Voute Nubian (Association la Voûte Nubienne) is an organization founded by Berkinabe farmer Séri Youlou, and French mason Thomas Granier in 2000, serving to utilize the ancestral construction technique— the Nubian Vault— to meet the housing needs of rural areas in several Sahelian nations.
Owing in large part to the economic and environmental consequences of neocolonialism, which have engendered mass poverty and a scarcity of wood resources throughout the Sahel region, housing is often precarious or inaccessible for many. In response to this, the Voute Nubian organization seeks to utilize the Nubian Vault as a self-supporting construction technique that does not require cement, timber, or sheet metal and can create roofing systems entirely out of earth.
Nubian Vault construction has many additional advantages, including locally sourced and easily accessible materials, extreme durability, high thermal and acoustic performance, as well as its simplicity.
This process not only ensures that the readily available and inexpensive earth of the construction site can be used to create a comfortable and structurally sound home without the added costs of formwork or expensive materials, but also that workers can be professionally trained as experts in this production technique enabling the creation of skilled labor and the spread of the Nubian Vault as a technique.
For more information on the history of the Nubian Vault, and its revival as a contemporary architectural strategy in earthen construction: