Partnering with NATURE to go off Grid

Situated in the spectacular 48 000ha Lapalala Wilderness Reserve in the Waterberg region of Limpopo lies the newly built Lapalala Wilderness School Environmental Education Centre. The building’s immediately noticeable feature is its earthy red walls – a nod to its surrounds. Buildings are connected through steel and timber pergolas and canopies, and inside the main facility, high walls and airy spaces bestow a sense of calmness and connection to the earth. Every element in the buildings on this campus was intentionally chosen with a single goal in sight – to go off grid.

Lapalala Environmental Education Centre received its Net-Zero rating last year, and although it is considered one of the most stringent ratings, no stone was left unturned to make it all happen. “Going off grid is something we really wanted to do as a showcase,” says centre director Mashudu Makhokha. “We teach climate change and climate change mitigation strategies. We educate about biodiversity, energy saving and water conservation. In teaching those things, you don’t just want to be the talker – you want to walk the talk.”

Project architects Daniel Trollip and Lize Wessels of Local Studio Architects and Urban Design experienced the project as being one of extraordinary cooperation and enrichment. “The brief was developed with the school,” says Wessels. “There were workshops held on the facilities they used to have in the old school and what they would like to bring across, what they would like to enhance or make bigger, get rid of, or add.” This collaboration continued throughout the whole process, right down to the project interiors – also designed by Local Studio.

The centre facilitates 128 guests sleeping over in the 16 dormitory rooms, and 10 single unit rooms. The auditorium seats 120 people, and the industrial-size kitchen is able to provide meals for visitors within an hour.

Originally the school’s site, in an area of untouched bushveld that levelled out in the valley alongside the Palala river, was without any municipal supply or basic services. “It was almost a blank canvas,” says Wessels. “Our team had to introduce an extension of the municipal road to the site. We had to blast through boulders to get access and ensure a bus with children could make a safe trip down to the school. Then we introduced services, including two boreholes and the solar plant for the electricity, as well as a wastewater treatment system.” The campus’ power is supplied by a 105 KVA solar PV system, with 240kWh of storage, and water is heated using thermodynamic solar hot water heating systems. A back-up generator is also on standby – but this is only the tip of the iceberg.

SO MUCH MORE THAN A PV SYSTEM

“When you talk about net zero, everyone wants to know how much solar power there is,” says Solid Green partner and co-director Chilufya Lombe. The company was also involved in this project. “The message we want to get out to everyone is that these buildings are all about energy efficiency – it’s purely about performance. It’s not about being able to add more and more PV; it’s about having to use less and less energy, and being sensible about your usage.”

In the case of Lapalala Wilderness School, he says the biggest risk around efficiency is the cold Limpopo nights. “You have a finite energy source, which is your battery. If it runs out at night, that’s it. Whereas during the day – even if you use air conditioning – you have an infinite source of energy. The climate profile really pointed us towards the fact that both risk and opportunity lies at night.”

WARM WATER FOR ALL

“One of our approaches to design is to allow for passive heating and cooling, in winter and in summer,” says Wessels. “All the dorms are north-south facing, and in the dorms where the entrance door may face south, we have introduced skylights that scoop in the northern sun.” Adding to this, Lombe says a great deal of thought was given to introducing windows as means of extra light and passive heating. “The architecture, and where it started off, was very sensible in terms of the sizing of the windows, so we didn’t have to go to a place where we needed high-performance glass in order to make the building work.” In addition, walls have also been insulated to prevent heat loss in residential spaces.

Cold nights are often associated with warm showers, and according to Lombe, an efficient hot-water heating system helps power a building via solar energy. For Lapalala, a thermodynamic solar hot-water heating system was considered the best option. Lombe explains, “It operates almost like another battery, because you can heat the water up during the day using the sun. The storage is big enough, and it’s nicely insulated, so you don’t lose the heat.”

Makhokha says they can already see the difference in comparison to the old farmhouse they used for more than three decades. “We battled at the old facility, where, when 60 kids took a hot shower, 25 of the kids who showered later would have to make do with cold water.” At the new facility, everyone gets a warm-water shower, a bonus in an area where the temperature can drop to a minimum of -5°C.

A DAYTIME OASIS

A defining feature of the campus that both Local Studio and Makhokha are proud of are the rammed earth walls that characterise each of the buildings. “Our buildings are designed in such a way that they all have very thick gable-end walls of rammed earth,” says Wessels. “The thermal mass created by these rammed-earth gable-end walls contributes to the applied passive heating and cooling principles, and coupled with cross-ventilation through all the buildings, there’s no need for mechanical ventilation. It will retain heat during colder times, and in summer, the cross-ventilation allows fresh air to constantly flow through and cool the spaces down.”

Another element to controlling the heat gain inside the buildings is creating a cooler exterior. Trollip explains that all of the buildings have a canopy or an overhang outside the student dorms and the teacher units. Along with that, a continuous walkway canopy wraps around and between all the separate dorm structures. “Another defining feature of the campus are the steel and timber shade pergolas, the louvres of which are angled to provide relief from direct sunlight. The intention of these structures is to manipulate the sun to create comfortable outdoor seating environments for the students, because the educators also make use of these outdoor courtyard and amphitheatre spaces.” Not only are the pergolas highly functional, but they also allow for shadow play across the walls, much like trees to the earth.

The walls reflect the colour of the earth surrounding the campus – because it comes from here, says Makhokha: “When we were excavating to set up the platform, we harvested soil and kept it in storage, hoping to use it one way or another, and when the idea of ramming the wall came into play, we utilised the soil.” At first, they wanted to use it for just a few walls, but in the end, they became a statement piece throughout the campus. This is something Makhokha believes to be of great value in teaching sustainable practices in Limpopo. Houses in this region are traditionally built in the same manner, but to a lesser degree. The school conducts environmental programmes for approximately 3 000 children annually, most of them from the Waterberg region. According to Makhokha, they can identify with this technique. “It’s something we’ve grown up with – in my traditional language of tshi-Venda, this is called thidelo. The people who work with us in the area, the si Pedi, call it thitelo. When we talk to the kids and the parents, and explain to them how we built the walls, it underscores the importance of indigenous knowledge. We don’t believe that kids come here as empty vessels – we believe they have a vast prior knowledge that we can build on.”

TOWARDS A BRIGHT, INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

With education at the core of the Lapalala Wilderness School, it comes as no surprise that the school’s end-users were involved throughout the project’s inception and implementation.

Even the choice of furniture was made with this in mind. Intentional steps were taken to ensure that the local community members and staff were upskilled, and will stay involved in maintaining even something as small as the chairs or tables. “All the furniture pieces are very simple: hardwood and steel,” says Wessels. “The furniture was chosen and discussed for a reason – it is something that the workshop staff can fix on site, and in so doing, ensuring the school’s self-sustainability.”

In the end, no one was left untouched by this unique bushveld project. “It just blows my mind how we managed to pull it together, and work together with the professionals to get it to where it is,” Makhokha says. “When I received the keys on the first day, I was overjoyed, knowing that this is the building we dreamt of – where we constantly put our minds, hearts and everything that we have into creating the best environmental education centre in the world.”