Lung Vai Kindergarten and Primary School

  • Location:
    Ha Giang, Vietnam
  • Type of use:
    Educational
  • Year of construction:
    2020
  • Size:
    250 m²
  • Architect:
    1+1>2 Architects

Necessity

The Lung Vai Kindergarten and Primary School was constructed to replace the former school site located in Lung Vai Village, Ha Giang Province, Vietnam. The site is situated 5km from the highway, crowned atop a craggy mountain. The lack of a network road and provision for mechanized vehicles made accessibility extremely difficult. During the construction process, residents of Lung Vai village and Bac Sum hamlet joined hands to donate land to open a road to facilitate the transportation of materials. After the project was completed, this road has been maintained, continuing to connect the village with the foothill area.

The previous school structure was dilapidated and degraded, failing to meet safety and amenity standards for local education. The new Lung Vai School construction project received design sponsorship from the 1+1>2 Architects, in collaboration with local authorities and philanthropists, with the aspiration of providing a modern, spacious, and culturally resonant educational facility for the teachers and students.

Affordability

As a non-profit initiative, it was sponsored in design by 1+1>2 Architects and funded for construction by AA Corporation. The Lung Vai School project was established to serve the educational and living needs of the children and residents of Lung Vai Village, ensuring 100% accessibility and utilization by the entire local population.

Simplicity and Appropriateness

The Lug Vai School comprises three classrooms: two for preschoolers and one for primary students. The roof is clad in lightweight corrugated iron, featuring a wide, flared design for effective protection against sun and rain exposure. The thick rammed-earth walls ensure that the classrooms remain warm in winter and cool in summer. A high ceiling, combined with a plastic partition wall system near the roofline, large window openings, and skylights integrated into the roof, ensures the building benefits from cross-ventilation and sufficient daylight autonomy without the need for electric lighting. Consequently, the interior spaces remain airy, bright, and warm during the winter season, even when the windows are closed.

Sufficiency and Efficiency

During the construction process, both electricity and water were essential at various stages. Electricity was required for the installation of the roof, whose corrugated iron sheets and steel frames were prefabricated in the factory, transported to the site, and then assembled, erected, welded, and bolted together. Water, meanwhile, was needed to mix and soften the earth for the rammed-earth walls, as well as to prepare concrete for the courtyard and floor finishes.

Since the school is located on a mountaintop where electricity and water are scarce, and since the workforce was drawn from all available sources, including teachers, soldiers, local residents, and other non-professional laborers, the architects had to plan each phase with great care. Every stage of construction was carefully calculated in order to conserve resources, reduce costs, and complete the school within the shortest possible time.

Scalability

The project was executed by local laborers, predominantly from the Hmong ethnic group, under the guidance of the architects and engineers. The principal construction materials were earth bricks and stone, sourced directly from local extractions. To reduce costs and avoid bringing in materials from the lowlands due to the difficult mountain roads, the architects instructed the community to use a compact and mobile machine to produce bricks from excavated and depleted soil, augmented with additives such as straw, rice husks, buffalo manure, and agricultural waste products. These stabilized earth bricks offer superior durability and excellent thermal regulation, representing an enhancement upon the region's traditional rammed earth techniques.

Beauty

The Lung Vai School inherits and reinterprets the traditional rammed earth architectural typology of the Hmong people through its curved mud walls embracing the terrain. This creates an overall structure that appears as a natural entity, eliminating the boundary between interior and exterior space. The large, curving roof canopy extends widely, resembling either a flying saucer perched on the hillside or a forest mushroom springing up from the ground. Viewed from above, the construction evokes a terraced field, with sparkling water mirroring the mountains and forest scenery. This combination of curved earth walls following the unique roof structure represents a synthesis of tradition and modernity, lending the school a fresh aesthetic that remains harmoniously integrated with a terraced field.

Unique Principles of Success

1. Respecting the cultural and natural context of the place

The school appears as an organic entity, like a forest mushroom emerging from the ground. The classrooms unfold and blend seamlessly with birds, mountains, and vegetation. The architecture inherits the traditional vernacular of the Hmong people through rammed-earth walls that embrace the terrain, interwoven with patches of stone and pebbles, like brocade weaving.

2. Academic and vernacular combination

Earth, stone, and pebbles combined with corrugated iron roofing, plastic panels, and steel structures; traditional rammed earth techniques of the mountainous region combined with eco-additives from urban areas; architects working together with local people; traditional architecture reborn in a modern and new form - all forming a harmonious combination of academic knowledge and vernacular experience.

3. Sustainable and ecological

Using mainly locally sourced materials: rammed earth walls made from leveling soil and poor soil mixed with eco-additives (by-products from the wood pressing process for paper production) to increase cohesion, strength, and crack resistance; recycled timber; stones and pebbles contributed by local residents and assembled using traditional techniques.
Energy and resource efficient design: plastic panels at the top of the walls to bring in natural light; corrugated iron roofing with insulation, lightweight, and wide overhangs to prevent driving rain, block sunlight, and create self-shading.

Limitations

Through the construction process of Lung Vai School, we learned from the local community a great deal of valuable vernacular knowledge: how to select soil for rammed earth walls; how to process bamboo - soaking and treating it in the most time-efficient way; how to determine the location and orientation of a house, etc.

All of these have become lessons learned, applied, expanded, and further developed in the subsequent projects of 1+1>2 Architects, and also form our distinctive approach to preserving and promoting vernacular architecture and cultural heritage in the context of global integration.

Links & Downloads

 1+1>2 Architects

Join our movement

Participants

Are you working on a project that follows the SHIFT philosophy or is committed to specific aspects of the initiative? Then send us your project. We are excited and look forward to receiving your submission.

Supporters

Do you want to become a part of this SHIFT movement and help to make global architecture more resilient, climate-conscious and culturally responsible? Then download the supporter logo and share it in your networks.

Join SHIFT