This time we are going to show you the work of some students of the subject of Cooperation whose objective was to design a house for Chenchus tribe in India at the request of the Foundation Vicente Ferrer.
Student: Roser Estelrich, Claudia Gratacós and Olalla Piñón.
Subject: Cooperación I.
Teachers: Ivan Llach and Raquel Colacios.
THE AIM of our project was to provide self building houses for the Chenchus, improving and respecting their construction materials. We understand how used they are to what they have, and the fear of something new. We wanted to increase their life quality and decrease skin and breath deseases by air flowing and promote more self confidence to their tribe by bringing their home, one step forward on a developing process.
Considering that Chenchus life doesn’t happen at home at all because they spend all the time hunting little animals and collecting fruits; which they will later sell on local markets. We have focused our Project on an eating/sleeping place. Thinking about those two needs, we distributed the house, giving different properties to match with each use.
The house has an entrance through a porch which acts as a prolongation of the kitchen, where most of the activities are developed during the day. The kitchen follows acting like an interior/exterior zone, letting all the interior space for sleeping.
We placed the window as close as posible from the floor, for two reasons, first of all to let people look through while seated and the other one has to do with ventilation; in order to let cold air in and make the warm one go up and leave the house through the opening above the door.
MATERIALS used are almost the same they already use, branches, mud, ropes and stones; developed from an architectural point of view. As a part of facilitating the change and to make them feel they still belong there, we purposely reused, as well as to recycled, their old homes. The walls can be used as the fabric layer, in order to maintain the mud/lime mixture fixed in case of any crack. The roof may be used as the filler layer between the structure and the mixture.
THE STRUCTURAL SYSTEM works by a row of arched branches locked with transvers branches by rope knots. That structure is embedded into the foundation hole which is later filled with cement and rocks. The cladding goes directly onto the structure, it is composed by a filler layer of twings and a mixing of mud and lime above which has a fabric inside.
Don’t miss it all the projects, you can see the video: