2020
Kaloum Bankhi, 2018 Big Ideas winner, is building durable and culturally appropriate houses for residents in Kaloum, Guinea. In response to COVID 19, this project has begun distributing personal protective equipment including buckets with taps that hold dilute bleach which families will use as hand sanitizer...
Aboubacar Komara, an architect from Guinea, is working on a housing startup.
"We're implicating people in the process of actually building their homes. You know, we want to change the concept of what is architecture, because architecture has a lot to do with your identity,” he said...
"We're implicating people in the process of actually building their homes. You know, we want to change the concept of what is architecture, because architecture has a lot to do with your identity,” he said...
Aboubacar Komara, founder and president of Kaloum Bankhi, says his upbringing in both Guinea and the United States has shaped how he understands architecture. The Kaloum Bankhi team incorporates the local identity into its designs is by including African prints as a design element in its renovations.
“I don’t think this project would be possible without Aboubacar and the ways he brings his cultural experiences and architecture together,” said Matt Turlock , a 2019 graduate of UC Berkeley master’s programs in architecture and structural engineering and a Kaloum Bankhi team lead...
2019
Four College of Environmental Design graduate students were recently awarded first place for their exceptional “Big Ideas” as part of UC Berkeley’s annual contest recognizing interdisciplinary student teams whose projects aim to solve “big” problems.
Architecture alumnus Aboubacar Komara (B.A. in Architecture ‘18), recent Master of Architecture graduate Matt Turlock (M.Arch '19, M.Eng) and Master of City Planning graduate Matt Fairris (M.C.P. ‘19) and were part of a team that won first place in the “Art & Social Change” category for their low-income, sustainably built housing project...
Architecture alumnus Aboubacar Komara and current Master’s student Matt Turlock will be pitching their low-income, sustainably built housing project as part of the Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day on April 24 at 5 p.m. in Blum Hall on Berkeley’s campus.
Their “Big Idea,” Kaloum Bankhi, focuses on the construction of a durable and culturally appropriate housing unit for residents in Guinea. The concept was conceived by Komara following an architecture studio prompt to design sustainable and adaptive one-room dwellings. The project was awarded first place in the "Art and Social Change" category, and the group is now competing for the overarching award...
Kaloum Bankhi: A Migration of Architecture is a project about ecology and community. With cost-effective building materials, sustainable methods, and a community process, the project crafts a path toward improving housing in the slums of Kaloum, Guinea. This project introduces a shift to sustainable materials that are vernacular, local, and suitable to Guinea’s dry and humid climate. At the same time, Guinean architecture and culture are celebrated with this alternative housing solution that is built by a community, for a community...
The night is pitch-dark and silent. Five boys fit into two twin-sized beds, hardly able to move, but still a rare luxury in the neighborhood. Crawling over his cousins to get down from bed, a boy tiptoes to his mother’s room and spends the night on a mat, but with more space to himself.
Growing up in Guinea, Aboubacar Komara, 25, found home to be the best place on earth, surrounded with loving families, but always crowded...
Growing up in Guinea, Aboubacar Komara, 25, found home to be the best place on earth, surrounded with loving families, but always crowded...
2018
This summer, the Kissosso neighborhood in Conakry, Guinea, welcomed a distinctly different home clad entirely in bright green corrugated metal. Its interior, decorated with vibrant traditional West African fabrics and prints, stands in stark contrast to the neighboring metal and concrete shacks. Built entirely by and for the residents of the slums, it’s the first of its kind — a prototype for what a recent Berkeley graduate in architecture, Aboubacar Komara, hopes will soon be hundreds of low-cost, sustainably built homes for some of Conakry’s most vulnerable populations...
Local organization Youth Spirit Artworks, or YSA, met with Aboubacar Komara, an alumnus of UC Berkeley’s architecture program, to collaborate with his tiny house project based in Guinea, and voted to create a sister relationship at its Friday meeting.
Despite recent setbacks in a plan for their initial “tiny house village” — miniature residences in a community with on-site access to vocational programs — YSA hopes to expand the impact of its projects through the collaboration to help achieve its goals...
This summer, the Kissosso neighborhood in Conakry, Guinea welcomed a distinctly different home clad entirely in bright green corrugated metal. Its interior, decorated with vibrant traditional West African fabrics and prints, stands in stark contrast to the neighboring metal and concrete shacks. Built entirely by and for the residents of the slums, it’s the first of its kind — a prototype for what Aboubacar Komara (B.A. Architecture ‘18) hopes will soon be hundreds of low-cost, sustainably built homes for some of Conakry’s most vulnerable populations...
Kaloum Bankhi addresses the lack of housing by maximizing the use of the minimal spaces these families previously had and provides a new cost-effective home with movable features that allow for multiple uses of the same space. The project uses the term migration as a platform that literally mimics the term to establish an architectural language that serves to further promote the pre-existing collaboration and support among these communities. To illustrate this migration, the Kaloum Bankhi references the Shotgun House concept that once originated from West Africa and later developed in Haiti before becoming a ubiquitous house type in Louisiana, United States. This migration begins from the one room dwelling and expands to the neighborhood and continuously to the entire city. As a result, this creates a more inclusive habitat and engages the population into shaping their daily lives...
2017
Students from the University of Denver and UC Berkeley -- including a cohort of architecture students from the College of Environmental Design -- were part of a collaborative team that recently placed third in the 2017 Solar Decathlon, a collegiate competition that challenges students to design and build full-size, solar-powered houses.
The entirely student-run UC Berkeley team -- which included over 40 undergraduate and graduate members in disciplines including civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, architecture, environmental design, marketing, legal studies, economics, real estate, business, and more -- worked in collaboration with a group of students from the University of Denver to create the RISE Home, a sustainable, net-zero house designed specifically for the densely populated areas of Richmond, California. Sponsored by the US Department of Energy, this year’s Solar Decathlon was the first time a team from UC Berkeley had ever competed in the contest...