HARIHARPUR VALLEY SCHOOL

PARTICIPATION IN AN INTERNATIONAL PROJECT - NEPAL

Desislava Iroslav Petkova, Eleni Tsiamparta & Stien Poncelet

Academic Promotors: Ignaas Back & Klaas Vanslembrouck

Prologue

The development cooperation Project in Pipalmadi (Ghante) Nepal - realized during 12 August and 26 September 2016 - was a cooperation between the faculty of Architecture (Sint Lucas - KU Leuven) and the Nepali NGO CEPP, working for the betterment of the public primary educational system in the country. Three interns from the courses of International Masters of Architecture, Eleni Tsiamparta and Desislava Petkova, and Master of Interior Architecture, Stien Poncelet, were sent on site with the mission to do an extensive on-site research of the local context, which will as well be used as a database for the up-coming Master Dissertation Studio “The Ideal School”.

On one hand, the students did anthropologicalarchitectural observations, gained overall knowledge about the vernacular building methods and an understanding of the rural “urbanity”, meaning the spatial organization and dependence of the village society on a larger scale. On the other hand, the interns participated in a try-out participatory design process of a playground and an interior design, getting in contact with the different parties involved in such a process – the school (teachers, director), the parents (mainly mothers), the students, the active mediator (CEPP) and the builders (local carpenters).

Living in a host family of a teacher, and performing some drawing and English classes themselves, the interns dove into the everyday reality of contemporary village life in Nepal, a reality in-between rice fields, non-asphalt roads and smart phones with barely any internet connection. This reality between the vernacular architecture and globalization opens a lot of questions on social and environmental sustainability, which provoked CEPP to try out a new format of the internship. They not only worked for the first time with architecture interns, but involved in the process two local students of Environmental Studies - Seema Shrestha and Rinjin Lama.

The collaboration between all the parties was successful, leading to opportunities for a continuous collaboration between the interns, the school, CEPP and the local community.

The settlement of Pipalmadi lies south-east of the capital Kathmandu, at the borders of the lower hills and the Terrai area (the fields). This build tissue is arranged in smaller clusters of houses joined in bigger assemblages. Their position is directed by the natural-geographical elements and resources, in-between the two “barriers”, or major geographical elements –the low hills and the big Bagmati river.