Sra Pou Vocational School is a training center and community building in the Sra Pou village in Cambodia designed by Architects Rudanko + Kankkunen. It provides professional training; encouraging and teaching poor families to earn their own living and help them start sustainable businesses together. It also acts as a public gathering place where important community decisions are made.

Design Process

The project began as an Aalto University design studio exercise in the spring of 2010. Students traveled to Cambodia to seek out community problems and built environment needs. The academic exercise was to seek out NGO’s and come up with an architectural design solution to meet their needs. They met with a local non-profit organization, NGO Blue Tent, who led them to the Sra Pou community, one of the underprivileged communities in the country – lacking basic infrastructure, decent buildings, and secure incomes. The students were asked to help with the design of a small vocational school.

As the design process progressed, it became very apparent that this purely academic exercise was a real, urgent necessity for the community. It was during this time that the students formed Architects Rudanko + Kankkunen and started to work towards the construction of the school and finding donors who were inspired by the design. Together with the community and NGO, they built the project in the spring of 2011.

Construction Process

The goals of the design project were to use the local workforce and local materials for this low-budget intervention ($15,000 USD). The construction process was to be simple, constructed by hand, and teachable. The aim was to encourage the community to make use of readily available materials so that they could apply the same construction techniques in future buildings.

Using the abundant red soil of the area, the team created a design that utilized sun-dried soil blocks. The community, who provided the labor to help build the structure, embraced this easily teachable construction practice.

Gaps in the block walls provide indirect sunlight and a cross breeze to cool the interior spaces. At night, the space glows through the voids in the masonry. Colorful doors open to the covered outdoor space and are visible from far away to welcome visitors.

Post-Occupancy Follow-up

What we find very admirable about Architects Rudanko + Kankkunen is that after construction, they kept in touch with the NGO Blue Tent to ensure the building continued to meet the needs of the community. The team reviewed the building’s functionality and with the community, designed a few necessary changes. One thing they learned was that the community wanted more durable doors, but they didn’t want to change the building themselves. They thought the building was a gift!

In 2012, the architects wanted to make a follow-up visit to the Sra Pou community to not only fix the doors but to also transfer the mental ownership to the locals so that they would feel comfortable making changes and feel responsible for maintaining the building. When they visited the school, the architects saw firsthand that the handmade textile doors were not durable enough so the local craftspeople refined the design by replacing them with solid metal doors.  These doors then received a colorful facelift by the community artists and children.

The ownership issue is important to understand. For many humanitarian and socially responsive projects, it’s important to not only involve the community but also to empower them and encourage them to take control of the building process so that they feel the building is theirs. Hilla Rudanko of Architects Rudanko + Kankkunen explains:

“This same issue is problematic in all development aid: the transferring of ownership. I think best projects are the ones where the locals are completely in charge so that the ownership does not need to be transferred but it is with the locals from the beginning on.”

The Sra Pou Vocational School brings a sense of joy, and now, ownership and pride to the Sra Pou people, elevating the community to higher standards of living. This project has enriched the lives of these young Finnish architects, encouraging them to focus their design practice on designing better learning environments. When asked what they learned from this project that affects their work today, the architects said:

“We definitely learned that best designs are the simplest ones. In Finland, building is like a secret science: buildings are very complicated because of our harsh climate. In Cambodia it was relieving to see how simple building can be. That also removed some of the myth of difficulty in architecture. Architecture can be easy and understandable! And this rule we try to apply in our current projects in Finland, too. We want to create easy and understandable environments.”

Architects Rudanko + Kankkunen joined the NGO Ukumbi with the completion of this project. Ukumbi is a larger design movement of Finnish humanitarian architecture firms who believe architecture is a human necessity and provide architectural services to communities in need.