Baccalauréat · Série F · Anglais — 2023

TEXT — Building for the heat

For thirty years, the houses built in our cities have followed the same model: cement blocks, a flat concrete roof or corrugated iron, and small windows. In April, when the temperature reaches forty-two degrees, these houses become ovens. Those who can afford it buy an air conditioner; the others sleep in the yard.

Madame Ilboudo, an architect trained in Ouagadougou, thinks that we have forgotten something. « Our grandparents built with earth, » she says. « An earth wall forty centimetres thick keeps the heat outside during the day and releases it slowly at night. Cement does exactly the opposite. »

Her agency now builds with compressed earth blocks, produced on the site itself. The material costs less than cement, it does not need to be imported, and it creates local jobs. The main difficulty, she admits, is not technical.

« It is in people's heads. A client told me last year: I have worked twenty years to leave the mud house of my father. Do not ask me to go back to it. I understand him. But a modern earth building is not his father's house: it has a concrete foundation, a damp-proof course and a proper roof. »

The school she built at Koudougou has no air conditioning. In the hottest month, the temperature inside stays about eight degrees below the outside temperature.