Thanksgiving at home…

CHALMERS – Final Presentation

The formal end of Reality Studio 2010. Well, find each other once more all together is undeniably a big emotion. Passing something that has been once in a lifetime experience with people that you bearly know make you tight like a band of brothers and entering in the room the day of the presentation give the feeling of arrive at home for thanksgiving. This has been the last presentation, reach home after a long, incredible, amazing journey; put down our backpack and tell our friends the tale of our work.

One down, one to go…

‘Bamboo for Emergency’ in Turin was an absolutely fantastic experience; well-organized and inspiring.
We can proudly say that it was pleasure and a great honor having the opportunity to present our work for 60 enthusiastic experts and students on the conference yesterday.

On the courtyard of ‘Castello del Valentino’, the seat for Architecture Faculty of of the Polytechnic University of Turin.
Listed on UNESCO World Heritage List since 1997.

With one of the organizers and host of our visit.

At the venue where the conference took place.

In spite of being the last ones to present in the late hour, we had an audience around 60 people.

Silvio presenting passionately in Italian.

Mingling after the conference with snacks, cheese and wine.

In the exhibition hall…

In front of our posters

Missing anybody?

Group picture with the students and organizers of ‘Bamboo for Emergency’

Our loyal supporters…

Another group picture!

Thank you Turin and all the fantastic people we met along the way !
Extra thanks to our hosts for your hospitality and for letting us stay in your beautiful apartment.

Wish us luck for the final presentation on tuesday!

What a week!

After several days of trying to come up with a design for our school with a feeling of getting nowhere, we finally had a break-trough on Sunday. We managed to come up with a layout for the building and the rest of the site, but no final proposal for what the structure should look like. We had some ideas, though.

On Monday we had a new meeting with our tutors – they raised some questions about our ideas for the structure but seemed fairly content with the rest. In the evening we attended a workshop held by Engineers without borders. Four of us did anyway, since our fifth member was again stuck elsewhere due to volcanic ashes. The workshop in itself was not as useful as we had hoped, but we got to know more about the difficulties you might encounter while dealing with biogas and – most importantly – met a very enthusiastic architect/engineer who knows a lot about both clay and bamboo and were happy to meet us on thursday to discuss our project.

During the next two days we focused on getting ready for the presentation in Turin next week. We had three posters and a digital presentation to prepare and the posters had to be finished before Friday morning so they could be printed and ready for the start of the conference on Monday. On Wednesday we had a meeting with a professor who has actually built her own house with straw bales and clay plaster. She gave us some tips and suggestions and lent us a whole stack of useful books about earth buildings.

Thursday morning we had the best tutoring ever. So much useful information – oh, why couldn’t we have met him earlier in the process? It was so refreshing to meet someone with so much knowledge who took a real interest in our work. It was also helpful to talk to someone who has worked a lot in similar conditions like the ones we face with our school.

After lunch we realised that we still had most of the poster-making left to do. Even though we worked hard with few and short breaks, the posters weren’t finished until early Friday morning, but at least we were able to hand them in on time.

During the last week there has been a lot of tension within the group, almost splitting us up. It’s hard to manage a group with five strong individuals and no real hierarchy. To get things done somebody has to take the role of the leader, and it’s not really an enjoyable position. After what seemed to be endless discussions and a lot of frustration we have now hopefully solved the problem and are able to move forward with our work in a more efficient and satisfying way.

Ready to go…

Small spoiler of the posters made for “Bamboo for emergency”… the exhibition will take place in Turin from 17th to 25th of May.

Skype = Swedish invention

Time to do some brainstorming of concepts and ideas for the design proposal!
Place: Italy/Sweden
Time: 17.00 – 19.00

No such thing called mission impossible.

Let’s go to Bamboo for Emergency!

Wow.. that seems a really nice location!

“Bamboo for Emergency” is a conference born from an initiative of a bunch of passionate students of architecture who have been able to involved the whole Polytecnic of Turin in a big event. We are more than glad that the organizers had shown interest in our work and we are really looking forward to be there!

The conference will take place on thursday the 20th of May at Valentino’s castle, the headquarter of the faculty of Architecture in Turin, Italy. Here you have all the information about their work!

Blog “Bamboo for Emergency”

arvedse a giobia a ‘n bot!=)..

SHOW IT PART III?!

Scenario: Thursday morning, 10.30am something in the middle of a tutoring session, discussing our critical reflections and content of the report.
S: “Oh, and I got something to tell you guys as well…”
C: “What? As…we’re going to Italy?”
S: *giggles*”We’ll see… (…) There’s a bamboo conference and we are invited to go there to present our project.”
I: “When is it?”

Approximately an hour after that question, we finished booking our first ticket to Turin.
TURIN in Italy, thats were we are going to have our SHOW IT part III…
No words for how surprising this is to us, but it definitely gave us some proper adrenaline kicks that will last for some weeks.

Let’s release a teaser for the upcoming presentation in Italy….

The building process of our test structure in Maseno… enjoy it!

Back in Sweden – what to do now?

The field trip ended on the 2nd of April and after that we had a week to do “documentation”. During that week, one of our group members went to the Kenyan coast, one went to Uganda, one went to Holland, one went to France and only one spent the week in Sweden. During our first week back we were still one person short due to volcanic ashes in the air. Lucky for us the volcano didn’t start erupting earlier.

What should we do know? We need to:

Make a schedule
Create a dummy for the report
Document what we’ve learned so far
Contact interesting people
Find a laboratory to do tests in
Do tests with bio gas and Moringa seeds
Start with the proposal

So much to do and not a lot of time left until hand-in!

SHOW IT! (part II): UN-Habitat, Nairobi

This sounded like a big big event before. We had already heard that we will meet different kind of people in this exhibition in compare with the one in Kisumu. No doubts the people we met were mostly experts and we had more to learn from them about what we had worked on. However, the number of visitors seemed so few after experiencing such a crowd in the first exhibition. Some of our fellow students in other groups met visitors who had quite interesting information about their area of work and seemed very pleased with the discussion.

Group picture!

It was a long day, we were so excited in the morning but a bit bored before the first bunch of visitors arrived.
The exhibition was supposed to finish at 4 pm in the afternoon but suddenly, we had to do a postponed consultation with our teacher which felt quite necessary. A few hours passed like a year, and by the time all groups had finished exchange some words with the teacher the sky has gotten dark. We were absolutely exhausted while retuning to the guest house in late evening.

All together it was a unique experience. We had the chance to present our work in such an interesting place and got some really good reflection. We left the samples of our clay bricks in our teacher’s place for further tests, since we found it impossible to take it to Sweden.. The toilet model was broken so we just presented the idea using the sketches and pictures. Our water purification method with the locally growing seeds seemed to attract quite a lot of attention and we also got useful critics about what we had done with bamboo and clay.

It felt like paradise to be totally done with our work in Kenya. A few more hours at the airport and we will be on the flight back to Sweden. Hope the snow has said farewell for this year…or?
To be continued…

SHOW IT! (part I): Kenyatta Sportsground, Kisumu

We were a bit behind schedule on the day of the exhibition. Neither the building nor the presentation were finished. We sent two people to take down the scaffolds and place the floor while the remaining three prepared the material for the exhibition. We had brought lots of stuff from the construction site; bamboo, a piece of clay test, weaved water hyacinth and bamboo, cow dung bricks, water bottles and a toilet model.

At lunch time we were panicking. Downloading the software for the printer would take hours! In the end we had to print in a local printing office – at an over price and with a really crappy result. We arrived a bit late to the exhibition and felt more than a bit unprepared.

The highlight of our presentation was the movie made from the photos taken every five minutes at the construction site, during all days of construction. With some catchy music it instantly became a spectator-magnet.

The toilet also attracted some attention – people were really curiuos and asked a lot of questions, some that we hadn’t thought about before, like “How effective is urin for fertilising compared to industrial fertiliser?”

On site at the exhibition, we tried to purify water using the moringa olifiera (or horse radish) seed. It didn’t work very well, probably because the seed wasn’t dry enough to pulverise. We’ll have to bring some seeds to Sweden and try again.

All in all, the exhibition was a great experience and we were really happy to see so many people taking interest in our work and also sharing their experience with us. Exhausted but happy, we ended the evening with a low-key celebration dinner at a nice roof terrace restaurant, before crashing into bed.

Tomorrow we will prepare the material for the exhibition at UN-HABITAT on Wednesday.

Removing the scaffolds

Roof structure

Placing the floor

Done!

Exhibition at the Sports ground