What if learning began with inhabiting the land? Thirty minutes from Dakar, on a 4-hectare site in Sangalkam, architect Fatiya Mazza and her office ID+EA Architecture are drawing a school like no other.
Here, classrooms spill into gardens. Agriculture becomes a subject. Sun, rain, and raw earth brick teach alongside teachers. Welcome to Sangalkam Institute: a pro bono campus for gifted children from disadvantaged backgrounds, conceived as a living nursery of knowledge.
The School That Steps Outside
Senegal knows too many cage-schools. Concrete blocks. Tarred courtyards. Metal gates. Sangalkam Institute refuses that model. The project rejects the idea that learning happens inside, between four walls.
Here, architecture is porous. Classrooms open onto shaded galleries, courtyards, vegetable gardens, wooden agoras. A science lesson can start at a blackboard and end with hands in the soil, watching millet grow. A theatre workshop unfolds under a palaver tree. This is Montessori, but translated into laterite, into rainy season, into Wolof.
“The landscape becomes an open-air classroom,” says the ID+EA team. And it isn’t a metaphor.
Knowledge Tastes Like Mango and Raw Earth
The campus’s primary material is raw earth brick. Not for folklore. Not to look “authentic.” But because earth, here, is intelligent. It cools. It breathes. It ties the building to the ground it comes from. Terracotta tones dialogue with the surrounding savanna. Deep roof overhangs and mineral volumes protect from the sun, without air conditioning.
Then there is the landscape. But not an ornamental garden. The campus is a system. A sensory garden to touch, smell, move. A linguistic garden where plants carry their names in French, in Wolof, in Serer. Pedagogical orchards where water cycles and respect for the living are studied. An agricultural greenhouse integrated into classes. Preserved gallery forest to learn biodiversity.
A child learns that water comes from a well on site. That electricity comes from the sun. That food is planted, watched, shared. Self-sufficiency isn’t a slogan: it’s the curriculum.
An Architecture of Soutoura and Kersa
Soutoura: protection, dignity. Kersa: modesty, restraint. Sangalkam Institute is an architecture of care — but a Senegalese care. It protects without confining. It pushes for excellence without crushing. It places the child at the center, at their height, in human-scaled spaces.
The campus brings everything together: administration, teacher training, classrooms, laboratories, library, auditorium, infirmary, dormitories, sports grounds. Yet from above, nothing screams “institution.” You see a village of knowledge. Earth volumes, solar roofs, circles of agoras, fields. A coherent, living whole.
Building for Tomorrow, Now
Construction began in 2021. Completion is set for December 2026. It’s a pro bono project. An architectural and political act. For ID+EA Architecture and Fatiya Mazza, it’s about proposing a new model: a school that forms well-made minds, but also hands that know how to plant, hearts that know how to cooperate, citizens who understand their territory.
In a country debating education reform, Sangalkam Institute doesn’t wait. It plants. It builds. It shows that excellence can grow in our own soil.
Client Sangalkam Institute
Architect ID+EA Architecture Fatiya Diene Mazza
Landscape design Landscape Consulting
Building control office SCAT International
Structural engineers Delta Ingénierie, Maty Ingénierie, SECBTP
MEP engineers ERECO, SMB
Location: Sangalkam, Senegal
Site area: 4 hectares
Status: Under construction, delivery December 2026
Program: Complete educational campus — academic, cultural, residential, agricultural, sports
Key materials: Raw earth brick, mineral volumes, solar roofs
Note: Pro bono campus for gifted children from disadvantaged backgrounds
By Osman Ali