Refurbishment of a storage room as an architectural studio / Albert Faus

This is a small project to adapt some existing storage rooms as an architectural studio. At the end of 2015 we left the city of Koudougou, where I had lived for almost 5 years, to settle in Ouagadougou. In the capital, we finally rented a house with a courtyard in front and a service area at the back where this small volume was originally intended to be used as a service bedroom, and later as a living quarters.

The existing construction, made of cement mortar block walls and corrugated metal sheet covering, with a usable area of about 20 m², was dark, warm, poorly ventilated and very low, just over 2.20 cm high at its lowest point.

The intervention aims to respond both to the shortcomings of the existing building and to the climatic conditions of Ouagadougou, especially the high average daytime temperatures (over 35°C), with a very limited budget of around 2000 €. Several bioclimatic strategies already experimented in previous projects are proposed and priority is given to the reuse of remaining or rejected materials from those same projects, as well as from the existing construction and the work itself.