Innovative solutions from Tanzania

Aiming to engage with many of Tanzania’s environmental and health challenges through architectural exercises, thirty students travelled to this region of Eastern Africa during the winter of 2017, to test their own constructions and prototypes.

From Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city lacking proper infrastructure and flood resilience strategies, to Lake Natron, where the isolated Maasai communities are suffering a two-year drought, we travelled over 3000 km to investigate and test the performance of inventive solutions to engage with clean water access, malaria resilient structures, energy efficiency and test new local building materials. Students systematically measured performance, monitored results and wrote scientific papers to study the potential of their hypothesis and engaged with local communities and researchers in the process of site specific.

This work is the student’s first step towards proposing a critical and alternative approach to building design. Now their work is exhibited at the Institute of Architecture and Technology. The exhibition opens at Friday the 23rd at 3 p.m. – all are welcome. 

The field work collaborated with Københavns Universitet and Ardhi University in Tanzania.