A WarkaWater tower is a tall, vase-shaped bamboo frame with a fine mesh hung inside it. At night and in the early morning, moisture from humid air, fog and dew condenses on that mesh, runs down and drips into a basin at the base. No pump, no electricity and no moving parts are involved. The idea, from Italian architect Arturo Vittori and his studio Architecture and Vision, was to give rural Ethiopian villages a source of drinking water that people could build and repair themselves.
Here is how the towers work, what they can realistically produce, what happened after the first prototypes, and why "water from thin air" is a useful idea with real limits.
Why water from the air matters in rural Ethiopia
Safe water is still out of reach for a huge number of people. According to the World Health Organization, about 2.2 billion people did not have safely managed drinking water in 2022, and around 115 million were still taking untreated water straight from lakes, ponds, rivers or streams. Diarrhoeal disease linked to unsafe water, poor sanitation and poor hygiene kills roughly a million people a year.
In many highland villages of Ethiopia, the daily routine behind those numbers is a long walk to a pond or stream, a heavy container carried home, and the risk of illness from water that animals and people share. The work usually falls on women and girls, and hours spent fetching water are hours not spent in school or earning a living.
Vittori has said the project began after travelling in Ethiopia and seeing communities living in beautiful landscapes but without running water, toilets or electricity. Drilling deep wells in the rocky highlands is expensive, and a well also needs a pump, spare parts and often a power supply. The tower was meant to be a low-tech alternative that a village could own outright.
How a WarkaWater tower collects water
The structure has two main layers. The outer one is a lightweight triangular lattice of bamboo (early versions also used juncus reed), tied together with rope and wire rather than nails or screws. Inside it hangs a mesh made of plastic fibre. The original reports compared it to the netting used to bag oranges; later versions use a polyester net.
When air cools overnight, its water vapour reaches the dew point and turns into droplets. Those droplets also catch on the mesh when fog drifts through it. As droplets grow heavy, gravity pulls them down the fibres into a collection basin at the bottom. A fabric canopy shades part of the basin, and the tower also catches rain when it falls.
The design borrows from nature. Its makers point to beetles in the Namib Desert, spider silk and cactus spines, which all gather moisture from the air on their surfaces. The same basic physics drives older fog-collection projects, which use flat mesh panels facing the wind in places such as the Chilean coast and Morocco's Anti-Atlas mountains.
Design drawing of the vase-shaped frame and inner mesh. Credit: Warka Water / Architecture and Vision
Size, cost and how much water it really gives
Early press coverage in 2014 described a tower nearly 10 metres (about 30 feet) tall and light enough for a small team to raise by hand, with a build time of under a week using local materials. A cost of about 550 US dollars per tower was reported at the time, though that figure has not been independently confirmed and costs depend on materials and labour.
Current figures from the project describe a tower about 9.5 metres high, weighing roughly 80 kg, that can collect up to around 100 litres of water a day. Older articles quoted "over 25 gallons", which is about the same amount.
The key word is "up to". Output depends heavily on local humidity, temperature swings between day and night, fog and wind. On a dry, still night a tower may collect very little. Research on fog collectors in general shows huge variation, from about a tenth of a litre per square metre of mesh per day at some sites to around half a litre at better ones. That is why the towers are best seen as a supplement to other water sources, not a guaranteed supply.
Named after the warka tree
The project takes its name from the warka (Ficus vasta), a large wild fig native to Ethiopia. Its broad canopy often shades the spot where villagers meet, hold markets and settle community matters. Vittori wanted the tower to play a similar role: a shared structure at the heart of a village, providing shade under its canopy as well as water.
The choice of materials was deliberate. Using bamboo and natural fibres lets the tower sit comfortably in the landscape and draws on local weaving and building skills. The thinking was that once a community had built one tower, its members could teach neighbouring villages to build their own.
Weaving part of a bamboo prototype frame. Credit: Warka Water / Architecture and Vision
From prototype to pilot: what happened next
In 2014 the WarkaWater tower was still a prototype. Several test versions were built in Italy, and the concept was shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The first pilot tower was installed in 2015 in Dorze, a village in the Gamo Highlands of southern Ethiopia.
In 2016 Vittori set up Warka Water Inc., a US-based nonprofit, and the design won the World Design Impact Prize 2015–2016. It was later shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2019. The idea has since grown beyond a single tower. From 2020 the team worked on a "Warka Village" for the Baka community near Kribi in Cameroon, combining towers with homes, a school and farming plots, and towers have also been reported in Togo and Haiti.
Limits, maintenance and water safety
Water harvested from the air is not automatically clean. Insects, bird droppings, dust and organic matter can settle on the mesh and in the basin, and bacteria can grow on damp surfaces. Boiling, filtering or otherwise treating the water before drinking is the sensible default.
The towers also need care. The mesh wears and must be cleaned or replaced, and bamboo sections eventually need swapping out. The project estimates a lifespan of about ten years for a tower that is looked after.
There are wider lessons from fog collection too. In Chungungo, Chile, a large fog-net scheme once supplied a village of about 300 people, but by 2002 only a handful of its collectors were still standing. Projects like these tend to succeed when the local community owns the maintenance and the site has reliable fog or dew, and to struggle when either is missing.
Common myths about "water from thin air"
"It makes water out of nothing"
It does not. The tower only collects water vapour that is already in the air. In very dry climates there is little to collect.
"One tower can supply a whole village"
Up to 100 litres on a good day is valuable, but it is far below the full daily needs of a village. Towers work best alongside rainwater harvesting, protected springs and wells.
"Simple means maintenance-free"
Low-tech is easier to repair, not repair-free. Clean mesh and a covered, cleaned basin are what keep the water safer to use.
Why the idea still matters
WarkaWater is not a silver bullet for the world's water crisis, and its designers do not need it to be. What it shows is a way of thinking: start with what a community already has, from local bamboo to building skills, and design something people can build, understand and fix themselves. For a family that walks hours to a dirty pond, even a modest, reliable supply of water close to home can change the shape of the day.
Sources: Warka Water (Wikipedia); WHO: Drinking-water fact sheet; Fog collection (Wikipedia). Design and images by Arturo Vittori and Architecture and Vision / Warka Water; the story was first reported by Wired in 2014 and shared by True Activist and The Mind Unleashed.
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