Hardel Le Bihan Architectes Houses 10,000 Dakar Students Behind Wind-Tuned Terracotta Moucharabieh Screens

Student housing at scale is usually a story of compromise: maximum beds, minimum cost, and a mechanical system left to absorb whatever the architecture failed to solve. At Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, working with the Dakar studio Alun BE, took on a brief for nearly 10,000 students spread across 16 buildings, ten on the UCAD campus and six at Cité Claudel. The Senegalese state set the process in motion in 2015. The first two buildings opened to 750 students in June 2024, after roughly a decade of work that included uncertain access to materials and a site disrupted by student riots.

What makes the project worth your attention is not its size but its argument. The buildings are designed so that comfort comes from orientation, mass, shade and moving air, and the students are expected to take part. Residents are shown how to run daytime and night-time ventilation, which turns the dormitory into a working lesson in bioclimatic living. On a campus described as one of Dakar's last major green areas, that ambition carries real weight, and in our view the architecture mostly earns it.

Slim Bars on a Green Campus

From the street the blocks read as stepped brick volumes under sloped, projecting roofs, set back behind young trees. The massing stays modest. The brief called for a morphology that respects the limited dimensions of the surrounding urban fabric, and the result is a series of slim bars rather than a single megastructure, which keeps the campus porous and leaves room for planting between buildings.

The slimness is functional. A narrow plan is what makes cross ventilation possible, and the bars are oriented to catch the prevailing north-northeast winds and channel them through the site. The roof overhangs and over-roofs shade the top floors, where heat gain would otherwise be worst. At dusk, with balconies lit behind the screens, the blocks feel inhabited rather than institutional.

The Moucharabieh as Climate Device and Cultural Signal

The terracotta screens carry most of the architectural identity. They give privacy to walkways and rooms, filter low sun, and let air pass freely. Three patterns are used, each drawn from the symbolic knowledge systems of the Akan and Dogon peoples. That reference could easily have stayed decorative, but because the screens are also doing environmental work, the patterns feel earned rather than applied.

We would have liked more variation in how the patterns respond to orientation, since a screen facing west has a harder job than one facing north. Still, the white banded balconies behind the lattice give the facades depth, and the interplay of solid brick, open screen and pale concrete keeps long elevations from becoming monotonous.

Brick, Steel and the Logic of the Frame

Beneath the screens sits a post-and-beam frame with solid slabs, engineered by EVP. The modular grid allows layouts to change over time, which matters for a building type whose occupancy patterns tend to shift. Brick infill and pale concrete bands make the structure legible on the facade rather than hiding it.

The envelope works on a double-wall principle, with the denser, high-inertia material on the inside. Thick interior mass absorbs heat during the day and releases it when night air is flushed through the rooms. Exterior steel stairs and a recycled-material chair on a landing hint at an economy of means that suits a project built under material uncertainty.

The Central Garden Atrium

Each building splits into two wings around a central opening designed as an interior garden. This is the strongest spatial move in the scheme. The void is a ventilation stack, a light well and a social room at the same time, and the stacked walkways that line it turn circulation into a place to linger. Students talking at the railings or crossing the pale floor give the atrium the feel of a shared street.

The walkways themselves are ventilated, so moving between rooms never means passing through a sealed, overheated corridor. Planters along the upper levels soften the terracotta and bring the garden up the section rather than leaving it at ground level.

Shade, Passages and Rain Gardens

Niez Studio's landscape treats the ground between buildings as informal territory for gathering, studying and resting. Brick-paved passages run along tall lattice walls toward existing trees, and covered walkways with hanging vines create shaded thresholds. Rain gardens manage stormwater and encourage infiltration, a serious consideration on a site where a dense housing program could easily have sealed over a green campus.

Shared Rooms on the Ground Floor

The lower levels hold communal services: TV rooms, laundry, concierge and campus shops. The glazed lounges open onto the atrium, so social life spills between inside and out. A meeting room walled in white louvers with a door onto a terracotta screen shows how the same principle of filtered openness reaches into smaller rooms.

Rooms Built for Sharing

Inside the bedrooms, exposed brick bands frame sliding windows that look out through the screens. Blue wardrobes, desks and steel bunk stairs give the rooms colour and durability on a tight budget. High ceilings help warm air rise away from occupants, and the sliding windows let residents tune airflow themselves.

An image of a woman seated beside a bunk with a child above says something about how these rooms will actually be lived in: shared, adapted and busier than any plan suggests. The robustness of the fit-out looks well judged for that reality.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans make the environmental logic explicit. Blue arrows track the north-northeast prevailing winds as they strike rows of bar buildings, confirming that orientation came before almost every other decision. The ground floor plan shows the two wings divided by the planted courtyard, while the upper floor plan reveals long bars of repeated rooms linked across the central void by open passages and stair cores.

The furnished room plan, with its four beds around a central table, shows how carefully the unit was sized, and the elevation captures the regular window grid wrapped in a pale slatted skin. Elioth's climate engineering is readable in every drawing.

Why This Project Matters

Mass student housing across fast-growing cities is often built as sealed boxes that depend on cooling that residents cannot afford to run. UCAD offers a different model: a large program, delivered by a private client in Amsa Realty SA, that relies on narrow plans, thermal mass, screens and wind to keep rooms livable. Its 2026 A+Awards jury prize for sustainable multi-unit residential work recognises that this approach can operate at the scale of a city district, not only at the scale of a pavilion.

The more provocative idea is pedagogical. By asking students to manage their own ventilation, the project treats comfort as a shared practice rather than a service delivered from a plant room. Whether that culture holds over years of occupancy is the real test. If it does, a generation of Senegalese graduates will leave campus having lived inside a working argument for building with climate rather than against it.

UCAD Dakar Student Housing by Hardel Le Bihan Architectes with Alun BE, Dakar, Senegal. Area: 120,000 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Schepp Renou.

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