The Ebrah Project, Assinie-Mafia, Côte d’Ivoire

This Studio will situate a housing development within The Ebrah Project, by Koffi & Diabaté Development, located in the coastal city of Assinie-Mafia, Côte d’Ivoire. Offered here by the developers as a site for an experimental alternative to deregulated, unchecked, market-driven urbanization, the development will be situated within the area of Bassam-Assinie, between a sensitive tropical mangrove forest, a lagoon and the ocean. The housing project will form part of a large urban landscaping project by Koffi & Diabaté (currently in progress) centered on the development of a Built Ecology where notions of sustainable development are fully integrated at every scale within building design concepts, as the developers aim to introduce a new, locally derived “coastal” material aesthetic.

Through the medium of housing, we will investigate a series of questions linking architecture to the organization of material culture:

I. Why do we dwell and how can we support dwelling?
In the context of rampant migration and rootlessness within our media-saturated present, we will question what we need from a home. And to what extent is modern humankind essentially homeless? As we come together in this studio from all corners of the earth, and from vastly different climates and cultures, we will take this unique opportunity to collaborate with the developers to investigate experimental concepts and phenomena of dwelling: How the design of these phenomena could create a sense of ‘home’, especially for the uprooted, through the tangible connection and immediacy of integrating biological materials, environmental ephemera and living ecosystems. Through an urban metabolism framework, we will work with the developers to conceptualize and design the flows of materials, water, food, energy and air through the module of the house, as both a basic unit of social and economic organization, as well as the imaginative vessel through which culture is passed down and transformed. Conventions that establish the boundaries between individual and collective bodies, both human and non-human will be questioned.

II. What is Development?
The word development, in the context of the built environment, has typically been associated in the modern era with a process of growth or change, in which a society or economy becomes more ‘advanced’. However, it’s possible to speak of ‘developed economies’ that are typically accompanied by built environments that erase most indigenous flora and fauna in favor of urban heat islands and biodiversity deserts that are also uninhabitable by humans without mechanical climate control. So, we will question the fundamental metrics and values of modern and contemporary material systems. How do we characterize these ‘advanced’ material flows?
The advanced concrete and steel systems are often considered ‘dependable, static and durable’, but might only last a few decades despite permanently removing minerals and sand from coastal beaches that took millions of years to accumulate. Meanwhile, a community that still builds in mud structures that last thousands of years with only a few days of annual maintenance is considered very ‘low on the development index’, despite the fact that the architecture is designated by UNESCO to be intangible cultural knowledge in danger of extinction. We will investigate and develop criteria for hybrid contemporary and ancient methods, with rigorous lifecycles that take into account the social, ecological and geological implications of material choices.

III. How are climate change effects shifting our notions of human security?
As our rapidly shifting climate is throwing into question fundamental ideas about how we secure ourselves within built form, we will question the relatively recent connection in human history between the sense of ‘security’ and static architectures. Over the span of architectural history, the vast majority of human dwellings guaranteed security through the nimble recombination of portable elements, assuring their nomadic occupants of a patrimony that could be passed on to multiple generations, and adapted to a vast array of climate conditions. Within The Ebrah Project, while acknowledging the fixed geographical boundaries of the site, we will investigate novel regenerative and circular material practices that align with adaptive, living maintenance protocols.

Program

The studio will focus on the design and development of housing at three scales of inquiry: a) the detail; b) the housing unit, and; c) a plan for housing for 100 units within The Ebrah Project through five main modalities:

1. Scalar Program. The studio will look at how the morphology and planning of housing units, from the DNA of the material detail to the scale of the unit and the urban layout, can promote latent community and commercial programming opportunities for places where people grow, cook, purvey, eat, identify place, and where the unit itself is a component in a larger urban infrastructure.

2. Material + Construction Systems. During travel week, we will conduct intensive workshops with local artisans and builders, as the studio will focus on regenerative biomaterials that are locally and regionally sourced from forest and agricultural streams—both from waste products towards construction, and as source media for mitigating environmental factors. The studio will also look at how the assembly of the housing unit can create a net-positive environment (energy, water, etc) for the inhabitants of the units’ immediate surrounding environment.

3. Water. The coastal climate and relationship to tropical airborne humidity will be examined from an aesthetic, poetic and technical performance standpoint to radically shift the paradigm from rigid and outmoded centralized modern water systems, towards distributed systems that create an intimate connection between the domicile and ambient water flows.

4. Energy. Through active charettes with the architects and developers, the studio will examine how emerging technology coupled with new thinking about distributed infrastructure can facilitate seamlessly integrated energy capture, storage and transfer from materials and living ecologies into power driven systems like lighting, signage, small power receptacles (for charging phones, devices etc.)

5. Airflow Dynamics + Pollutants. The studio will examine the macro and meso scale urban air flows from an environmental justice standpoint to understand how urban development and morphology either produces or mitigates toxicity and the opportunities for our project to not only decrease their own negative contribution to urban air quality but how form can enhance and remediate at multiple scales to mitigate other emitting sources within the urban airflow stream.

Schedule

September 26th - Design Review for Assignment #1 – The Detail

October 22nd – Mid-term Design Review

December 12th – Final Design Review

Objectives

Each student will develop ways to approach with equal measure issues of site, environment, context, history, concept, structure, materials, systems, and geometry in order to provoke a tangible and persuasive architecture that:

1. Advances their insights in response to the program brief and performance criteria that each student individually develops a comprehensive program and ‘client’ analysis and assessment

2. Furthers ecological and parametric approaches to the building and thinking of integrated architecture and design that considers environment, structure, envelope and assembly systems.

3. Produces architectural knowledge and expands possibility of ecological and design thinking through the act of integration, development of ordering systems, conception of design through scales and implementation systems.

4. Builds awareness of the many and complex factors involved in the design of experimental housing types.

5. Build an understanding of the theoretical, traditional, symbolic, practical, constructional, and technical considerations of introducing regenerative material flows into the design of housing types and their applications.

Students will develop a capacity to design at various scales of material realization and assembly in support and development of conceptual intentions/ideas while integrating building, environmental, and programmatic systems and addressing regulatory and technical requirements. Students are expected to iteratively address multiple design considerations and in doing so to develop their awareness and understanding regarding how:

1. One scale informs/impacts another

2. Criteria established by considerations of environmental building performance inform and positively affect morphology, structure, envelope and the planning and design of buildings

3. Disciplines affecting architectural design (structural, mechanical, acoustic, lighting, etc…) cannot be seen as exclusive, isolated, or compartmentalized practices, and to develop the capacity to integrate that understanding early into the design process.

Project Phases

Development of an Ecological Living Module (ELM) Through the program of a simple housing unit, and its relationship to multiples (10 homes, 100 homes, >1000 homes) which become an Ecological Living Network (ELN) in which we will investigate and experiment with an ecosystem-of-systems approach to completely reconsidering the relationship between human life and our ecological surroundings.

Background
The building and construction sector is at the heart of global economies and is vital to the achievement of socio- economic development goals of providing shelter, infrastructure and employment. The sector is the largest consumer of non- renewable, toxic resources, while the over-exploitation of raw materials damages the environment, endangers communities and promotes conflict.

Furthermore, the sector is not addressing rampantly expanding global housing insecurity. Overall, about 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing, one hundred million are homeless, and 850 million people are living in informal settlements which increases their vulnerability to disease transmission and other hazards. As the number of climate migrants is steadily increasing, the percentage of the global population without access to secure shelter, water or energy sources is projected to explode, necessitating an investigation of new forms and relationships between a domicile and the means of procuring basic security. CO2 emissions resulting from material use in buildings account for 28% of the annual buildings related CO2 emissions. Most of these emissions are a result of cement and steel manufacturing, cement production alone makes up 5% of global CO2 emissions. Hence, the building and construction sector has a major role to play in mitigating climate change. With changing climates and disasters increasing in number and intensity, the built environment is one of the most vulnerable human assets and in many cases existing infrastructure and BAU constructions are less and less adapted to the changing climate. Furthermore, humans spend more than 90% of their life inside the Built Environment. The current pandemic has further highlighted the need to completely reconsider the ways in which buildings negotiate spatial and flow relationships between interior and exterior, in order to provide healthy indoor environmental quality.

Ecological Living Network Program

Innovation is critical towards transitioning buildings and cities into built ecologies that align with and support the work of the geo-biosphere. Here we are offering the framework of a small housing module through which to examine and investigate ways in which we can reconsider how a group of four people might interface with ambient energy and materials flows in order to sustain their requirements for energy, water, food and fresh air. This exercise is meant to solicit ideas and analysis towards a productive discourse on future built environment procedures. Developing a sustainable built environment methods based on local and people-centered solutions is key for countries to achieve their housing objectives in alignment with Sustainable Development Goals and their climate commitments under the Paris Agreement. To this end, Yale Center for Ecosystem + Architecture is joining forces with an extended network of collaborators to develop a programme which aims to foster investigations leading to the development and deployment of local and people- centered strategies to transform the housing sector across the globe, towards the achievement of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. The Ecological Living Network programme was launched following the successful development of a first Ecological Living Module (ELM) demonstration which was designed to work with the climate in New York City, and was exhibited and demonstrated in July 2018 at the United Nations HQ. The 22-square-meter ELM was the first instantiation of several adaptable and open prototypes, intended to spark debate and propose new ideas on how to rethink the way we live, through a novel Built Environment Ecosystem Framework that can adapt to and test the potential for different materials, forms and systemic approaches to address the following:

1. Resilient and adaptable construction techniques

2. Renewable, sustainably-sourced local materials and resources

3. Secure on-site solar energy, geothermal and/or wind energy where appropriate

4. Safe sustainable rain and ambient water capture and purification, with grey water cycling

5. Air quality bioremediation through plant-based approaches

6. Waste management integrated with distributed micro-farming, dry toilets where appropriate and sustainable fertilizing methods

7. Integration of nature and biodiversity in the project

8. Pedagogical information on how to operate in the ELM to help sustainability

9. Thermal properties: Insulation & building envelope, low carbon heating and refreshing

10. Circular economy: recycling materials in the project – from the area and from the working site

11. Design: Modularity, Flexibility of the design and versatility in use. Showcase benefits of pre-assembled modular construction (gain in time and clean working site) with a positive future lifecycle – deconstruction and recycling of parts)

12. Urban planning: Orientation of the building and architectural features that play with climate (veranda, accumulation walls, sun shields, natural ventilation, canopy…)

13. Heritage: How can the ELM demonstrate principals for taking the surroundings into account and integrate with local cultures and methods?

Objectives / Outcomes:

The ELM ideas competition aims to support concepts for transitioning to more locally adapted sustainable construction solutions and responsibly sourced materials through promoting:

• Locally adapted sustainable construction solutions and materials with a focus on passive designs, nature-based solutions and recycled and bio-based materials
• Business models for more local supply chains for sustainable construction
• Sustainably sourced materials and sustainable construction/building standards, labels and certifications
• Green building codes and other regulatory frameworks for buildings and construction
• Green building certifications and labelling creating market incentives for cleaner production standards.
• Green public procurement for the construction sector
• Awareness campaigns for construction companies and building/housing developers

Program

The area of the proposed housing unit will take the minimal dimensions of a living unit for housing, comprised of units of 200 sq. ft. Mobility being a vital factor, the house needs not to be self-mobile, but should be treated as an extension, or construction that can be disassembled and reassembled, as a circular principal.

The Interior Spaces should include the following:

1. Living Area / Recreation space

2. Flexible Sleeping Area for 1-4 persons

3. Cooking and Dining Area

4. Toilet space

5. Workspace

6. Any other function that the participant wishes to add to the ELM Unit

Bioclimatic Considerations

Either individually or in a group you will continue to develop your ELM proposal towards an urban housing proposal for Ebrah.

Throughout the semester you used your selected location for your weekly workshop and assignments and will now apply your climatic analysis in order to investigate and test proposed strategies on ELM unit designs.

The ELM exercise is intended as an investigation into new ways of understanding the potential of living with ambient resources, through an ecosystems approach to viewing bioclimatic flows (e.g., light, humidity, temperature, etc., or anything with an energy gradient and thus potential) as significant resources that are encouraged to flow through the building systems matrix. To effectively engage these bioclimatic flows with the constant and fluctuating nature of occupant demand, the ELM will be required to be both adaptive and capable of controlling the multiple energetic resources at a variety of scales across the building systems matrix.

Mid-Term Review Design Deliverables: Synthetic Drawings/Models

The goal of this review is to issue a series of ‘synthetic’ 3-D Drawings that visualize the relationships across multiple environmental strategies in the form of holistic diagramming. Start by defining a 3-dimensional view of your design / analysis. You may choose to show this as an exploded axonometric, sectional perceptive, or other 3D view that best explains the relationships between the bioclimatic behaviors of the site, and your integrated environmental design approach across multiple systems. Use annotation and detail call-outs to explain additional data and strategies. Cite all sources.

Consider the following aspects in your synthetic response:

• Mangrove and Coastal Ecologies
• Solar strategies (cooling, thermal comfort)
• Daylighting (visual comfort)
• Air flow (passive cooling, thermal comfort)
• Psychrometrics and thermal comfort
• Living systems (vegetation, green infrastructure)
• Other environmental factors that are key to your environmental design strategy (life cycle systems, multi-scalar relationships, dynamics)

ELN Material and Energy Synthesis: ELM Energy Circuit Diagram

1. Develop a “traditional” Energy Circuit Diagram for the Ecological Living Module.

   • Define your system boundary
     
   • Outline the inputs needed – renewable, non-renewable, and services
     
   • Identify the flow – energy, material, information, monetary
     
   • Consider the outputs – to society, to the city, socio-cultural, waste, emissions, feedback loop and recyclability
     

2. Rethink ELM’s design in terms of the overall socio-ecological system, giving one suggestion for each of the following:

   • Its relationship with its surroundings
     
   • The aesthetic, social, and cultural values or flows
     
   • Significant spatial or temporal scales
     

3. Consider the questions your re-design raises

   • Identify 3 questions your re-design suggestions raise in the context of the initial ELM design concept.
     
   • For each question: How would you go about answering this question?If you were to consult an expert in external fields, which fields might be pertinent?
     

Final Review: Role of Ecological Ideas in your ELN Design Approach

The final review is an opportunity for each student, individually and within their groups, to propose a personal theoretical construct on the role of architecture in the face of major societal and environmental shifts. A statement of the relationship of ideas of ecology to your ELN design approach. As per any ‘thesis’ statement, this exercise should raise more questions than answers, but that’s the kind of thought provoking, animated discussion we are looking for in this studio. Students have complete autonomy over the how, what and why of their presentations, and we strongly encourage everyone to take risks and get outside of their comfort zones to experiment with very personal modes of representation. A few guidelines, perhaps to remind ourselves of the obvious:

• The work can be very personal but needs to be clear and concise in order to communicate and resonate socially.
  
• It must be meaningful, of course, to be useful to you. This is the time to really explore what will form the basis of your personal philosophy for design practice in the future. If you like, introduce the context of your prior research (other coursework) and/or design focus as context. In advanced studios, we are aiming for as much synthesis as possible.
  
• This is supposed to be difficult. It will be evaluated by the jury on their terms, so take this opportunity to try on new ideas, and especially to establish and convey your own terms and criteria for evaluation. (i.e., what you find valuable, challenging, or irrelevant, as the case may be)
  

Elm Thematic Considerations

Environmental Systems / Solar Energy:
Secure, distributed energy independence is a core feature of the ELN program. As an open testing framework, an ELM demonstration is intended to flexibly adapt to and test multiple energy and material systems as they emerge, and to provide an open framework for local and international actors to demonstrate both ancient and new approaches. All ELM design investigations must account for how solar energy will be collected and converted for interior use. We will enhance this topic with some additional technical discussions for understanding, and some may want to do a deep dive here, however for students who wish to remain schematic, this portion does not need to get overly technical.

Water Sustainability / On-site Capture:
Globally, water resources are being stretched by population growth, rising living standards, industrial development and urbanization. Locally, Ebrah has an opportunity to show a completely new way to maintain the fragile ecosystemic balance between fresh and salt water and to maintain a healthy water table over time. In West Africa, and around tropical regions globally, the loss of coastal mangroves to development practices and urbanization is one of the most critical anthropogenic drivers of drought and water insecurity and is leading to devastating biodiversity loss and urban heat islands. We will have expert lectures on mangrove ecosystems from inventors who are developing novel systems to safely construct within mangrove zones. Additionally, the ELM requires concepts for water capture systems that focus on methods for reclaiming onsite rainwater, as well as ambient humidity capture, which is extremely appropriate to this climate, to enhance comfort while producing potable water from humidity in the ambient air. The systemic water capture approaches that the ELM should seek to demonstrate present highly localized integration of water cycles into the built environment, reducing the need for extensive infrastructure. Additional technical lectures on hydrogel materials and other emerging materials will enhance our investigation of these potentials, but we will keep it loose and imaginative rather than overly technical.

Air Pollution Bio-remediation:
We will encourage students to experiment with the idea of designing with soils and living systems if this is of interest. Additional (optional) lectures will be available to support technical understanding. By cleaning airborne contaminants associated with poor indoor air quality, building-integrated living systems have the potential to decrease fresh air intake requirements in urban conditions with hazardous external air quality conditions (a condition that billions of people worldwide find themselves in, leading the WHO to rank air quality as the number one global health threat) and thus also the potential to realize substantial energy savings, especially in climate types with high cooling loads such as Ebrah. In areas with good external air quality, solar- driven interior bioremediation systems can provide important support towards the remediation of internally produced air contaminants.

Future Micro farming – Building-Integrated Urban Farming:
Similarly, the ELM approach seeks to intensify the opportunities for urban and peri-urban dwellers to have increased access to safe nutritious food, even if they do not have access to gardens, but here Ebrah affords an ideal setting. Ebrah could provide an outstanding model to respond to the conditions that billions of newly urbanized populations find themselves in throughout the world, and these numbers are increasing. Micro-farming could integrate the traditional practice of subsistence farming into ELM’s external wall systems. It could replicate the footprint of a typical community garden’s footprint within the vertical orientation, freeing up valuable ground area while maintaining access to nutrient dense, sustainably grown, fresh fruit and vegetables at the local domestic scale, requiring a small fraction of the water irrigation that traditional ground-based agricultural systems consume, thereby adding to food security in urban and peri- urban areas with insecure water supplies. Integrated micro-farming systems will require ambient water and some maintenance by ELM occupants, so these aspects need to be socially considered within the design strategies. Irrigation by harvested rainwater should be integrated into the walls and harvested from the roof. The organization and size of planter modules could support a wide variety of edible planting including leafy, fruiting, and root vegetable types. These systemic approaches could be investigated with respect to grey water recycling and/or pre-filtration for solar water purification.

Transitioning Economies from Imported, Toxic Materials to Locally-sourced Bio –Based Renewable Materials
Typically, global residential construction practices rely heavily on non-renewable, mineral-based resources and their energy-intensive extraction, manufacturing, and transportation processes. However, the various versions of the ELM should experiment with construction material strategies that are renewable, locally- sourced and preferably prefabricated to the largest extent possible, and readily assembled on site, thereby dramatically increasing efficiency and reducing toxic production and waste. For the first experimental ELM’s primary structure, enclosure and finishes were constructed with timber products sourced from the Northeast US, since that was a sustainable approach for that region. However, each region will have very different considerations regarding what is considered sustainable, and we will discuss at length before, during and after our travel trip what it means to build with local, bio-compatible materials. In general, Bio- based products have the potential to be renewable and sequester carbon within the building, which would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere. At a global scale, bio-based building products can answer the demands of the world’s urbanizing population while reducing the carbon footprint of cities and infrastructure. Each ELM will be sourced locally to reduce transportation in the material life cycle, but to also encourage local industrialization of building products. We will focus our workshops during the travel week to learn from local builders and artisans to absorb as much as we can on local ecosystemic considerations, while acknowledging that for the sake of the design exercise, we will need to forge ahead in our experiments with partial, and in some cases ‘beginner’ knowledge, and that there is tremendous value in becoming completely ‘defamiliarized’ from how we think ‘things are done’.

Tools for Sustainable Self-Sufficient Urban Districts
Embodying the challenges set forth in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, ELM should employ new technologies to provide clean energy, drinkable water, fresh air, bio-renewable materials, and food. Solar energy is captured, transformed and distributed throughout ELM to meet the electrical and power needs of the four occupants. Potable water is provided via de-humidifying systems which harvest water from humid air. Living air purification systems provide healthy indoor and urban air quality and increases the microbiome diversity within the home and at the urban scale. Micro-farming walls and roofs grow provisions of fruit and vegetables for citizens, providing vital nutrients throughout the year. The overall performance of ELN is monitored via sensor networks coupled with a data visualization and analytics platforms demonstrating the environmental control and energy performance of ELN. The ELN’s reduced carbon footprint and clean energy systems support the sustainable development goals: reduced energy needs limit the financial resources necessary to produce urban housing, renewable bio-based materials preserve rural landscapes and finite resources, and – if aggregated at district scales – low-carbon residential developments can dramatically reduce climate change