Khoja Hasan School
The Project:
This project demonstrates that a small rural
community can themselves build a good quality
school using local materials. The design makes
use of passive solar gain in winter and summer
shading to improve the thermal characteristics of
a typical school.
This School is the first in Afghanistan to
incorporate efficient masonry mass-storage
heating. Non-engineered earthquake mitigating
design features are integrated from the
beginning, and may save lives in the event of a
large seismic event. The earth-plastered and straw-insulated walls provide superior acoustics and
temperature regulation. The cost is no more than for an inferior contractor-built school using imported materials and conventional construction. -Grahame Hunter, Architect.
Direct From Istalif (January, 2009): “Kabul is sliding into an ever colder winter and the skies are thick with smoke from peoples’ fires. There is very little building work that can be done in these sorts of temperatures. Grahame Hunter, the senior architect on the project, will arrive in the next few days and will have a clearer idea of when work will begin again.” -William, Turquoise Mountain Regional Director in Istalif.
The drawbacks with the existing school standards for small rural schools using local materials are:
· they take no account of orientation – which is clearly important for schools with no heating or
lighting – and are badly insulated;
· they do not fully incorporate techniques to mitigate earthquake hazards using non-engineered
seismic design (although they do follow some Indian and Pakistan guidelines);
· they have proven hard to maintain;
· the quality of construction has been poor.
This project’s objective is to help the Ministry of Education address these problems by creating a new and better standard.
“Whatever happens, the school exists, the villagers built it themselves, they know how to repair it, and
they like it.”
-Grahame Hunter, Architect for the project
