Drawings

Lodge

The main area of the station is the Lodge. Here is where the Lounge/Dinning, Kitchen, Vet’s Office, and Boma are located. People use this space to gather for meals, socializing, learning how to cook traditional meals, and learn about the work that the rangers at the station are doing.

The Lodge is unique in it’s design by the way it naturally ventilates itself. There are walls set up away from the cluster of buildings that collects the winds coming from the North East and brings them down into tunnels in the ground. These earth tunnels naturally heat or cool that air based on the season. The air is then released into the buildings and allowed to pass through until it is released through louvers in the roofs.

Since these buildings sit directly on the ground they are building using rammed earth with thatch roofs. During the day the walls collect heat from the sun which is released at night into the space to keep it warm on cold nights.

Guest Huts

At the ranger station there are 5 guests huts that allow people who are interested in learning about rhinos or the delta to stay. 2 of the huts are dedicated to the translocation team, a team of 10 people who work on moving rhinos from their endangered homes into the delta. These people stay with the rhino until it has settled into its new home. Each hut can hold 5-6 people with 2 bedrooms on the first floor and an additional bedroom in the loft. The huts allow air to naturally ventilate the building by having walls made of screens.

Ranger Huts

The rangers housing is set up separately from the rest of the huts. There are 5 huts for the rangers/staff and one hut for the manager. The manager’s hut has a living space on the first floor with their bedroom in the loft. Where as the rangers’ huts have a living space and 2 bedrooms on the first floor and an additional 2 bedrooms in the loft. All of the rangers and staff share a communal bathroom with composting toilets. The bathroom hut has a metal roof with some of the stations solar panels to help with the collection of energy. The huts are situated around a Boma that sits under a tree for shading.

Water Filtration System

In trying to achieve Living Building Challenge, but also being a building set up off the grid, the concern for water collection and waste had to be considered in the design. With this project, being located in the delta, getting fresh water was not a problem. Islands are formed in the Delta by an evaporative process that leaves a fresh aquifer below ground that can be reached with a borehole. The water collected from there is filtered through reverse osmosis before being stored in a water tank located in the tower. This water is then gravity fed to the different buildings on the site. The grey and black water is then collected and brought back to the water filtration building which is actually a living machine. This means that the building houses different tanks with plants that filter and clean the water so that it can be released back into the ground. After moving through the living machine the water is released through sprinklers located under the raised paths. This keeps the vegetation green which attracts animals and it also replenishes the aquifer thus completing the system.

The Water Filtration Building is designed to have photo-voltaic glass that is another way of collecting energy for the site. The Land Rover shelter also has solar panels for the same reason.