The Atelier Bois is a carpentry workshop owned by the cabinetmaker Lamine Sambou. It is located in the town of Thionck Essyl, a city in Senegal organized into an urban grid based on 100×100 meter plots. The common building typology in the area is isolated, and the buildings are surrounded by a perimeter fence that limits each plot. The project is located in the western quadrant of a plot and aims to unify the building and the boundary of the plot in a single element, treating the fence directly as the building envelope. The boundaries of the façade confine both the exterior and interior spaces by intertwining their limits, while integrating an existing tree through the generation of a working courtyard located to the south-west.
One of the premises of the project is to work with local materials and techniques, which is why the initial excavation becomes the work quarry. By transforming the earth of the site, we managed to reduce the transport of material to a minimum and, with it, the associated ecological footprint.
The roof, made of local redwood profiles and finished with a corrugated sheet, does not cover the BTC (compressed earth block) façade-fence. The space it delimits is a covered work area surrounded by a patio that widens in the south-west section. In the central part of the rectangle the program is organized through a reinforced clay slab finished with black and white glazed ceramic material. It is distributed into a large space for the wood-thinning machine, a space with tables for the assembly of furniture, and a small office separated by a bookcase. The space surrounding the slab is finished with native palm tree shells, thus draining the areas susceptible to getting wet in the rainy season.
