Biyo iyo Baad. Settling the Nomad: Exploring Transcience in a Permanent Typology
N. Aden (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
N. Sanaan Bensi – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R. Heykant – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Biyo iyo Baad (Water and Pasture) investigates what happens when a people whose identity is rooted in movement are asked to settle. Situated in the context of Somaliland's accelerating urbanisation, the project explores the transition from the ephemeral architecture of the pastoral nomad to the permanence of the city. As climate change disrupts seasonal migration patterns and diminishes pastoral livelihoods, many families find themselves inhabiting an intermediary condition; neither fully nomadic nor fully urban.
Rather than approaching architecture as a solution, the project understands it as an intervention into a moment of social and ecological transformation. The question at its core is not how to house the nomad, but how the rituals, memories, and forms of knowledge embedded within nomadic life might survive settlement. To what extent can ephemerality be maintained within a static dwelling? Can architecture continue to act as a site of community cohesion, female agency, and collective labour once movement has ceased?
Drawing from the building culture of the Aqal, the traditional Somali nomadic hut, the project investigates song, ritual, and construction as forms of architectural notation. Somali work songs were translated into spatial rules that informed the organisation of the project, transforming rhythm, repetition, and exchange into a language of form. Through this process, architecture became a means of representing journey rather than merely accommodating it.
Located on the edge of Hargeisa, where urban expansion meets the pastoral landscape, the proposal reimagines the communal watering hole as both infrastructure and social condenser. Housing, water collection, and productive spaces are organised around rituals of gathering and making. Constructed from locally available eucalyptus poles, earthen materials, and woven systems, the architecture remains lightweight, adaptable, and participatory.
The project proposes a typology that is neither fully permanent nor fully temporary. Instead, it exists in the space between, honouring a culture whose understanding of home has always been inseparable from the journey itself.