Converting a disused rainwater collection tank into a children’s library could not, under any circumstances, be called an obvious design solution. But that’s exactly what one nonprofit asked San Francisco–based Natoma Architects to do, in a small farming community in the Nyeri West region of Kenya, a four-hour drive north of Nairobi.
The Nobelity Project, an Austin, Texas–based group that builds critically needed school infrastructure, is known for looking beyond easy answers to meet a community’s needs. While undertaking the Nyeri West school renovation some years back, the organization’s cofounder, Turk Pipkin, saw the nearby cistern and, noting its unusually large size, saw the potential of its robust, curved form for housing books. The 70-year-old tank had a diameter of 25 feet inside its thick, plastered brick walls, which rose 9 feet high. It was conveniently situated behind the property’s cattle sheds-turned-classrooms. It even had a prominent site on a hillside—with views out to Mount Kenya—and could be seen from the road leading up to the school. And, for locals, who were given the tank (and the rest of the formerly British-owned dairy farm on which it sits) when Kenya declared its independence from the United Kingdom in 1963, it also had sentimental value.
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