African Design Magazine February 2015 | Page 31

African project: Mbera Project: Desert Flower refugee camp The challenge in building 60 classrooms at the Mbera Refugee Camp in Mauritania was to provide an alternative to transitional structures, usual in arid contexts, by combining materials and techniques. Instead of common solutions such as concrete slab, metal frame, corrugated iron sheets and plastic enclosures, FAREstudio combined sandbag masonry for massive walls and plastic sheets on metal trusses as lightweight roof, with a do-it-yourself approach inherently loose and apt to combine what is locally available. africandesignmagazine.com 31