Client: Camps International
Project: Community Kindergarten
Role: Design, Supervision & Capacity Building
Status: On site
Design Team: Ian Hall, Eoghan Hoare, Oliver Wilson, Michelle Martin, Hasmartina Celestial, Jamie Ross

How do you build capacity in rural communities to pursue sustainable development ideals? Camps International’s model is to empower communities to build and operate their own community tourism businesses. Arkitrek designs community projects to be built by voluntourists and locals. We engage interns to implement design innovation such as use of biocomposite concrete.

By this means we build local capacity for sustainable design including such practices such as; rainwater harvesting,
reduced reliance on tropical hardwoods, biogas digesters, grey water recycling and use of recycled materials.

This is our proposal for a community kindergarten at Kg Tinangol in the North of Sabah. The community’s brief was for a three classroom kindergarten on the bottom and a community hall on the top. Our design response was to propose a first floor based on a traditional Rungus Longhouse and a ground floor using biocomposite concrete.

All of the necessary construction techniques required to build this kindergarten are familiar to the locals – steel cables on the ubiquitous suspension bridges for example or homemade concrete blocks. Our challenge is to adapt existing technologies and materials which may have been overlooked by conventional wisdom.

Tinangol Kindergarten blog posts