This foundation provides downloadable blueprints for efficiently-built school libraries

Picture this:

A school in rural China with 1,000 pupils, sharing just one library facility 45-square-metres in size.

Just one tiny library room for 1,000 students. Source: Alfons Morales/Unsplash

Now, compare that with your school library, your university library or even your local library. Is it anything like 45-square-metres in size?

From time to time, it’s good to take a moment like this to reflect on the educational resources you have around you.

Whether you have access to 1,000 books or 10 interactive whiteboards, you have a chance to enhance your expertise and increase your academic opportunities.

But this is the reality for many students around the world, whose educational resources stretch to a confined space with a handful of books and limited writing apparatus.

A game-changing design platform 

Noticing the need for renovated learning spaces and resourceful academic areas, the UK’s WikiHouse Foundation aims to place design solutions for constructing low-cost, low-energy, high-performance buildings into the hands of every citizen and business on earth.

Recently, the open-source architecture platform attracted a great deal of attention for the part it played in the construction of a new library at Er-tai primary school in Hebei, a northern Chinese province near Beijing.

The school’s surrounding community is greatly afflicted by poverty, but the new ‘Huaxia Star Library’ has granted students a central public space with a courtyard, a reading room with library shelves and plenty of windows to shed natural light upon their textbooks.

Initially, the funding was donated by HuaXia bank, but the downloadable blueprints for the library were supplied by WikiHouse.

By downloading low-budget simple structures that can be constructed quickly and safely, learning communities worldwide have the chance to be transformed!

 

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The #PPESReadingHut has finally been assembled in its new location at Pei Ping Primary School in Taiwan. It offers shade and shelter, making a great place to read or relax. . . . . #digitalfabrication #education #students #read #3dprinting #citizensector #bypeopleforpeople #shelter #community #wikihouse

A post shared by WikiHouse (@wikihouseproject) on Nov 23, 2016 at 2:21am PST

Resources for the future

Instead of keeping these resources to themselves, WikiHouse has decided to grant public internet users the benefit of downloading and following the structure’s plan.

If you click on the library link, you can view the different types of structures and tools and can even transfer them to your personal files.

As an example, the MicroHouse design supplies starter files for architects, designers, engineers and others interested in getting to know the WikiHouse system.

From there, the building can be largely self-assembled with production costs of £37-45k.

So if a charitable architect or engineer wants to dedicate their services to a school that needs renovation or a rural institution in need of a library, they can find a donor to fund the project and plan it effectively, without extra costs of a construction company or design consultant.

School library built in 7 days https://t.co/1jpuvdgV6x

— WikiHouse (@WikiHouse) December 3, 2018

By cutting out the middle man and the time it takes to plan a blueprint design, WikiHouse is starting an architectural revolution.

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