Last year, architect José Selgas, of the Spanish firm SelgasCano, brought 10 architecture students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to an isolated desert region in northwest Kenya to design and build a vaccination and educational center serving the nomadic Turkana people. He hoped to interrupt the students' dependence on digital technologies and confront them with more basic questions of habitat and design. In the process, he also managed to upset romantic notions about the use of indigenous, ecologically sustainable materials such as thatch or adobe, which were ruled out by the client as too expensive to install and maintain. “They're for the luxury hotels, the tourists,” Selgas observes. “So you realize that it's a lot of our own prejudices that make us want to use these supposedly natural and honest materials. It was difficult for the students to understand this.”
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