Tanzanian Roofing Solution
Syracuse IID 360 Design Competition Grand Prize Winner
Phillip J Stevens Award
RSA US Student Design Awards Finalist
Roofing solution for low-income houses in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. My roles in this group design project were leading strategic research, concept development, project management, presentation design, and infographics.
How can we create an innovative building solution to improve a current building process and instill value for the future homeowner?
BACKGROUND: Tanzania
The port city of Dar Es Salaam is vastly over crowded. The people are impoverished and due to cost of building materials, most are unable to live in shelters with permanent roof structures.
CURRENT BUILDING PROCESS
The most common home building process in Tanzania involves hand-made cement walls, a wooden roof structure, and galvanized sheet metal roof panels. This is a very simple process that happens at the final build site.
MATERIAL COSTS
Based on a Habitat for Humanity case study, we calculated the average costs of materials while building a house. The materials are purchased in bulk from the local supply store at the beginning of the building process and delivered to the build site. The most expensive part of this process is also the last step, the roof.
FINAL SOLUTION
Our solution uses locally sourced materials in combination, to create and easy to manufacture and affordable roofing solution. The fabric absorbs the concrete mixture during the manufacturing process, allowing the fabric to act as the support within the panels.
PRODUCTION PROCESS
We designed our solution to allow the roof tiles to be easily manufactured at the build site. The frame could be easily built from wood or utilize a found object such as a wooden shipping pallet.
We prototyped and test various materials and concrete thicknesses to validate our design.
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