Bantaba: Under One Roof

Bantaba — the Mandinka word for the gathering place beneath a tree begins from a single ambition: to work with the community’s existing places of gathering rather than impose a new one. Traditionally the bantaba is the village’s open forum, a shaded place beneath a tree where people meet, talk and make decisions together. The brief asks for exactly this spirit: a space for assemblies, learning and shared decision-making that reinforces collective identity.

The project draws on two building traditions of southern Senegal. From the Mandinka comes the bantaba, the social idea of gathering beneath a tree. From the Diola of the Casamance comes the impluvium house, a circular plan of rooms wrapped around an open courtyard. The design brings these together: a continuous ring of accommodation around a central courtyard, with a mature Mango tree held at its heart as the natural meeting point the community already knows.

The programme wraps around this courtyard. Community and assembly spaces sit alongside rooms for training, craft and entrepreneurial workshops, a library and quiet study, with services completing the loop. Gaps in the ring let people pass through from the surrounding ground into the sheltered centre, while the roof channels seasonal rains inward in the manner of the impluvium, drawing people toward the heart of the building.

View towards Mango Tree

In keeping with the brief’s call for a humanitarian self-construction initiative, the building is made from local materials that the community can assemble and maintain themselves, without heavy machinery or specialised labour. A timber post-and-beam structure is set out on a regular grid, raised on a compressed earth plinth and sheltered beneath a woven thatch roof. Each element can be sourced nearby and put together by hand.

The grid is more than a structural device. Because the earth block partitions sit independently of the frame, walls can be removed, added or repositioned without affecting the structure. The building can grow and reconfigure as the community’s needs change, repaired and adapted with the same materials and methods used to build it. This makes the project not a finished object but an ongoing part of community life — a place passed through, paused in and returned to, that extends and shelters the gathering places already there.