Poultry Academy: A poultry farming school, intended to help the people of a desperately poor tropical country evolve a better diet from chickens, has been built with wisdom and care for the environment drawn from the North - Kahere Poultry Farming School, Koliagbe, Guinea - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2001

The Kahere Poultry Farming School at Koliagbe in Guinea is the result of a most extraordinary chain of circumstances. In the early I 980s, Alpha Diallo and his uncle, the vet Bachir Diallo, decided to study poultry production abroad so that they could help to improve the diet of their native country, which is notoriously low in protein. Alpha went to Hungary and, being a superb linguist, he became enchanted with the connection between Hungarian and Finnish (which have little in common except underlying structures). He ended up by translating the Finnish national epic Kalevala into his native language. His activities attracted the attention of Ella Kivekas, who after Alpha's death in Finland in 1984 asked Bachir to return to Guinea to start a chicken farm which she funded through a foundation called Indigo. This proved so successful that its operations became inhibited by the many people who went there to learn. So Kivekas proposed making a separate institution: a school of poultry farming which could serve th e whole country.

She asked Heikkinen-Komonen, who had already worked for her on several projects in Guinea, to design the school. Based on previous experience of the culture and climate, Heikkinen-Komonen evolved a language of form and construction that, according to the technical assessor, has made the staff 'happy and proud'. The techniques evolved by the architects have already been adopted by people who worked on the job for other new buildings in the area.

In Guinea, most new small buildings are made of badly fired bricks, and have corrugated metal roofs. They are incapable of resisting the heavy rains, and tend to intensify intense equatorial heat. Heikkinen-Komonen evolved a construction method based on unfired earth blocks stabilized with a small proportion of cement, roof tiles made of cement reinforced by local sisal fibres, and local hardwood structural timber scarfed together to achieve wider spans than would have been possible with the usual short struts. Widest spans are achieved by forming trusses with timber and imported steel wire, but as many materials as possible are from Guinean sources, and locally made.

Double layers of blocks provide thermal mass. They can be left exposed, unlike the usual fired bricks that have to be faced with imported cement render if they are to survive for a few seasons. Porous woven ceilings under the tile roofs are made of local wood laths woven in the traditional way as they often are in fences and partitions. They are able to breathe, helping to cool spaces with convection currents that are drawn from openings at the top of external walls. The technical assessor commented that the strategy might be liable to insect infestation in the rainy months.

The compound is square. Its central circular space is dominated by the portico of the main classroom, a communal place in which staff and students can gather in all seasons. The portico's tall columns are scarfed struts coupled in almost Aaltoesque fashion with blocks to increase their stiffness. As usual with Heikkinen-Komonen, a rigorous geometric discipline has been applied, with a 1.2m grid based on possible spans and functional considerations. Small windows in the residential areas are designed to avoid lintels. The jury welcomed the project because it 'uses a deceptively simple language ... distinguished by clarity of form and appropriateness of scale. The solution is a fine example of an elegantly humble yet modern architecture that successfully crosses the boundaries of local Guinean and Nordic traditions'.