Children‘s Surgical Hospital, Entebbe (Uganda)
The medical centre, built for the Emergency non-government organisation that provides free surgical treatment for children from all over Africa, is slightly oriented to the southwest and consists of two parallel, elongated buildings that are connected by a square building to the east. The single-storey buildings, which vary in depth, have monolithic walls constructed using rammed earth techniques.
To prevent heat gain, a gently sloping butterfly roof with wide overhangs is suspended a clear distance above the building structure. The elegant steel structure functions as a multifunctional roof for providing both weather protection and energy generation. Arranged across a 3,301 m2 area, 2,352 thin-film modules with an installed PV capacity of 276.36 kW generated about 245,000 kWh of electricity during the first 12 months.
The Children’s Surgical Hospital in Entebbe provides an excellent example of climate-friendly construction, utilising local materials in combination with renewable energy sources. The roof is designed as a fifth façade. Matched to the structural grid, well-proportioned PV surfaces are arranged with a clear structure. The conceptual approach utilizing a “simple” construction method combined with an extremely sensible solution for large-scale energy roofs not only provides an exemplary solution for the African continent, but can also be transferred as a model to other climate regions and construction tasks.
The project received an award by the jury of the “Architecture Award Building-Integrated Solar Technology 2022“.
Project partners
Owner/Operator: Emergency NGO
Architects: Renzo Piano Building Workshop + studio TAMassociati
Get an Overview of the series "Solar architecture at its best – Excellent projects from the Architecture Award Building Integrated Solar Technology 2022 introduced briefly“
About the Architecture Award Building Integrated Solar Technology
The “Architecture Award Building-Integrated Solar Technology“ was started in the year 2000 by the Solarenergieförderverein Bayern (Bavarian Association for the Promotion of Solar Energy) and held since then for the 9th time. The award is established as an international competition concerning the interface between architecture and solar energy. The prize honors exemplary contributions of planning and designing building-integrated solar systems.
In the last edition of the competition the jury singled out 15 projects from 121 entries, which we want to present in a series. The jury was unanimous in its positive assessment that even with very different building tasks, and in different environments, these projects show that photovoltaic modules and solar thermal collectors can be successfully integrated with equal ambition in terms of design and technology.