Louvers

Overview

A wall that has to breathe without opening. The angled blade lets air and daylight through while shedding rain and blocking the line of sight straight in.

Ugandan buildings need ventilation in places a window cannot sensibly go — store rooms, kitchens, stairwells, gables, toilet blocks, boundary screens. A louver block does that job as part of the walling itself. It lays in the same course as everything around it, and once the wall is up the ventilation is simply there, with no frame, no glazing and nothing to maintain.

The geometry is what earns its keep. The blade is cast at an angle so that air moves through freely while driven rain runs off the outer face instead of tracking inward, and so that nobody standing outside gets a straight view of what is behind the wall. That is security and privacy delivered by the shape of the unit rather than by a fitting bolted on afterwards.

They are cast on the same line, from the same mix, as the rest of our range — so a louver course beds down to the same height as the blocks it sits between, and the mason keeps working instead of packing out a mismatch.