Status: competition

Eldoret, Kenya

Site area: 8 acres

Programme:

Administration (existing), 2,550 SF

Principal’s house and Offices, 2,500 SF

Gymnasium, 16,800 SF

Junior School, 18 classrooms @ 900 SF, library @ 900 SF, 17,100 SF

Senior School, 18 classrooms @ 900 SF, library @ 900 SF, 17,100 SF

Farm, crops 22,000 SF, husbandry 22,000 SF, barns 2,500 SF

Student Dormitories, 10,050 SF (3 @ 3,350 SF, student bedrooms, living room, bathroom, dining room, dorm parent apartment)

Football Field, 54,600 SF

“No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.”
― Paulo Freire

ONE HEART CHILDREN’S VILLAGE

An orphanage is like a like a boarding school: its students are often broken, alone, and vulnerable, and its teachers and administration have outsized requirements for both physical and intangible systems of support. The institution built to house the orphanage bears a significant burden to help to overcome these challenges and to make places that support their exceptional needs.

Our institutions can either inure us from the world, or they can help to immerse us in it. This is knowledge creation and true education: like a fish in water, the student accompanied by the teacher explore the ecosystem through which she swims, its natural co-inhabitants and processes, its systems of governance, and the means by which a society can survive and ultimately thrive.

design response

One Heart is designed to induct their young inhabitants into an immersive experience of the world around them. The soils, the native grasslands and plants, and the domesticated animals are gathered together with the assemblage of structures to coexist and to ensure that the mission of study through immersion are achieved.

One Heart is sited within a farm community in rural western Kenya near the large city of Eldoret. This area has a high poverty rate and many children do not attend school; these are the new students of the eight acre community. The village is a place for living, learning, and growing for 400 day students, 112 full time student residents, their guardian dorm parents, and a vital faculty. The homes, schools, community meeting hall, training center, and farm provide a place of nurture and education so that dozens of children can find a more meaningful and fulfilling life.