WESTERN SAHARA

The conventional procedure is that refugees wait in temporary shelters until a country receives them. These settlements normally have to be created in a hurry. But the average length of transitory status is seventeen years. The complexity of the question is that on the one hand governments and international agencies find it hard to justify investing too much money in a situation that won’t last forever, and in fact nobody wants a transient situation to become permanent, so a certain physical fragility of the shelters is convenient. But on the other hand, in these circumstances you would like people to have the best possible living conditions. How to solve the temporary– permanent controversy?
In the case of Western Sahara, architecture offered two possibilities: tents and mud. Tents are the conventional Western humanitarian aid response. But in this case tents are also the most traditional and consequently deeply rooted architectural typology of the desert. Therefore, the most appropriate response to the traditional nomadic life contained lessons for the transient condition of the refugee camp. On the other hand, mud tends to be perceived as a deeply rooted (traditional building technique), profoundly pertinent (thermal mass), permanent architecture (archaic heritage). But given that in this case it is easily available on site, mud allows for an improvement in the quality of the buildings and yet maintains the constructions’ reversible condition—in other words, if the refugee camp is no longer needed, then the constructions go back to the earth as mere material.
Tents and mud not only allowed the mutually exclusive choice between temporary or quality buildings to dissolve, but also unexpectedly paved a new way: Instead of constituting a place where refugees are temporarily housed while they wait endlessly to be accepted elsewhere, the right typology and the right material allowed a camp to become the foundation of a national identity.