Guyana’s team emerged victorious and walked away with the top prizes at the 2023 Concours d’Architecture International held recently in French Guiana – a competition that encourages students to be innovative and offer environmentally and socially sustainable project designs to be implemented.
The country’s team comprised Nia Bishop, Toquana Daphness, and Semira Greene – all students from the Department of Architecture at the University of Guyana. Aspiring architects from the neighboring countries of Suriname, Brazil along with Haiti and for the first time this year, Guyana, converged at Université de Guyane on June 1 and were tasked with presenting an ecological and solidarity project that considers the environmental concerns of the decade in the form of a boarding school.
According to Bishop, the team’s winning design was created with “architectural efficiency in mind.”
“We wanted to establish an indoor and outdoor experience since it would be for students, attending different high schools in French Guiana. We carefully chose our building orientation so allows for natural sunlight and considering that we live in a tropical climate, our design also factors in a sort of green and recreational space for students and ultimately achieve thermal comfort while being environmentally conscious,” she explained.
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The boarding school design was presented in 2D plan format along with a 3D virtual walk-through. The planning and execution spanned between four and five months.
But it was not without difficulty, said Greene. Among the rules of the competition, the design had to consider French Guiana’s terrain and this was the major stumbling block since the team had little knowledge of the country.
“We questioned our design when we got there, whether it was up to code, etc. because we were not there, we did not get to explore the project site or take examples from other buildings in the country and we relied on some images we saw during research but it was a learning experience and there was so much to take away from their methods,” she told OilNOW.
And that the team did. According to Daphness, French Guiana’s method of roof design is “energy efficient and sustainable” and can be something that Guyana could look to implement since the country is undergoing a modern landscape transformation. And the team, with the knowledge garnered from the competition, could well be at the heart of it.
Dr. Anna Perreria, Head of the Architecture Department explained that an in-house competition was held before the final team was selected for the competition.
The team was supervised by Sir Godfrey Proctor who assisted with the architectural design and Sir Kurt Gonsalves with the virtual build out.
The project forms part of the Department’s coursework. But the team’s winning design is expected to be implemented in French Guiana.
The design is featured below:
