On a four-hectare site in Sangalkam, on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegalese architecture studio ID+EA Architecture, led by founder and lead architect Fatiya Diene Mazza, is developing an educational campus in which the conventional boundaries between classroom, landscape and productive infrastructure are deliberately blurred.
The Sangalkam Institute brings together academic buildings, gardens, agricultural spaces, sports facilities and communal areas as parts of a single learning environment. But the project did not begin with an empty site. The land was previously a family farm, with mature fruit trees growing organically across it and existing wells that had long supported its agricultural use.
Rather than clearing the site and imposing a new masterplan, ID+EA developed the architecture around these inherited conditions. Existing trees were preserved wherever possible, with their locations helping to determine the positioning of buildings, paths, courtyards and outdoor spaces.
In this sense, the architecture began with the landscape that was already there.
Design work on the project began in 2021, with construction commencing in 2023. The first phase is currently targeted for completion in December 2026.
The project is also the product of a broader collective commitment among the professionals and partners involved. ID+EA and several other contributors are providing their expertise at fees significantly below standard professional rates, alongside substantial commitments of time and knowledge, to help make the institute financially possible.
At its centre is an ambition to create a different model for teaching and learning, supported by a scholarship programme intended to broaden access to the educational environment being developed at Sangalkam.
“The ambition for Sangalkam Institute is to promote more equitable access to quality education by creating a place where children can learn, grow and imagine their future in a supportive environment,” said Cheikh Kane, founder and CEO of Sangalkam Institute.
“The project reflects the belief that education should extend beyond the classroom, connecting knowledge to nature, culture, agriculture, creativity and collective life.”
A School Designed as a Landscape
Rather than concentrating the programme within a single institutional building, ID+EA has dispersed it across a network of low-rise structures connected by shaded walkways, courtyards, gardens, agoras and open-air learning spaces.
The extensive programme includes administration and faculty offices, teacher-training facilities, classrooms, laboratories and a computer room alongside an auditorium, library, infirmary and agricultural greenhouse.
Creative facilities for music, dance, theatre, visual arts and photography are joined by a nursery school, refectory, dormitories, teachers’ housing, workshops and sports infrastructure, including a football field, athletics track and two multi-sport courts.
This distribution gives the campus something closer to the character of a small settlement than a conventional school complex. Academic, residential, cultural and recreational functions remain distinct, but the spaces between them are treated with equal importance.
Crucially, the masterplan responds to the site’s former life as agricultural land. The existing trees and other landscape conditions were not treated as obstacles to development but as elements around which the new campus could grow.
The architectural concept and masterplan were developed by ID+EA Architecture, while the landscape design is being developed by Landscape Consulting, led by Enguerrant Doret, in close coordination with the architects.
Together, the teams are developing an intergenerational landscape that connects classrooms with gardens, agoras, sports areas, cultivated land and ecological zones. Movement through the campus consequently becomes part of the educational experience, creating opportunities for children of different ages to encounter one another and their surroundings throughout the day.
Taking the Classroom Outside
Central to Sangalkam Institute is the idea that education should not end at the classroom door.
Rather than following a prescribed pedagogical methodology, the project seeks to support a different way of teaching and learning, centred on autonomy, sensory experience, activity and direct engagement with the surrounding environment.
Inside, classrooms are planned around natural light, low furniture, tactile materials and flexible arrangements. Large openings maintain visual connections with gardens and courtyards, while shaded galleries create transitional spaces between enclosed rooms and the landscape.
A lesson can therefore begin at a desk and continue outdoors, allowing the architecture to support different forms of observation, experimentation and exchange.
That relationship becomes more explicit across a series of thematic landscapes being developed by Landscape Consulting in coordination with ID+EA.
Agoras provide circular gathering places for conversation, storytelling and performance. A sensory garden encourages children to learn through touch and movement, while a linguistic garden incorporates inscriptions, plant labels and sound devices into language learning.
A creative garden introduces questions of geography and spatial awareness, while productive gardens and orchards allow students to observe food production, soil conditions and seasonal cycles.
The Agora of Knowledge, in particular, is conceived as a civic space within the school: somewhere between an outdoor classroom, performance area and communal meeting place.
Landscape therefore becomes more than the greenery surrounding the architecture. It becomes educational infrastructure.
Earth as Environmental Infrastructure
The campus’s architectural identity is largely established through compressed stabilised earth blocks (CSEB). Their terracotta colouring connects the buildings visually with the surrounding soil, but ID+EA’s use of earth is also environmental rather than purely aesthetic.
On the east and west elevations, double CSEB walls incorporate ventilated cavities to improve thermal comfort. Building orientation is intended to capture prevailing breezes along the north-south axis, while deep overhangs, shaded galleries and double glazing help reduce solar heat gain.
The result is an architectural language that avoids both the sealed institutional box and the temptation to treat earthen construction simply as an image of vernacular authenticity.
CSEB is instead deployed as a contemporary construction system: tactile and locally resonant, but equally part of the project’s passive environmental strategy.
Lighter mineral surfaces, metal shading elements and broad roofs are juxtaposed with the earth walls, producing buildings that appear robust without becoming monumental. At a campus intended primarily for children, that scale matters. Entrances, covered passages and courtyards break down the larger programme into a sequence of more intimate spaces.
Sustainability Begins with What Is Already There
Perhaps one of the more revealing aspects of Sangalkam Institute’s environmental strategy is its approach to the resources inherited from the former farm.
The two wells incorporated into the campus’s water strategy, for example, were not introduced as new sustainability infrastructure. They already existed on the agricultural site and have been retained and integrated into its new use.
That decision reflects a broader understanding of sustainability running through the project: environmental responsibility does not necessarily begin with adding new technology. It can also involve recognising what already exists, preserving what continues to function and adapting it intelligently.
Alongside the existing wells, water-recovery systems support irrigation, while solar canopies contribute to the campus’s energy strategy. Local and drought-resistant planting is intended to limit water demand, complemented by composting, insect habitats and ecological learning areas.
Agriculture similarly remains part of the site’s identity rather than disappearing with its transformation from farm to school.
An agricultural greenhouse, orchards and cultivated gardens will allow students to participate in growing and studying crops, turning food production, soil and seasonal cycles into subjects that can be experienced directly.
Preserved ecological areas extend that approach towards biodiversity and conservation.
Rather than presenting sustainability to students as an abstract environmental principle, Sangalkam Institute attempts to make processes of water, energy, soil, food and ecology physically legible within everyday school life.
The project’s environmental strategy therefore operates through both preservation and intervention: retaining useful elements of the former farm while introducing new passive and renewable systems where appropriate.
Fatiya Diene Mazza’s Architecture of Local Context
Sangalkam Institute also reflects the trajectory of ID+EA founder and lead architect Fatiya Diene Mazza, whose practice has been shaped by an international education and career before her return to Senegal.
Mazza graduated from Northeastern University in Boston in 2008 and subsequently worked across the United States, Brazil and Qatar before establishing herself in Senegal. She founded Dakar-based ID+EA — Innovative Design Engineered Architecture — in 2015.
That international experience has been accompanied by a practice increasingly rooted in Senegalese conditions. ID+EA’s portfolio has moved across scales and typologies, from residential architecture such as Black Rock House to work associated with the development of Diamniadio, the planned urban centre east of Dakar.
At Sangalkam, however, the studio’s interests in materiality, climate and contemporary Senegalese architecture are placed in service of an educational vision established by Sangalkam Institute and its founder, Cheikh Kane.
ID+EA’s role has been to translate that ambition architecturally: asking what kind of physical environment could support more equitable access to education while creating stronger relationships between learning, landscape, agriculture, creativity and collective life.
The answer is not expressed through a singular architectural gesture.
Instead, the project’s ambition emerges through an accumulation of decisions — retaining an existing tree, positioning a building around the landscape, creating a shaded threshold, constructing an earthen wall, extending a classroom towards a garden or placing an agora beneath a canopy.
The School as a Small Ecosystem
Seen from above, Sangalkam Institute’s strongest idea becomes apparent. The campus is not organised around one dominant building.
Academic blocks sit among sports grounds, existing and new planting, pedestrian routes, solar infrastructure and productive landscapes, creating a continuous learning territory in which architecture and landscape are intended to work together.
That relationship is particularly significant given the site’s history.
What was once a family farm is not being erased to accommodate an educational campus; aspects of its agricultural and ecological character are being incorporated into the identity of the new institution.
Shade, ventilation, vegetation and water management have direct implications for comfort, while agricultural and ecological spaces give those environmental considerations a pedagogical purpose.
The project therefore operates at several scales simultaneously.
At the scale of the classroom, it considers how children see, touch and move through space. At the scale of the building, it addresses heat, shade and material performance. At the scale of the landscape, it responds to trees, water and agricultural conditions that predate the school. And at the scale of the wider campus, it connects education with food production, biodiversity, physical activity, creativity and communal exchange.
Sangalkam Institute ultimately proposes that a school can do more than accommodate education. Architecture and landscape can participate in it.
By turning corridors into shaded meeting places, gardens into laboratories and environmental systems into objects of observation, the project is creating a campus in which learning is embedded into the physical environment itself.
When its first phase is completed, its significance may lie less in any individual building than in the relationships created between them — and in the decision to begin not by clearing the land, but by understanding what was already there.
It is a school conceived not simply as a collection of classrooms, but as a place where knowledge can be cultivated.
