Malalai Kakar Center: Rammed Earth Walls That Shelter Afghan Women Without Confining Them

Every shelter faces the same contradiction: the walls that keep danger out can just as easily keep a life from moving forward. The Malalai Kakar Center confronts that tension directly. It is a protected community for Afghan women and their children, and it gathers housing, healthcare, education, vocational training and social life inside one low-rise earthen settlement. Its ambition goes beyond refuge. The architecture is built to help residents recover, learn practical skills and eventually leave for independent lives.

Designed by Mathilde Severinsen, Ronja Scherer and Kathrine Vand, the project was selected as an Editor's Choice entry in the Resile competition. The team reads resilience broadly. It covers more than a building's ability to withstand physical stress and extends to the social, economic and psychological work of rebuilding a life. The proposal stays connected to opportunities in Kandahar while answering to security, privacy, climate and cultural patterns at the same time.

Rammed Earth and Shade as the Grammar of Everyday Life

The school yard and classroom veranda show the project's most persuasive argument: sustainability here means familiarity. The rammed earth walls cast long afternoon shade across a paved yard where children chase a ball, and timber columns frame a veranda that opens toward a courtyard tree. Neither image depends on technical spectacle. The team set out to build structures that residents can construct and maintain with known methods, so the community never relies too heavily on outside organizations or complex building systems.

That decision affects more than the visual identity. A veranda that a local builder understands is also a veranda that a local builder can repair. The warm walls, deep openings and shaded passages tie the center to its climate and region, but the larger point concerns longevity. The project treats durability as a social question as well as a material one: can the people who live here understand the place, keep it running and outgrow it?

A Skill Centre Where Healing and Earning Share a Courtyard

The skill centre sheet pairs a courtyard rendering with ground and upper floor plans and an axonometric drawing. It brings a clinic and workshops into a single cluster. The adjacency carries the project's theory of recovery: healthcare and vocational training are not separate stages a resident completes one after the other. They sit around the same open space, so the woman who visits the clinic in the morning can join a workshop in the afternoon.

The plans show the settlement developing as interconnected clusters rather than a single institutional block. This is what makes the scheme read as a village and not a facility. Each programme gets its own courtyard, its own threshold and its own scale, while the network as a whole keeps everything within reach of a protected interior.

A Perimeter Wall That Lowers Itself From the Inside

The cafeteria colonnade, with tall timber fins set beside a rammed earth wall, offers a calm scene: one woman reads in the sun while another walks past. That ease is designed. The project's sharpest idea is its handling of the boundary. From outside, the perimeter rises about 2.5 metres and blocks views into the complex from the public realm. From inside, the wall begins roughly 1.5 metres above ground level, so residents can look out while remaining unseen.

The wall then steps down through platforms toward the centre of the development, breaking up what would otherwise read as one continuous barrier. This sectional move separates protection from confinement. For women who have faced discrimination and assault, the center has to be secure, but security infrastructure cannot dominate daily life. Here the wall works one way only. It reads as a barrier from outside and as a horizon from within, and privacy becomes a form of dignity rather than a sentence.

Dwellings Calibrated Between Privacy and Shared Life

The dwelling board brings together a courtyard rendering, floor plans, an arched interior and axonometric diagrams that map privacy and programme. These diagrams show the team's discipline. They treat privacy as a gradient, moving from the shared courtyard to the threshold and then to the room, instead of as a simple yes-or-no condition. The arched interior gives the private realm a sense of enclosure that feels domestic rather than institutional.

This layering matters for families who may arrive in crisis and leave years later with new skills and networks. The units let residents step back when they need to and step into community life when they are ready. The housing supports the same gradual movement toward independence that shapes the rest of the plan.

Why This Project Matters

The Malalai Kakar Center shows that resilience can be designed into a section drawing. A difference of about a metre between the outer and inner heights of a wall changes how protection feels, and that kind of precision is rare in humanitarian proposals that often stop at programme diagrams. The project shows how architecture can carry the emotional weight of security without making it visible at every turn.

Its other lesson is restraint. By choosing rammed earth, timber and buildable clusters over complex systems, Severinsen, Scherer and Vand design an institution its residents can maintain, understand and eventually leave. A shelter judged by how well people move beyond it sets a demanding standard, and this entry meets it with clarity.

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Project credits: Malalai Kakar Center Resile (uni.xyz).