About 100,000 people live in the stilt dwellings of Makoko, a lagoon-side neighborhood in the heart of the African continent’s second most populated city, Lagos. Constructions here are very precarious, hardly able to resist the inclemencies of nature – torrential rains, floods, strong winds, and so on –, which because of climate change are especially aggressive in the area. In this context, the new school of the community has a double mission: to provide residents with an educational facility and a civic reference, and to serve as a typological and constructional model for further building.

Rising ten meters over a rectangular base, the school is built with a timber structure whose pyramid geometry, because of its low gravitational center, is highly stable as well as resistant and very rigid; after all, it is intended to take in a hundred people in adverse weather conditions. Unlike traditional water structures, where the posts are firmly set on the bottom of the body of lake or river, the Makoko school rests on a floating base made of plastic drums that were salvaged from one of the city’s numerous dumps, held together with the help of a robust wooden lattice. This unsubmersible plinth is formed by several modules constructed on land but assembled on water. And all this with the active participation of the local community.