Poor architecture can lead to a public health crisis. Moving families into specially designed Star Homes in Tanzania showed a marked reduction in the spread of certain deadly diseases among children living within them. These homes have features that make them cooler and more hygienic, and can be built with fewer resources while producing fewer emissions.
A star of architecture
Most housing in Tanzanian villages “uses mud and thatch” and is “single-story, placing the sleeping spaces at-grade,” said The Architect’s Newspaper. These living arrangements are likely contributing to the spread of malaria, diarrhea and acute respiratory infections (ARIs), which are the “major causes of mortality in young children in sub-Saharan Africa,” said a study published in the journal Nature Medicine. Researchers designed a structure called the Star Home to provide an improved environment for Tanzanian children.
The Star Home is a “novel double-story house” that can “provide an insect-proof, cleaner, cooler and smoke-free environment, with a reliable supply of water and sanitation,” said the study. The houses contain “screened facades to allow airflow while keeping out insects; bedrooms on the top floor because mosquitoes mostly stay close to the ground; and an outdoor latrine and a system to harvest and store rainwater to help reduce the spread of diarrheal diseases,” said Science. They also have a “rodent-proof storage room, self-closing doors and a solar-powered electric light.”
To test the effects of improved housing, scientists randomly allocated households with children under 13 years of age “to living in 110 Star Homes or in 513 traditional mud and thatched-roofed houses,” said the study. After 36 months, “children living in Star Homes had a significantly reduced risk of malaria (44% reduction), diarrhea (27% reduction) and ARIs (18% reduction) compared to children living in traditional mud and thatched-roof homes.”
The improved housing also led to a “reduction in stunting,” where children under 5 years of age were “taller for their age than those living in traditional homes,” said the study. Healthier children are the “ultimate measure of success,” Salum Mshamu, the lead field investigator of the Tanzanian research consulting firm CSK Research Solutions, said to The Architect’s Newspaper. “Reducing stunting has lifelong consequences for education, earnings and wellbeing.”
More for less
The findings show that “architecture can function as a health intervention on a par with medicine when it is developed and documented using scientific methods,” Jakob Knudsen, an architect who led the designing of the Star House, said to The Architect’s Newspaper. Traditional homes in Tanzania and other sub-Saharan countries tend to “absorb heat during the day and discharge it into the houses at night,” said The Architectural Review. “High interior temperatures lead to low use of bed nets (temperature rises further inside the net), increasing the risk of mosquito bites.”
The Star Home solves many of these problems and at the same time “costs 24% less in materials than a conventional single-story cement-block house, requires 73% less concrete and generates 57% less embodied carbon,” said a release about the study. “We now hope that the building industry will adopt some of the important features of our healthy house design,” Steve Lindsay, a professor in the Department of Biosciences at Durham University and the author of the study, said in the release. Better building practices can “turn a dangerous home into a safe one.”