Earth Campus, Tatale, Ghana

#OnePlanetOneFamily

This project is for Tatale community, a sustainable teaching, learning, training and production centre at the northeast of Ghana on the Togo border. It is run by the Salesians with their Don Bosco mission.

There will be a school to learn sustainable construction techniques such as adobe masonry, rammed earth, timber structures etc., a school for agriculture and the production of local agricultural products, an electrical training centre, domestic economy and healthy nutrition as well as student dorms, a community hall, library and teacher accommodations. Through this vocational training the young people are to be enabled to secure the living for the families and to counteract the problem of rural exodus and emigration.

For decades, construction in the context of international aid has predominantly followed a specific pattern: foreign organizations erect their structures, based on a simple grid pattern and made of industrialized, often imported materials, in the midst of vernacular buildings. Development projects do not typically incorporate endogenous potentials or valuable local building traditions. Yet since these initiatives originate from wealthy and powerful parts of the world, the imported materials become status symbols: strength and stability, power, education, prosperity.

This project aims to develop an alternative. Building with natural materials, such as earth, maximizes the potentials of freely available resources and creates employment opportunities. As a result, investments in the built environment generate returns in both environmental and social capital.

This is what we call architecture for development.

It is a pilot project within the Catholic Church to find an enhanced way of building that fully respects the cultural context and identity, the embedded wisdom in vernacular structures and build with the natural and locally available building materials in order to keep the added value for the local people and rural area.

“Even the first glance at the floor plan, at the idea of ​​architecture shows that an architect is not looking for self-realization, but is building on cultural, social, human, craft and sustainable foundations with love and sensitivity. The shapes, the spaces dance and swing, not European grid-based thinking or maximizing, but cheerfulness and light-heartedness speak from the design.

It will certainly be a very exciting architecture, that still draws its strength from the tradition and knowledge of the people and the region.”

Peter Reischer

Video about the classroom and workshop 

Video about the boarding school