NYS Design and Construction – 40 Years On
By Hubert Murray
1980 and 1981 were years of intense activity both in building the physical infrastructure of the National Youth Service and in developing a curriculum through which the disciplines of design and construction could be imparted and developed with 15, 16 and 17-year old students. The practice of building classrooms, dormitories, bathrooms, kitchens, libraries and resource centers was the teaching medium, students learning through doing.
An outline curriculum for secondary education was developed in the early months of 1980. Many of the ideas were put to the test in a workshop at Port Launay that July. Based on the organizational principles laid out in the overall curriculum proposal, the government was in the process of building basic dormitory accommodation with cooking and ablution blocks to accommodate about 810 students in nine boys’ “clusters” and nine girls’. A typical cluster consisted of three 16-student dormitories, spatially organised in a star around cooking and ablutions at the centre. Boys’ and girls’ accommodation were located at opposite ends of an extensive site. There were no classrooms at this stage.
Pilot Study (1980)
The task for the pilot study was to improvise and develop a curriculum for each of the specialist “block” disciplines (Animal Husbandry, Fishing, Health, Culture, Communications, and Design and Construction). For Design and Construction there was a group of 20 students who over a period of a week were assigned the task of designing an ideal classroom, working in groups. Activities included listening to each other’s views on good and bad classrooms they had known and synthesizing the discussion into a design brief; measuring rooms and spaces to get a sense of scale; learning to sketch a classroom plan at 1:50 and 1:20 scale on quadrille paper; making clay models of their preferred designs (including roof structures); and making site surveys to evaluate suitability of the terrain for building a school. A public presentation of these exercises was made at the end of the week.
Pedagogically the pilot study formed the basis for testing and further developing a curriculum that combined intellectual work (written descriptions, maths) with technical skills (scale drawing, model-making) and practical application (site evaluations). Throughout this period and in subsequent months students participated in the building of the campus buildings.
Design and Construction Evaluation (1981)
The task for the visiting architect in the second year was to make a critique of the campus and buildings that had been built at the first site in Port Launay; to develop a brief and programme for the second village at a site to be determined; and to develop a curriculum coordinating the programme of the students and animateurs with the building process.
This work, completed over a three-week period in March 1981, is summarized in the report Design and Construction in the National Youth Service – Report to the Government of the Republic of the Seychelles.
The assessment and evaluation of the existing buildings was accomplished with oral interviews of students, animateurs and teachers as well as staff at the government building agency.
Specialist and technical information for the building of additional facilities and a new campus on a second site was obtained from local technical staff, as well as academics and design professionals in Kenya and the UK.
In addition to the prototypical designs proposed in the report, a revised and fully developed design was prepared for the Resource Centre at Port Launay, opened in November 1981. President René invited his visiting guest, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, to the opening and the presentations.
A 40-year Retrospective
Reviewing the work with the benefit of 40-year hindsight I am struck with the ambition and quality of the programme. In the very short period from when President René took office in 1977 to the time of the attempted coup by South African mercenaries in November 1981, a radically innovative educational vision had been articulated, teachers and animateurs had been recruited and trained and two sites developed for this building of a new society. As significant as this accomplishment was in the creative re-imagining of a society shaking off the inequities of colonialism, there were, given the very short space of time, two major challenges at least from the point of view of design and construction. The first was a lack of local personnel conversant with alternative building technologies; and the second was the lack of time to generate more maturely considered alternative construction and building systems. The resources of people and new technologies go hand in hand, the real catalyst being time. Time for discussion, time for building popular support for something new, time for training a younger generation in new ways of thinking and doing.
While the overall direction and philosophy of the report still holds strong a generation later, the technologies employed could have been more innovative. Concrete block was a standard construction technology used for all public buildings. Corrugated iron rooves became an unfortunate necessity as aid-in-kind donated by the well-meaning and comradely North Koreans. Rammed earth walls or sun-dried brick might well have been a more appropriate, low energy construction method. Likewise, thatched roofing with palms and grasses is more thermally efficient and certainly more acoustically tolerable. Composting toilet systems such as the Clivus Multrum have over the years become much more acceptable for institutions and there are numerous examples of greywater filtration, rainwater harvesting and other water treatment systems that one would now want to consider in design. Alternative energy systems combining wind and solar are now cheaper and more efficient by several orders of magnitude than they were 40 years ago.
There are also more examples in recent years of experiments combining technical training and social mobilization from which one could learn and adapt. Some good and apposite projects have been developed in Kutch in Gujarat, India following the devastating earthquake of 2001: the Hunnarshala Foundation teaches construction skills to Dalits (the so-called Untouchables) and has generated a number of spin-offs including a tourist hotel built, owned and run by a cooperative of thirteen villages; and a women-owned roof thatching cooperative that now exports its training and skills to other communities in the global south. Close by, the community managed Khamir Craft Resource Centre sustains and develops for the next generation the traditional crafts for which Kutch is justly famous – and at the same time overcomes old caste divisions. In all these cases, technical education and practical implementation of projects have been used to advance broader social and political goals.
The NYS was one of many historical attempts in many parts of the world to synthesize social organization, education and production as the basis for a just and equitable society. The Seychelles NYS was unique in time and place and social formation but there is nevertheless a thread that runs through all such attempts to advance these values. There is one that is being played out even as I write, in the work of the Lajee community center in Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank. Programs in health, culture and education, clean air and water and healthy food are the catalysts for asserting agency, for developing just and equitable relationships in a community beset by outside oppression. The Seychelles NYS spirit lives on.
May 2020