A New school in uganda

St. Bakhita Vocational Training Center is a vocational school for girls in Northern Uganda, teaching them practical skills and business know-how. Many of the girls go on to start their own businesses and are able to better support themselves and their families. Many of the students are young mothers themselves and they bring their babies to class every day. St. Bakhita’s identified two building projects of significant importance to the school: a new early childhood care building for young mothers and a new restaurant to generate income and community involvement for the school.

The project was introduced to us by Professor John Onyango. In his studio, we spent the first two weeks of the semester working with Mendoza students and Professor Wendy Angst to generate a rough conceptual design for the project. The studio project concluded with a presentation to her class and to the principal of St. Bakhita’s.

While we didn’t expect the project to continue on, Wendy secured a donor willing to fund interested architecture students’ participation for an upcoming trip to St. Bakhita’s. I traveled with three other architecture students to Uganda over spring break and accompanied Wendy and her class to St. Bakhita’s. The intent was that we would collect data which would then be passed on to future architecture classes who would eventually complete construction documents for the project.

During the trip, however, we realized how much this new early childhood center and restaurant would impact St. Bakhita’s, and after we formed strong connections with those at the school, we decided we weren’t quite willing to let go of the project just yet.

Over the next two months, the four of us completed a construction document set for the early childhood center and restaurant, culminating in a presentation to the project donors who approved funding for construction. Throughout the process, we relied heavily on Prof. Onyango who was highly dedicated and gave us excellent feedback. However, the project was separate from our studio requirements for the semester.

The renderings and construction documents below are my own work, but the project was fully a group effort in collaboration with fellow students Matthew Espeland, Caroline Larocca, and Elizabeth Reay. The construction document set was completed in the summer of 2023 and is currently in the bidding process.