Resile: A Courtyard Community in Raw Earth for Afghan War Widows and Their Children

Emergency housing is usually measured in square metres and delivery speed. Resile asks a harder question: what does a widow who has survived war actually need from a wall? The answer this proposal gives is protection, but not the kind that comes from fences and isolation. It builds safety out of the courtyard, one of the oldest spatial devices in the region, and scales it up into a permanent neighbourhood where homes, gardens, schools and communal facilities sit close enough to support one another.

Designed by Roberta Romita, Amos Goldreich and Carlos Quevedo Rojas, the project was shortlisted in the Resile competition. It starts from the experiences of Afghan women and children left behind by conflict and refuses to treat their housing as a standalone object. Instead, the team links privacy, independence, education, social life, landscape and cultural continuity into a single organised community built around circular residential clusters, protected internal gardens and a surrounding public realm.

Walls That Set Boundaries Without Cutting Off Community

The core move is the enclosure, and the drawings make clear that the enclosure here is defensive without being hostile. Heavy perimeter walls establish a firm line between the residents and the outside world, while the courtyards behind them open up to light, vegetation and gathering space. This is the project's central argument: privacy does not have to mean isolation, and a protected interior can still be a social one.

What separates Resile from the visual language of refugee camps is its insistence on permanence. Public institutions sit beside the homes rather than in a separate service zone, so that daily life, from schooling to shared work, happens within walking distance and within view. Safety becomes a product of proximity and familiarity as much as of enclosure, which is a far more durable kind of security for families trying to regain independence.

Raw Earth as Both Climate Strategy and Cultural Memory

The designers identify raw earth as the defining material of the complex, and the choice carries more weight than its appearance suggests. Earthen construction ties the new settlement to established local building traditions and to the terrain it sits on. Sandy walls, deep blue skies, muted mountain backdrops and touches of gold in the illustrations reinforce a reading of the architecture as an extension of the ground rather than something imported onto it.

The severity of those monolithic surfaces is broken by intricate screens set into the walls. These elements do several jobs at once: they filter light, cast patterned shadow, protect the privacy of the rooms behind them and give the buildings a cultural texture that bare earth alone would not. The result is a measured balance between restraint and ornament, and between protection and permeability, which suits a community that needs both shelter and a sense of beauty restored to everyday life.

From Open Ground to Protected Courtyard in a Few Steps

The project's diagrams explain the whole scheme through a clear sequence of transformations. It begins with the place itself, then introduces a boundary, and from that boundary the courtyard emerges as a protected geometry ready to receive homes, gardens and shared programme. The clarity of this sequence is one of the entry's strengths: a juror or a community member can follow the logic without specialist training.

That legibility matters in a humanitarian context. A model this simple can be understood, replicated and adapted, and it grounds an ambitious social programme in a spatial type that residents are likely to recognise. The circular residential organisation and planted internal voids then refine the type, turning a single defensive gesture into a layered neighbourhood with degrees of privacy from home to garden to public realm.

Why This Project Matters

Resile challenges the assumption that post-conflict housing should look and feel temporary. By treating dignity, identity and emotional security as design requirements alongside weather protection, the team proposes architecture that helps people rebuild lives, not just wait out a crisis. The courtyard becomes a tool for rehabilitation, giving widowed families a protected base from which to reconnect with education, work and each other.

The proposal also shows that sustainability and cultural continuity can be the same decision. Raw earth, shaded courts and screened walls answer climate and context at once, and they do so with a material language that belongs to its landscape. For a competition focused on resilience, that alignment of social care, environmental sense and local memory is exactly the kind of thinking worth carrying forward.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Roberta Romita, Amos Goldreich, Carlos Quevedo Rojas

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Project credits: Resile by Roberta Romita, Amos Goldreich, Carlos Quevedo Rojas Resile (uni.xyz).