ZAATARI WOMEN & CHILDREN'S MEDICAL CENTRE
The Al'Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan is home to thousands of Syrian refugees who lack many necessities such as sufficient education, jobs, and healthcare. This course required us to fulfil a need of the camp and the design team chose to create a hospital dedicated to the care of women and children since the camp averages 80 births a week and 20% of the population is below 5 years old. As resources are scarce and the buildings should by regulation be temporary, the buildings were designed to be built out of adobe mud bricks.
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This introduced a high level of complexity since adobe is a weak material. Computational tools were heavily used to enable form-finding of the most structurally efficient forms and the easiest construction methods. Spatial planning played a big role to ensure that all the requirements of a functioning hospital could be included. To solve these issues the project adopted a modular approach using vaulted and domed repeatable modules that are easy to construct and can be joined with different openings to form the rooms. In addition to traditional vault building techniques such as the Nubian vault, voxelisation was tested to construct the non-standard forms from standard rectangular bricks.
