The Center d'Education FC Advan is located in a secluded, rustic area with extreme climatic conditions in the mountainous region of Madagascar. Instead of an improvised training ground on a hilly meadow, FC Advan is newly provided with a football pitch, a drinking water station, a guard house and a school building. This gives children the opportunity to get a minimum of reading and writing lessons after football training and eating together in the evenings.
The project is the combination of local craftmanship and unique communication. Due to the special situation, the architecture had to be planned and controlled from Zurich. The local builders use shovels and simple building tools, materials are gained from the surrounding ground. The local buildings are small and simple. The lack of advanced building knowledge and technologies had to be solved by drawings that requested nothing but their intelligence and their handicraft. Therefore, a simple typology was developed, all new buildings convey a common architectural language, despite their different uses. The local building type served as a starting point, a small and comparatively high brick house. It was modulated with a singular operation, the building corners were diagonally cut.
Ground plans develop along symmetrical axes, and the entire design has been figuratively communicated with the help of axonometric projections. Each building element was described like a step by step instruction. The role model for the plans was the instruction to build model airplanes. The magic with these do-it-yourself models is, every single step is actually easy, the complexity is generated with the sum of all pieces.
It resulted in an iconographic six-sect building type with a large roof that extends over the exposed building corners and protects against sun and rain. The building material was a brick from which all the buildings in the Madagascar highlands were built, this stone is fired locally in the villages from the clay soil at hand.
Material Used :
1. Building material: Brick from local clay soil
2. Paint: Saumon rose (local painting color)
3. Wood: Trees from the site
