By Raul Pantaleo, translated by Simon Turner
Raul Pantaleo is a member of the Italian architecture practice Tamassociati Architects. He has 18 years of experience in designing and building sustainable humanitarian projects in some of the toughest and most strife-ridden areas in the world. That means addressing, on an everyday basis, the process of empowerment through participatory self-help in the context of building. For uncube he describes, in his own words, the practical reality of building a clinic in Sudan, working together with refugees and local nomads.
The desert gives no quarter in the summer: it is violent, merciless and unfit for any form of life. On the shores of the Red Sea, Port Sudan lies between desert and sea. A port city of strategic importance for the whole of Sudan, its population has grown dramatically, rising in less than a decade from 30,000 at the turn of the century to nearly 500,000 in 2007. And it is still rising today. This dramatic expansion is mainly due to the influx of huge numbers of refugees from the wars that have plagued the region for years, added to which has been the settlement of Beja nomads due to the frequent droughts in the area.
»Poverty and war can destroy traditional crafts built up over the centuries, making these places almost incapable of building their own future.«
This is where our practice built the Italian paediatric clinic for the Italian NGO “Emergency”. It was a long and complex task, to a great extent due to the difficult social and environmental conditions, but especially to the limited technical skills available in the area. In this corner of Africa, we had first-hand experience of how poverty and war can destroy traditional crafts developed over the centuries, making these places almost incapable of building their own futures.
As usual in the case of Emergency projects, we tried right from the start to build the clinic using local labour and materials, but after just a few attempts to work with local companies we found they were unable to ensure the level of quality we needed. We therefore decided to go for self-construction, creating a company from scratch with refugees and local Beja nomads, as well as with Emergency staff. We adopted a participatory approach because we rejected the idea that companies should be brought in from the capital or, worse still, from abroad. We were well aware, however, that we would come up against harsh reality and find that the workers were often illiterate and sometimes lacked even the most basic practical skills – such as using a pair of pliers or a screwdriver.
The building site thus turned into a crafts workshop and, at the same time, a social laboratory where the local communities personally helped create a work of public utility. The project started out as a training course in the very basics of construction for the group of refugees who had embarked on the enterprise. It was a long and tiring process, but it was ultimately crowned by the satisfaction of having managed to self-build almost the entire clinic (excluding the technical areas). This meant starting from the main structure, the brick vaults and the walls in coral stone, and ending with the mashrabiya, the typical wooden latticework sunscreen found in all Islamic countries and commonly occuring in Port Sudan. This artefact turned out to be the greatest challenge, and it is the story of this particular object that I wish to tell.
We became interested in the mashrabiya while preparing the site, as we were curious about its historical legacy from seeing it on so many buildings in the town centre. We studied and analysed the objects for months, ultimately preferring them to aluminium sunscreens because they are perfect thermal machines capable of keeping out direct sunlight as well as the prying eyes of the world. They are simple and effective, and have a powerful cultural and functional identity.
So we set them into the architecture of our hospital as a sign of respect for local traditions, but also as a challenge to our ability to build something that elegant by ourselves. An experienced carpenter would have no trouble making these panels, but for our group of apprentices it was a nigh impossible task. From the outset, our work was strongly influenced not only by the refugees’ total lack of experience but also, and especially, by their different ways of perceiving space, reality and time – in particular, their different way of viewing the concept of precision.
We spent months in the site workshop, trying to build eight mashrabiya all exactly the same. That meant adjusting, enlarging and re-doing the same piece over and over again. But often our apprentice carpenters could not see the difference between making twenty horizontal strips or making twenty-one, or between panels of four metres and panels of four metres and five centimetres. This was partly because, lacking basic numeracy, they often just tried to make an approximate copy.
In the rudimentary language of the site, using gestures and English mixed with Arabic, they seemed perplexed by our idea of precision. “Same, same but different!”, they kept repeating. It was hard to explain that it had to be exactly equal, not just more or less equal. But around here, precision, in our terms, is an abstract concept.
Still, even in Ancient Greece, one of the cultures associated with the birth of mathematics, precision was considered to be the prerogative of the gods: humans are allowed an imperfect world, because we are ourselves imperfect. So in Classical buildings, the distances between columns were approximated or measured in tens of centimetres – and this was not just a matter of chance.
Raul Pantaleo (front row standing, second from right) is an architect and founder member of Studio Tamassociati which he founded in Venice in 1996 together with Massimo Lepore and Simone Sfriso. They specialise in sustainable architecture and are frequently involved in social and humanitarian projects. Tamassociati are particularly known for their work for “Emergency”, an Italian non-governmental organisation providing treatment for civilians in war zones worldwide. Tamassociati has designed health care buildings for Emergency in Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic and Nicaragua.Their Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Khartoum, which opened in 2007, received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013, and their Port Sudan Paediatric Clinic in Darfur, mentioned here, received the 2014 Zumtobel Group Award in the Building category. Tamassociati have also just been named Italian Architects of the Year 2014.
The illustrations accompanying this article are by Marta Gerardi and from Tamassociati’s book Destinazione Freetown published 2012 (in Italian only) by Becco Giallo
It was in the eighteenth century, with the Age of Enlightenment, that measured precision began to mean using millimetres, and later tenths of a millimetre. Today this is down to microns. It was only with the advent of industrial technology that the obsession with precision began. But in this corner of Sudan, it is the “same, same but different” collective attitude that prevails, and is still the way of working, and a way that we gradually came to accept at our building site.
By accepting that accuracy may really be the privilege of the gods, we ventured into a different dimension of construction. The result was a building that, with no trace of cold formality, expresses the vitality that led to its creation: it is functional and effective while remaining human. In our work with the refugees we experienced the imperfect pleasure of manual work, as opposed to the coldness of automated production. It was not a matter of aesthetics but of a new-found harmony with our own nature. Craft skills and self-building thus became a form of resistance against a modernity that tends towards standardisation but also, we hope, it will be a way of lifting this region out of its poverty. I
PRODUCT GROUP
MANUFACTURER
New and existing Tumblr users can connect with uncube and share our visual diary.
Uncube is brandnew and wants to look good.
For best performance please update your browser.
Mozilla Firefox,
Internet Explorer 10 (or higher),
Safari,
Chrome,
Opera