John Drake, AIA enabled Guy Butler Architect to win a 2009 Florida American Institute of Architects Award of Excellence for Africa Windmill Project. 

The actual windmill project was built in March 2009 when John Drake, vice president with GBA and Bill Salter, Senior Design Architect with GBA, went to Malawi Africa with two friends to build a windmill in the Village of Mgwayi.  The windmill was designed to be built out of locally found materials in a rural village to irrigate crops during the region’s punishing eight month dry season.

The idea for a sustainable windmill for the small farmer was conceived when John was in Malawi, Africa a year and a half ago, and noticed remote farming villages had hand-dug wells, with no means of pumping water.  During a drought Malawi does not produce enough food to support its population; 94% of farms rely on the natural three-month rainy season, which only allows one growing season per year.  Farmers, with Malawi’s temperate climate and the means to ‘pump’ water for crop irrigation, would have the opportunity to produce crops year round regardless of droughts.  Modern irrigation equipment is too expensive for villagers and impossible to maintain, since they do not have tools or training.  Most agriculture in Malawi is composed of individual subsistence farmers with small one acre farms. 

The design solution evolved over a year and a half of trial and error and is based upon the panemone windmill (500AD Persia) connected to a rope and washer pump.  This enables crop irrigation and only utilizes materials that are readily available in Malawi to the common farmer.  The windmill is made of a main wood post, bamboo, wire, grain sacks, and two stones for the main bearing; and the pump is made of rope, bottle caps, hand-cut rubber washers (out of used bicycle tubes), and PVC thin walled pipe.  The total cost for the windmill if all the parts are bought is $40 US dollars and it could irrigate a minimum of ¼ acre which yields $100-$125 US dollars at harvest, so within the first harvest the rural farmer will be able to make a profit.  Sustainable irrigation will stabilize the region of Southern Africa’s food supply which is a matter of Life and Death in Malawi.

     Energy efficient architecture made with local materials has always been around since the beginning of construction.  Civilizations have always designed and built in response to their environment to make their daily lives more comfortable. Before the 1900’s, when alternating current became wide spread, all buildings were ‘off the electric grid’ and without air-conditioning.  So, before the 1900’s most buildings would have been considered ‘Green Buildings’, ‘Sustainable’, or ‘Carbon Neutral’ by today’s buzzword standards.  Things went awry in the United States when buildings designed for natural ventilation were retrofitted with central air-conditioning.  The buildings envelopes could not contain the conditioned air and became ‘energy hogs’.  The design response in the 60’s – 80’s was to tighten and insulate the new building envelope to create an engineered sealed box and ignore the natural environment.  While maintaining the interior temperature comfort of the occupants this design approach created the new problem of building related illness.  The EPA defines Sick Building Syndrome as “Term that refers to a set of symptoms that affect some number of building occupants during the time they spend in the building and diminish or go away during periods when they leave the building.”  In the 1990’s extensive studies were conducted on indoor air quality and modern construction’s impact on the environment.  Multiple design performance standards and guidelines were created by various government agencies, trade associations, and non-profit agencies.  In 1994 the Green Building Council began to develop the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system to provide an organized way to determine which standards should be used with various building types and also assigned a point rating system to the various standards to evaluate their impact on the environment.  The expensive new green building technology grabs the news, however just about any well designed building can meet the basic LEED certification without exotic technology.  Also, a misunderstanding about green building is that buildings cannot be designed to be more energy efficient and environmentally friendly without the additional cost of being submitted for LEED certification.  Most of our clients are not concerned with the marketing potential of LEED certification of their buildings, but are interested in inexpensively cutting their long-term energy and maintenance cost with proper building design.  Finally an additional misunderstanding is an energy efficient building has to look like something from the future.  As mentioned earlier prior to the 1960’s buildings responded to their environmental context to keep their occupants comfortable in an energy efficient manner.