For over twenty years now, the Italian office TAMassociati, founded in 1996 by Massimo Lepore, Raul Pantaleo and Simone Sfriso, has been working on a social, humanitarian and bioclimatic architecture, on an international scale. In 2010, TAMassociati delivered a paediatric clinic for the NGO Emergency in Nyala, South Darfur. 

The Salam Centre for cardiac surgery in Khartoum was the first in a network of medical facilities planned in the region by the NGO Emergency. This paediatric clinic in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, is another, located in a region that was heavily affected by the 2006 conflict and which still remains unstable today, due to the civil war in neighbouring South Sudan, which since 2013 has caused an estimated 2 million refugees to cross the country’s borders.

Faced with climatic conditions similar to those in Khartoum, TAMassociati adopted similar architectural solutions. The paediatric clinic is a passive building with thick walls made out of local brick, deliberately small areas of glazing and a double roof covering: a shallow brick vault (jagharsch in Arabic) surmounted by a layer of metal to protect it from direct sun exposure. Like in Khartoum, the clinic uses wind-catchers – inspired by Iranian bagdirs – to take in air that is cooler and less full of dust at 8 metres above ground level and, again as in Khartoum, that air is cooled by a few degrees and cleaned of sand thanks to a system of basement ducts. It then passes through an adiabatic cooling system based on water evaporation, resulting in a comfortable internal temperature of 28°C – considerably less than the 38°C at the mouth of the wind-catchers.

The clinic is built around an enormous baobab, and abundantly available woven vegetal material has been used to make vertical and horizontal sunscreens, further helping to lower temperatures both inside and in the courtyard. On its exterior the building has been given a coat of white render to reflect the heat, but inside the ceilings have been painted in bright colours.

 

 

 

 

 

Paediatric Clinic
Location: Nyala, South Darfur, Sudan
Client: NGO Emergency
Area: 1160 square metres
Completion: 2010
Partner: Emergency building & technical division

Discover the publication AA Projects “TAMassociati, citizen architecture”, available on our online shop.