The Atelier Bois is a carpentry workshop owned by a local carpenter from Thionck Essyl, a city in Senegal. The workshop is organised into an urban grid consisting of a 100x100m plot. The common building typology in the area is isolated and a perimeter fence that limits each plot surrounds the buildings.

The project is located in the western quadrant of the plot and aims to unify the building and the boundary of the plot in a single element, treating the fence directly as the building envelope. The boundaries of the façade confine both the exterior and interior spaces by intertwining their limits, and integrate an existing tree through the generation of a working courtyard located to the south-west.

One of the premises of the project is to work with local materials and techniques, which is why the initial excavation became the work quarry; by transforming the earth of the site, we managed to reduce the transport of material to a minimum and with it the associated ecological footprint.

The roof is made of local red wood profiles and finished with a metal sheet. The CEB façade-fence is not covered, so the space it confines is a covered work area surrounded by a patio that widens in the south-west part. In the central part of the rectangle, the space is organised through a reinforced clay slab, finished with black and white glazed ceramic material. It is distributed into a large space for the wood-planer, a space with tables for the assembly of furniture, and a small office separated by a bookcase. The space surrounding the slab is finished with native palm tree shells, thus draining the areas susceptible to flooding during the rainy season.