into the project’s most recessed corners, the interiors remained too hot in the summer months so ventilators and air conditioning units were added.

At Tadjoura’s Children’s Village, a lot of the young people are not orphans, but parents enrol in the programme when they experience extreme hardship and are unable to provide a healthy and stable environment for their little ones. Relatives are welcome to visit any time and, in the summer holidays, children take turns to go and spend a month back at home. The Afar, the prevailing ethnic group in the area and origin of most of the project’s inhabitants, were a tribe of nomadic herders. Unsurprisingly, the translation of nomadic habits into tectonic form proves to be a thorny task, and a permanent architectural construct inevitably instigates new lifestyle demands. As Houmed tells me, ‘as nomads, you sleep on a straw mat so, if it gets too hot, you just move your “bed” to the shade. But here, air conditioning is unavoidable.’ In addition to the residential compound, SOS commissioned Urko Sanchez to design a kindergarten a few minutes’ walk away, welcoming some of the residents of the Children’s Village as well as other inhabitants of Tadjoura. All of the Village’s residents are enrolled in education, but they are spread around different institutions throughout the town, in order to facilitate their integration. From about the age of five, children freely come in and out of the Children’s Village, but the outer perimeter wall was a requirement stipulated by the NGO’s brief to guarantee a secure environment.

Both inside and out, the Village’s concrete blocks are coated in homogeneous pale yellow, reiterating the lack of defined ‘interiors’ and conveying the sense of a single continual journey from the bedroom all the way to the city. Urko Sanchez’s team imagined all the circulation spaces to become safe play areas for the young inhabitants. Beyond the clever re-appropriation of the medina structure into a home for a large ‘artificial family’, what stands out in this miniature urban organism is the stripping down of architectural form back to its essentials, opening up a vast array of appropriation opportunities from the users as a contained and reassuring environment.  Paradoxically, the lack of prescriptiveness becomes one of the project’s strengths. Architecture can certainly suggest ways of inhabiting spaces and try to encourage certain behaviours, but it cannot control. ‘That degree of uncertainty is what enables us, as architects, to be innovative’, believes Sanchez. ‘And sometimes it’s not what we expected.’ Upon my visit, I found out that children and staff alike deem the medina morphology well suited to the project, yet it is not a model with which they feel familiar – suggesting Sanchez has succeeded. The environment he has designed is both pertinent for the local inhabitants and innovative in its context.

Originally published in Bauwelt 14.2017, pp. 36-43, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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