carin...market day...'africa' vs 'the rest of the world'

After a solid week of drawing out our building, we're back to a more active schedule. Not that climbing Table Mountain last Friday wasn't active in the best way (and totally gorgeous every giant-boulder step of the way), but in terms of moving the project closer to manifestation in real space it is now time for us to get busy with meetings. We started off with an excellent one: another conversation with broadly experienced architect Carin Smuts. She gave us an hour of her time that again had great implications for the building design as well as its representation in drawings (which she felt are quite adequate for sending out to bid, given we track down that site survey..). Some notes from the discussion:
----drainage--we have already accounted for the fact that water needs to get out to the street. however, carin recommends having a manhole or other drainage point in the back of the site, in the outdoor courtyard, and then running a pipe under the container and out, allowing for easy access at the front and back of the site in case of blockages--which, apparently, are inevitable because in her experience every single drain in a township gets clogged at some point with rice and porridge. this is not something we can change, just something we can design for in order to make the problem easier to fix.
----on the drainage note, she says nix the porous pavement in front and just use another gutter to take water from the entry over to the green roof. says it's not worth the trouble.
----water supply in--be aware that we will need a stop cock and meter at the point of the supply, which is going to be at the front of the site where the toilet is currently located. this poses an issue for container placement, as our container currently rides the site boundary, but we need to have a place on that boundary to at least locate this meter for easy reading. this could mean moving the container off the line slightly, or modifying it somehow.
----lighting--carin gave us a heads up on finding someone to make our electrical drawings, which will be immensely helpful. we also discussed effective daylighting strategies in order to minimize the need for compact fluorescent lights. specifically, she felt that having such a large translucent roof, even with the bamboo to filter, would be too much light and heat in the multipurpose room. rather, sh suggested, keep the transparency to a meter at each side and allow the walls to do the work of bouncing light into the rest of the room. (we have in fact already seen that this works quite successfully at one of her own buildings, Guga S'Thebe)
----perimeter windows--a bigger problem is our design's reliance on windows on the site boundary line. even on the upper level, she feels this is a no-go because they could in theory be built against. this means we have, at the moment, a couple of very dark rooms.
----ventilation--even more than daylighting, the need to move the windows requires a new ventilation strategy. whirlybirds are one option for the upper level rooms, but through our discussion a new idea evolved: make the courtyard central. we can remove the need for walls that are 'just walls' or a corridor that is just circulation if we use the back program to form the perimeter of the site, making it particularly secure and allowing all rooms opening doors/windows onto a small central courtyard. this requires a bit of refiguring in plan...but the more we spoke about it, the more it seemed like a perfect solution.
----storage--in her experience, the kitchen needs the most storage space because that is actually one area where you might receive a surplus in terms of donations (canned food and such). moving it to the other side of a central courtyard would allow the kitchen to utilize the allocated storage space in the back end of the container. also, we should make sure the kitchen gets a nice strong roller shutter because this is where people are most likely to steal things.

Design continues to evolve, and happily we have the opportunity to keep our real clients, the women of MonkeyBiz, informed as much as possible. Today we attended the monthly Khayelitsha market day for MonkeyBiz at Makatiso's house and the Boat. While market day is by now a familiar but still captivating experience, it is always exciting to see and speak to the women at the site of our project, where we can see right in front of us the many uses their new building will serve. We even got the chance to put our craft skills to work, making new tags when Makatiso had run out. Though we were unable to do any more with the cameras or storytelling (projects we've been working on for artaidsart at the Friday clinics), we will be back in three weeks to do that.

Finally, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MANDELA! '90 minutes for Mandela' was our chance, for only a few dollars, to watch two full teams of soccer legends come together on the Newland Rugby Stadium field for a charity game. It was a good cause--and it was fantastic! We hung around the bars and kiosks outside the stadium for plenty of time before we ran inside to our bleacher seats with a crazy loud croud. 90 minutes later...Africa and The Rest of the World tied. Just for Mandela perhaps (who I kept trying to find with my video zoom but alas, he was either well hidden or not there). Anyway, next time we're learning to blow a vuvusela.

Patrick is headed back on Friday, and our home here will be sadly quieter for it. However, his attention to and exploration of details in the last week has been invaluable to clarifying and moving forward with the project, and I won't let him lose touch with me that easily...I'll miss my roommate man. But I gotta feel for him because he'll be missing it here bad after getting spoiled with bunny chow, the best fish n chips ever, and TWO delicious ballpark sausages (with onions and chili sauce) all in one day...