New Classroom in Rural Guatemala
Partnering with the Tecnico Maya School andthe NGO Long Way Home in the village of Paxan, San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, our team worked to develop the design for classrooms to serve the surrounding communities, where current facilities are often not adequate in size, or present a financial burden on the students and teachers. Using land owned by Long Way Home, the goals of the project are to design a school that uses readily available, inexpensive materials, and begins to address some of the problems of pollution in the area, as well as providing adequate space for the students, and alleviating the financial burden that comes with their current space. This would allow more students in the area to attend school. We also worked with Tecnico Maya School and Long Way Home on ideas for the curriculum of the school and its larger role in the region. The vision of the collective partners is to have a school complex that will produce future technical experts, environmentalists, and development minded graduates with unique skills to help them become leaders in their communities. In addition to the traditional classrooms, which are the focus of this competition entry, with traditional curriculums, the partners wish the school to provide vocationial secondary training, with shops that could also potentially bring revenue to the school, as well as adult education classes, as the majority of indigenous people have little formal education.
We employed several strategies to achieve our goals of sustainable, low-cost construction. The primary strategy was the building method, which is rammed earth. Trash accumulation is a major environmental issue in this region, and one of the main types of trash is discarded vehicle tires. The basic building block for our new classrooms will be tires filled with rammed earth and stacked in running bond pattern. This unique building unit lends itself to round configuraions, and so we chose round classrooms. The round shape also lends itself to greater structural stability in an earthquake-prone region (the earth-filled tires themselves, with their width, weight, and flexible rubber shell, also should withstand seismic activity better than the current construction materials of the region), as well as towards a more collaborative, egalitarian learning style, which seems to be the emerging trend in education globally. This method of tire construction has been employed in several examples for the last few decades, and has proven to be an effective building method.
A second strategy is the roofing material, which will be trash filled plastic bottles, another waste item that literally litters the landscape of this region. Plastic bottles filled with trash are a lightweight, insulating, stable material, and again assist in cleaning up the environment while also being readily available and low-cost.
The curriculum of the school will be heavily focussed on environmental issues, and so the school itself will be a showcase for how waste can be transformed into useable materials. Other strategies include rainwater collection and on-site organic gardening.
Long Way Home hopes to continue partnership with the school into the future, assisting with future initiatives, planning, and directing volunteers to help at the school.

Location