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Feb 12, 2009

"Every house where love abides
And friendship is a guest,
Is surely home, and home sweet home
For there the heart can rest." --Henry Van Dyke

Sand Castles in South Africa

In 2007, Cape Town's Design Indaba conference organizers decided to use that concentrated creative energy to address a problem in their own backyard: the thousands of impoverished people living in makeshift shacks in South Africa's townships. Looking to create low-cost houses that could serve as models for the future, they launched the 10x10 Housing Project, which paired 10 leading international architects with 10 local architects, and tasked each team with developing an appealing house that could be built for about $7,000. Luyanda Mpahlwa, a partner in the firm MMA, and his team decided to build theirs with an unlikely but abundant source: sand. "As architects and professionals, we should be leading the search for different ways of building. Not everyone can afford the normally available material."