The Laliguras School: A Resilient Vision for Education in Nepal
In the wake of natural disasters and geographic challenges that disrupt learning across Nepal, the Laliguras School prototype offers a hopeful and practical vision for the future of education. Named after Nepal’s national flower, a symbol of prosperity, the design emphasizes resilience, adaptability, and community strength.
The concept centers around a seven-meter square classroom module, organized around a shared courtyard and connected by open verandas. This modular approach ensures construction efficiency, flexibility for future growth, and a consistent learning environment that supports both students and teachers.
Inspired by Nepal’s traditional architecture, the Laliguras School integrates familiar elements such as arched openings, circular motifs, and sunlit courtyards. Its form honors regional aesthetics while enhancing comfort and safety. Elevated floors, steeply sloped roofs, and bioswales protect against monsoon impacts, while reinforced earthen walls and triangulated structural ties improve earthquake resilience.
Every detail reflects sustainability and self-reliance, using locally sourced materials, solar energy, rainwater harvesting, passive ventilation, and gardens that nourish both minds and bodies. The result is a climate-responsive and low-impact framework that communities can build and maintain themselves.
The Laliguras School is more than a building. It is a foundation for opportunity, designed to help education take root and flourish throughout Nepal’s diverse landscapes.
Architects Without Borders Oregon is proud to support design concepts like the Laliguras School that empower communities, promote resilience, and create lasting change through thoughtful architecture
WATTSMAKER: Low Rise Housing Ideas for Los Angeles
WATTSMAKER was AWB’s response to a competition that asked architects and landscape architects to imagine thoughtful new models of low-rise, multi-unit housing informed by community input and concern for affordability, flexibility, sustainability, and public health.
Al Nouri Complex UNESCO Competition
In 2021, AWB-Oregon submitted an entry to a UNESCO competition to reconstruct and rehabilitate the Al-Nouri Grand Mosque Complex in Mosul, Iraq. Made up of volunteers from Portland, New York, Italy, and Bahrain, the competition team investigated design solutions that respect the historical buildings on site, while also introducing modern and sustainable elements. AWB’s design, one of 123 from around the world, featured an upper-level walkway around a courtyard that contains native plants and a water element for evaporative cooling. The walkway also helps shade the facades of buildings adjacent to the mosque. These buildings house a school and a higher education center.
Elder Cottage Housing Opportunity (ECHO)
AWB is partnering with The Home Foundation of Centre County, Pennsylvania to design a prototype Elder Cottage, a modular, movable living spacelocated in the yard of an elderly person's family member or friend as an affordable, income-based alternative to an assisted living facility. The project involves solving challenges related to energy efficiency, accessibility, transport, and making an attractive and comfortable home in the most efficient space.
Senegal School Competition
AWB submitted a proposal to a design competition for a school in Marsassoum, Senegal. The design was driven by the context, the local materials available, and the goal of providing the volunteer builders with construction techniques that can be adapted elsewhere in the area. Bamboo reeds cover the building facade and invite gentle sunlight inside without overheating or exposing the students to harsh UV-light. The main classroom building faces south with a bamboo sunscreen that wraps around the second floor. The second floor extends slightly further out than the first floor which offers shade and rain protection to the entry of the classrooms below. The roof slopes in one direction to help with the water collection system through gutters.
School in the Marshes
Architects Without Borders-Oregon was one of more than 130 design studios and individuals from 37 countries entering the inaugural cycle of the Dewan Award for Architecture competition in 2018; the competition challenge was to design a primary school in an ecologically sensitive site between two rivers in Southern Iraq. The AWB team produced a design inspired by the floating islands created by the Marsh Arabs. It features rolling hills, a dock with vehicle parking, locally sourced brick and reeds, and arched concrete forms that reference indigenous reed buildings.
Q Center Improvements
Architects Without Borders-Oregon has begun working with the Q Center to develop a vision for a more welcoming and functional community space at its location on Portland's North Mississippi Ave. The non-profit Q Center provides services, information, referrals, classes, support groups, events, and a safe space for the LGBTQ community.
Plywood POD
AWB-Oregon participated in an exhibit organized by the Center for Public Interest Design at Portland State University and Communitecture, in partnership with the Portland Art Museum and the UO John Yeon Center, in connection with the exhibit, Quest for Beauty: The Architecture, Landscapes, and Collections of John Yeon. The call for entrees noted "Yeon's incredible life and work included investigations into affordable housing in Portland through pioneering uses of plywood, a product with origins in Portland” and called on designers to demonstrate “similar visionary thinking” to address today’s homelessness crisis. AWB’s design capitalizes on the structural capabilites of plywood by using it to form rigid, interlocking panels not requiring traditional framing. Plywood serves as structure, cladding and the interior finish surface. Plywood is also used for the furniture which is assembled from multiple identical adaptable storage crates.
Sleeping POD
AWB-Oregon was one of 14 teams that participated in the Portland State University Center for Public Interest Design’s Partners on Dwelling (POD) Initiative. AWB designed and built a sleeping pod that, along with 13 others, became part of a village for homeless women.
City of Vernonia Park Shelter
Ten years after a flood destroyed the middle school in the small town of Vernonia, Oregon, local volunteers built a multipurpose shelter on the site. The structure, used for city events and as a public picnic area, was designed by AWB-Oregon with assistance from Lower Columbia Engineering. Materials include old-growth fir planks and timbers salvaged from Vernonia's flood-damaged grade school. The project was funded by a State of Oregon grant.
School for Deaf Children
AWB-Oregon is providing design services for the School for Deaf Children in Les Cayes, Haiti. A new campus, designed to serve 60 deaf and hard of hearing students, will include gardens, boarding facilities, and six classrooms.
King School Park Redesign
Located in Northeast Portland's King Neighborhood, this project is focused on redesigning the park adjoining the King Elementary School. AWB is collaborating with local organizations to research site use and history, conduct community design charettes, and create a design proposal. Current conceptual proposals include active space, nature immersion, and community gathering.
Elman Peace & Human Rights Center
AWB-Oregon is developing a master plan for a 4-acre site for the Elman Peace & Human Rights Center in Mogadishu, Somalia. The plan brings together six EPHRC programs currently dispersed throughout this war-damaged city. Through its programs EPHRC provides services such as counseling, housing, and vocational training. AWB is also designing individual buildings at the site including a women's shelter, children's rehabilitation center, and vocational school.
Portland Homeless Storage
AWB-Oregon is working with JOIN, a Portland non-profit organization, to design a facility where homeless people can store their possessions. During AWB's 2014 educational focus on homelessness issues, storage was identified as a critical need for people who want to engage in daily pursuits such as job interviews, personal hygiene, and securing social services. The project team is currently working on several design ideas addressing a variety of installation circumstances (church/host parking lots, vacant city lots, building interior spaces, etc.). Considerations include cost, availability of materials, ease of maintenance, staffing requirements, and aesthetics.
Northeast Emergency Food Program
St. Andre Bessette Catholic Church
Bon Repos Orphanage
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti damaged thousands of structures, including a classroom building at the Bon Repos Orphanage, located in a suburb of Port-au-Prince. AWB-Oregon is working with The Good Shepherd Church of Boring, Oregon to repair this three-story building and perform a seismic upgrade. The work involves constructing a set of reinforced concrete shear walls to alleviate structural deficiencies, and moving damaged bearing walls to more structurally advantageous locations. In Spring 2014 an AWB volunteer from KPFF Consulting Engineers traveled to Haiti to work onsite with the Good Shepherd team, and another AWB volunteer trained local workers to lay concrete block. Work on the building's second story will begin in Fall 2014.
buildOn Nepal
Architects Without Borders – Oregon is helping to design sustainable schools in rural Nepal through a partnership with buildOn, a non-profit dedicated to bringing education to children in the poorest and most remote communities in the world. AWB-Oregon has worked with buildOn in the past to redesign a prototype school for Haiti, making the new school more structurally sound, better suited to the climate, and a better learning environment for the students. The success of this past project has led to the current work in Nepal. BuildOn has already constructed 101 schools in Nepal and is working with AWB-Oregon to make the next 100 schools even better. AWB-Oregon’s Nepal design consists of three classrooms, consistent with buildOn's program requirements, and will be constructed of reinforced concrete, masonry, steel joist and uPVC roofing. The new schools in Nepal will begin construction in early 2014.
Minzoto School
The Minzoto School in Dungu, Democratic Republic of Congo, was destroyed in the devastation inflicted on that country by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Today, the Friends of Minzoto School have partnered with Architects Without Borders - Oregon in their effort to rebuild. The project aims to create new and refurbished classrooms, latrines, and hand washing stations for 537 students and their teachers.
Wahkiakum County, WA Space Planning
Wahkiakum County (population 4,000) in rural Southwest Washington has turned to AWB for help with space and site planning for its Health & Human Services campus. Located in the county seat of Cathlamet, the campus consists of five buildings originally built for the State of Washington Forestry Department. Goals for the reconfigured spaces include grouping staff to support efficient work teams, organizing services for client-friendly delivery, and minimizing construction costs.
