La deserción y la minería de datos

at the northeastern outskirts of the town of Mali, Guinea, at an elevation of 4,790 feet above sea level in the Fouta Djallon high-lands—the origin of the Niger, Senegal, and Gambia rivers. Temperatures are mild, ranging from 62˚ Fahrenheit in the winter to 88˚

during the summer. For three months during the rainy season, precipitation is constant and the annual rainfall averages 20 inches.

The house is sited on a narrow terraced strip of land, on a west-facing slope with picturesque views of the surrounding peaks.

A continuous roof structure, whose columns and beams are constructed of hard mahogany harvested from local forests and joined using simple steel fasteners, shades the indoor and outdoor living spaces beneath it. The slope of the roof is parallel to the slope of the site;

and to protect against strong winds, thin steel rods are attached to the overhangs on the east and west sides of the roof, extending to the foundation, which anchor the roof to the ground. On the east side of the house, the rods support a woven bamboo screen that filters the morning sunlight and gives privacy to the outdoor toilet and bathing area.

In the shade of the roof are several rooms of varying shapes. Round volumes at each end of the villa serve as guest rooms. A square room is used for storage and houses the bath and toilet facilities. Sleeping quarters are connected to the living room in the large

rectangular space. Meals are also prepared in the living room, which has built-in cupboards and a counter. A gap between the ceiling and the roof allows cross ventilation to completely circulate around each indepen-dent volume.

Each of the rooms is constructed of a single thickness of stabilized compressed earth blocks measuring 10 by 10 by 20 inches and rendered with a cement stucco. Each compressed earth block is made of soil that contains approximately 12 percent moisture, mixed with 3 to 5 percent portland cement.

In accordance with the aims of the architects and client, many of the building components were made by local villagers. The compressed earth blocks were made by hand using a press imported from Belgium that allowed a team of six workers to produce between 700 and 1,000 blocks a day.

Floors are covered with glazed ceramic tiles handmade by women from the nearby village of Colci using molds built by a local carpenter. Outside, the terrace floor is covered with red gravel. The large ⅛-inch-thick roof tiles were made by hand on site from cement, fiberglass, and plant fiber, and are curved to interlock and overlap each other. Woven straw mats, another locally sourced craft, cover the ceilings in the northern guest room and the main living area and master bedroom.

Villa Eila

opposite, top: South elevation opposite, bottom: the west facade is open to views of the mountains

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Site plan

Section Site section

top: the east facade is camouflaged by a woven bamboo screen that blends with the Fouta Djallon highlands in the background.

bottom left: A sublime effect is created by the alternating bands of light and shadow that pass through the woven bamboo screen.

163 VIla eIla

bottom right: the ceramic floor tiles were made by local potters.

Architecture Firm

In the early 1980s two Guinea natives, agrono-mist Alpha Diallo and his uncle, veterinarian Bachir Diallo, decided to help their country by creating a poultry farm to improve the Guinean diet, which lacked sufficient protein.

Education, teaching others to raise and sell chickens, was to be the primary directive of the farm. Alpha had studied in Europe and was well known for his translation of the famous Finnish poem The Kalevala into his native language, Fulani. His work caught the atten-tion of Eila Kivekäs, the founder of Indigo, a nongovernmental association dedicated to helping developing countries. Alpha eventu-ally became Kivekäs’s translator and told her of his and his uncle’s poultry project. Although Alpha died in 1984, Kivekäs asked Bachir to begin the poultry farm with the support of Indigo, and in 1986, the poultry farm opened in the village of Koliagbe, becoming an imme-diate success.

Because of the rapid success and growth of the educational component of the poultry farm, classrooms and housing for students and

teachers were needed. The poultry farm even-tually was organized to educate five particular groups: illiterate farmers, farmers literate enough to receive advanced instruction, students from professional schools who might establish more poultry farms, professionals with academic backgrounds in fields such as veterinary studies, and university students preparing theses or final reports on topics of food and agriculture.

In 1998, Kivekäs commissioned Mikko Heikkinen and Markku Komonen, Finnish architects who had gained great experience in the region after completing several projects beginning with Villa Eila, to design a campus for the school. They continued their approach of improving upon regional building tech-niques by employing compressed earth block, rather than using crudely fired bricks, an inferior material whose production requires a tremendous amount of wood. They also avoided using corrugated metal roofs and instead designed a process in which the build-ers could make cement roof tiles by hand.

The architects also imported their knowledge of wood construction techniques and devel-oped a strategy for the campus based upon vernacular planning methods to create an Aga Khan Award–winning project whose history, philosophy, and architecture is a hybrid of Finnish and Guinean traditions.

Village compounds in Guinea typically consist of three types of buildings: larger communal structures for sleeping, smaller structures for cooking, and covered areas without walls for socializing. Buildings are usually grouped around an open space with a single tree, where activities take place in the shade and open air. The architects used this traditional organization as a precedent: the classroom, a dormitory that houses twelve students, and teachers’ quarters define a court-yard with a tree in the center and a water tower marking the main entrance. A 4-foot grid on which the 3,660 square feet of buildings are arranged dictates the relationships between them and their proportions. The ramifications of this grid can also be seen in the details of the individual buildings. Glass is arranged in rows of fixed and operable windows that add diversity to the rigid layout and also allow for interiors that are bright and airy, reducing the massiveness of the earthen walls.

A double-layer load-bearing wall of stabi-lized compressed earth blocks resting upon a concrete foundation is the primary building enclosure used throughout the campus. This gives the buildings considerable thermal mass, keeping them comfortable throughout the year. Workers using a hand press were able to make up to a thousand blocks per day, on site, from locally sourced soil. The manual press