GHANA, KENYA, BELIZE...
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STORY
ACCRA, Ghana—Architect Joe Osae-Addo moved back to his native Ghana in 2004 from Los Angeles to build a home for his family. A simple enough idea, except that Mr. Osae-Addo wanted to use local timber, local bamboo, and local adobe mud blocks in the construction of his home, none of which exist in commercial quantities in Ghana.
So Mr. Osae-Addo, a former architecture lecturer at the University of Southern California, had to source the materials himself and work with local builders who weren't necessarily open to his new approach.
"It was very, very difficult," Mr. Osae-Addo says. "Everything takes twice as long in Ghana."
Construction projects in Africa are slow-moving, bureaucratic affairs in the best of times. They rely on imported materials, mostly concrete. To veer from that formula is to invite trouble, frustration, headaches.
But Mr. Osae-Addo does have some experience in this regard.He designed a house for the Brad Pitt-led charity in New Orleans, Make it Right, and runs his own firm, Constructs LLC, which strives to use local materials for long-lasting, energy efficient housing and commercial projects.
The firm has several large-scale projects in the works in Ghana, Liberia and Angola. Those include a proposed 500-unit site in Ghana's future oil hub, Takoradi, for Anglo-Irish oil company Tullow Oil Plc. TLW.LN +3.58%
"The way things have been built over the last 30 years [in Ghana] is not sustainable," Mr. Osae-Addo says. "The passion is not about the intrinsic quality of the products we buy locally but how we can use them in a much more commercial and industrial application so they're available to the people."
One such effort led Mr. Osae-Addo to work with a Chinese company to begin building a bamboo-processing facility in Ghana, where bamboo grows in the wild.
"Until Africa, or Ghana, develops the materials and the system for industrial, sustainable construction techniques we will never solve our housing problem," he says. "If we keep importing housing solutions it will never work."
Mr. Osae-Addo's own house is a 2,500-square-feet, one-story environmental marvel. It's slightly hidden from view by trees and vines that hang down from its wrap-around timber balcony. The inside of the house is spacious and breezy, since Mr. Osae-Addo didn't want air conditioning in his home despite the tropical heat and humidity. He built the house on a raised foundation and used slatted window screens to allow air to pass through. Rainwater is collected in several large tanks to be reused, and solar panels on the roof provide supplemental energy during frequent power outages.
Yet the house requires constant vigilance from nearby dangers. Mohamed, the caretaker, lives on the property and often has to run over to neighbors' homes to tell them to stop burning refuse or wood—the sparks could easily waft over the wall and set Mr. Osae-Addo's house on fire.
Since he didn't want to put a coil of barbed wire on top of the wall or install an alarm, as do many homeowners in Ghana, Mr. Osae-Addo has two dogs that act as a security system. A recent visitor to the house was greeted with deterrent-worthy growls and bared teeth before Mohamed came and silenced them. They are likely the only dogs in Ghana with a neatly-made, well-ventilated bamboo house built by an architect.
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STORY SOURCE:
WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882304575465502937442216.htmlOTHER SOURCES: http://www.villagevolunteers.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Bamboo.pdf
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