Tiémélékro is one of the newest towns in Ivory Coast. It has undergone a dramatic demographic growth in a very short time. Because of its lack of resources and the increment in the population of school aged children, part of these children cannot attend school due to lack of rooms. As a consequence, some of them start their schooling later or fail to attend school altogether. In the case of girls, the situation is much worse, since most of them help the women with domestic asks. Therefore, only a minority of them has access to education.

The kindergarten plays a key role in introducing children to instruction. It has such an important role for integration that the Ivory Coast Ministry of Education passed a bill requiring every primary school to be associated with some kindergarten. This project started on January 2007 in Tiémélékro and corresponds to the second phase of the Primary School in the district of Sogephia. It consists in the construction and opening of a kindergarten and a library, plus the urbanisation of the site.

The library complements a number of interventions in the area of education with great value for the community. It will be a public library, open both to students of the primary school as well as to the rest of the inhabitants of the town. As for the book supply, we contacted the French Association Biblionef, which provided new books in French to those facilities built through development cooperation projects.

The main goal of the project is to help the newly created municipal communes in construction, maintenance and modernization of public toilets in an ecologically sustainable way, accessible to all users and economically viable.  An important aspect of the project is also improving the overall health of residents of the municipalities and support local authorities in achieving various functions in field of public sanitation.
Vernacular architecture is the result of hundreds of years of architecture evolution and optimization, using local available materials and construction technologies known in particular area.
Traditional architecture often uses passive energy solutions to create good, comfortable living conditions depending on climate.

Our goal is to protect the local architectural heritage, and to support and disseminate passive solutions that use natural energy sources, such as wind or sun, to reduce construction costs and ensure the comfort of use of new buildings.

What is the impact of architecture on the quality of life in cities? How can architecture be an important instrument for improving everyone’s living conditions? “Cidade Sem Fronteiras” promotes knowledge about the city and a reflection on what a City Without Borders would be.
It uses the set of buildings of Companhia Vinicola, where Casa da Arquitectura is and the city of Matosinhos to playfully think about the relationship of buildings, and other key pieces in urban composition, with cities and learn concepts such as scale, heritage and inclusion, among others that are part of the vocabulary of architecture and cities in general.
This way Arquitectos Sem Fronteiras Portugal joins the second anniversary of the Portuguese Center of Architecture, with an activity in which one can think about what architecture can do for a better city and leave suggestions for urban spaces where social, cultural, environmental, and other impacts of the proposals that are part of this expected city are taken into consideration.
The activity took place in the Reading Room of Casa da Arquitectura Library, the 16th and the 17th of November, among many other activities that happened simultaneously and continuously in the block of the Portuguese Architecture Center throughout the weekend. Congratulations to Casa da Arquitectura!
We hope to continue to celebrate the importance of raising awareness of current and future architects to the responsibility of managing all decisive impacts on the quality of life in cities in their proposals.