Eye Clinic

The Eye Clinic is the first building for sanitary use that has been built in the Multi-functional Center that the NGO promoter of the project foreseen to perform in the district Boulmiougou of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The master plan of this Center expects spaces for professional training and sanitary assistance and administrative areas and lodging accommodations for permanent and voluntary staff. 

The building is composed by two blocks of identical bay dimensions that are separated and displaced to create the central hallway and two exterior terraces. These porches link the building with its surroundings since the East one relates to a tree-lined way planned to be used by sanitary staff and the West one with the central corridor for public access. The displacement of the pieces allows to place next to the entrance two consultation rooms with a covered waiting area, available at any moment, independently form the opening hours of the rest of the building. In the interior, in addition to the surgical area, it is required an ophthalmology revision room and a pre and post-surgery one and a bathroom and changing room. 

One of the principal premises of the project was to maximize the use of the CEB (compressed earth block) machine that the NGO bought years before to construct the perimeter wall of the plot. For that reason, in facades and ceiling it was developed a constructive solution that allows the use of self-locking block that were originally only used for non-structural walls. The whole building, plant and section, is designed following CEB dimensions (24,5 x 14 x 11,5 cm) so only entire pieces are used in building envelope, where they are placed in aligned joint, and to benefit from all the cuts in the vaults, placed this time in broken joint assuring a good answer to possible horizontal movements. In total 7.500 blocks where produced on site. Additionally, as a result from a collaboration started in 2016 with a local production company some hundred cement tiles (hydraulic mosaic) were made specifically and for the first time in Burkina Faso for this project. These pieces where used to tile the bathroom walls.  

To adapt to local weather conditions, specially to high average annual temperatures and to the heavy rain of the wet season, facades are doubled with an interior layer made of hollow concrete block – the same used in partition walls- and a double metallic roof is disposed which cantilever keeps the building in shadow most of the day and protect it against precipitation. The central hallway acts as a controller system of the interior thermal conditions renovating constantly the air through openings in the facades coinciding with predominant wind direction (East-West) and letting it go out through some open joints in the small central vault. This space is also covered with translucent poly-carbonate plates that introduce natural light through the holes of the vault specking interior surfaces with light spots that move through the day depending on sun position.