FMP Blog post 8 – 100 classrooms

The baseboard for this model, like all the others, was made of plywood offcuts from the waste box in the workshop.

This model required quite a lot of trying to work out beforehand how to go about making it. I had never sculpted an architectural model before.

I wanted ¼ of the wall of the model removed in order to show off the inside of the building and also to possibly show how the building was constructed. Super adobe structures are built using sandbags filled with mud, stacked in overlapping layers in a curved formation with a bench like addition both inside and outside for people to sit on. The doors, windows, air vents and in the case of this building climbing rods, are all added between the sandbags. The sandbags are then covered in super adobe mud. The building is quick and simple to make, weather proof and even earthquake resistant, and uses a lot of natural materials. They are an ingenious alternate housing solution, and especially effective for things like classrooms and shelter for refugees due to their quick, cheap and easy to build nature. This particular design caught my eye because of the wooden slats all over the building, put in place to allow the children to have not only a classroom but also a playground with something to climb. The inside too had an upper floor with a rope ladder to climb.

I started by making the shape of the inside of the building in white clay, I used a compass, and a piece of styrene I had leftover from another model to shape the form, and cut out ¼ of it, placing more of the styrene inside this cut-out to ensure the final clay wall would hold its shape.

Once that was dry I used cling film left over from my kitchen to make sure the clay would not stick to the former. I rolled out the terracotta clay to the correct thickness and applied it to the former like cake icing. While the clay was still wet I cut out the door, added the outside bench and the wooden climbing slats - more the balsa wood I had from a previous project.

Once the wall was dry I removed the former from the inside and added the bench to the inside. I had to patch up a lot of cracks as the clay dried, but nothing fell apart.

Once the clay was dry I added a door frame, the second floor and also the rope ladder, made of embroidery floss I already had at home. I also covered the base in sand to make it as similar to the photographs of the building as possible. I did attempt to hollow out the cross sections of the wall and add sandbags using white clay, however the space was too small and the white clay did not look at all like sandbags, so I decided to fill in the gaps

again with terracotta clay and not show the inside of the walls for this model.

I had to search for a long time in order to find scale people for this model. I wanted to show the children playing on the building as well as standing around it for scale, and to show its purpose. A lot of scale details for models are made of plastic. I did consider 3D printing some as the university has PLA 3D printers meaning anything printed is biodegradable, however I was struggling to find a file and did not feel I would have enough time to model the children myself on top of all of the other models I planned to make. Luckily I found a set of 1:50 scale pewter metal children, and even a few adults to supervise them, and was able to add those to the model. I used some scrap fabric to make a few small rugs for the inside of the model, and the same wire as the Majamajawurio model to make the shrubs, and the model was finished.