Since 1994, Professor Gail Della Piana has taken students from Miami's Architecture and Interior Design program to Ghana, Africa for service learning projects. The students have designed and built a library, reading room, and house. In the fall of 2002, the studio focused on a market place for the village. Without elaborate site maps and topographic information the building program was open to individual interpretation.
The first challenge was learning about a culture and place I have never experienced or visited. I began researching the Ghanaian people, learning about technologies indigenous to the land. It was this research that led me to the focus of my design: bamboo.
The people of the village have limited access to traditional building materials. The village's proximity to the rainforest allows easy access to bamboo, a free, plentiful resource. The bamboo is uniquely sustainable for the village, little waste would be occurred in the construction, there are no machines to damage the fragile rainforest, rapid growth allows for quick replacement, and the gathering of the bamboo could be a community event.
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