Urban Design + Street Furniture Design
Community Complex for the Widows of Afghanistan
Kandahar, Afghanistan
The Community Complex for the Widows of Afghanistan received an Editor's Choice Award in an international urban design and architecture competition.
Titled A Reinforced Cocoon, the proposal reinterprets the metaphor of a butterfly's cocoon as a protective architectural and public realm framework for the widowed women of Kandahar and their families. The project establishes a secure perimeter that accommodates living, working, social interaction, and collective growth within a controlled environment.
The outer wall forms a continuous structural and symbolic boundary, constructed using locally sourced brick and concrete to express solidity and permanence. Within this protective envelope, a contrasting composition of clustered white residential volumes organizes a therapeutic central public space, designed to foster safety, place identity, and community cohesion.
Through spatial hierarchy and coordinated urban elements and public realm design strategies, the project challenges prevailing social, economic, patriarchal, and physical constraints while proposing an alternative framework for resilience and collective recovery.
