In a small primary school in Suphanburi Province, forty-one volunteers spent eleven days learning to build the one thing their annual camp had never designed before: a toilet. For years, the AKU ASA Volunteer Camp has served as a meeting ground where architecture students and local craftsmen exchange skills that are otherwise fading from one generation to the next. Song Phi Nong Primary School needed a small sanitary facility, and its site offered little more than open ground shaded by a mature Nontri tree.
The volunteers arrived with almost no construction experience and eleven days to close that gap. Instead of repeating the pavilions and multipurpose halls that had defined previous editions of the camp, AKU ASA 20 asked a different question: what remains to learn when the same building type is designed every year? Choosing a toilet as the year’s project shifted the focus from structure and space toward a discipline rarely addressed in student work: sanitary design, and how plumbing systems are shaped by both the building and its site.
all images ©SEP
Shade, airflow, and reclaimed wood shape school toilet’s design
The layout responds directly to context: the shade cast by the Nontri tree and the site’s natural airflow transform the in-between space linking the sinks and the toilet stalls into an area that can double as a place to cool off, rest, or play, rather than a purely functional corridor. Materials carried their own history into the project.
The design team, led by SEP studio, sourced reclaimed wood from the school’s original building, a Chinese-style classroom constructed roughly sixty years earlier, giving the new structure a physical link to the school’s own past. Every component was built by hand by the volunteers. The result is a modest building, but one that reframes what a student volunteer camp can teach: that architecture education extends beyond form-making into infrastructure, material reuse, and the patient transfer of craft knowledge from one generation to the next.
project info:
name: Phi Sorn Nong Toilet
designer: SEP
location: Suphanburi Province, Thailand
designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. See more project submissions from our readers here.
edited by: Christina Vergopoulou | designboom
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