Usually representing spirits, ancestors or the primordial couple, these figures were placed in shrines and treated with great respect. Through a wide range of style, scale, belief and function the couples depicted share a timeless, serene equality necessary to the continuity of their societies.
Ruhehe School / African Design Centre
In September 2016, MASS Design Group launched the African Design Centre in Kigali to train and empower the creative leaders who will design a more equitable, just and sustainable Africa. The program gives fellows the training and hands-on experience required to execute social impact driven solutions to the continent’s most pressing challenges.
La Lucia House / SAOTA
LA Lucia is a dream transformer house. The view from the street is a closed in house with a veiled approach to it that is both secretive and introverted. A certain sagacity of arrival is created by a serious entrance between two milk-wood trees; the cinematic panorama is only revealed as one enters the double-volume hallway. To highlight that moment of connection, the architects clad the ceilin...
Regional Lafarge Holcim Awards 2017 Middle East Africa Winners announced
The LafargeHolcim Awards is about more than just beautiful buildings and stands out as the world’s most significant competition in sustainable design. The competition acknowledges projects and not only finished work that go beyond current standards and deliver new, surprising, or truly visionary solutions to the way we build. The fifth cycle of the competition attracted 5,085 entries from autho...
Ecological house in Gambia / Virai Arquitectos
At the seaside just outside Tujereng, west Gambia, a house has been built for a family of three children and some bungalows to accommodate tourists. The architects aim was to make this buildings ecological, cozy and rooted in its context. The goal from the very beginning was to construct ecological buildings with references to and in harmony with local housing traditions. The buildings are dist...
The Elusive Element of Regional Urban Resilience and Social Awareness in Cities
With urban sites being places where the large percentage of the population dwells to alter their economic situation, large cities have become home to high concentrations of poverty. The motivations and forms of concealing this reality have resulted in large inequalities manifest in conflict and other forms of social disability palpable in the region today. In the greater expansion, conflict can...
Francis Kéré Unveils Burkina Faso's New National Assembly in Ouagadougou
At the 2016 Venice Biennale, Francis Kere unveiled, as part of the exhibition “in search of a new Ouagadougou” the schemes for the design of the Burkina Faso National Assembly. In the transformative time for Burkina Faso, the scheme can be summed as tackling the fundamental question of “How do we move forward”. It consequently not only seeks to address the democratic values of transparency, ope...
Building for the Gap – Experimental Housing Units for Sub Saharan Africa
There is an expected boom in the construction sector in Sub Saharan Africa as factor of the projected urban population estimated to grow by almost 70% by 2025. This heavy urbanization consequently will choke the already insufficient planning methods in building techniques, soft and hard infrastructures and economic cycles. The current solutions in the said region are not commensurable with the ...
Politics and Architecture in Africa as Synonyms of Progress
Architecture occupies and shapes the socio-physical context and influences perceptual nature of human behavior. It organizes human spatial actions and transmits feelings to users who can associate and drape the building with meaning. The world over, architecture has been used to transmit intellectual meaning, express religious beliefs and political practices of a society through its physical an...
The Mauritius Commercial Bank Ebene / Jean Francois Koenig Architect
Few projects within Mauritius pride themselves in having a keen sense of contextual performance and impact. The Mauritius Bank Building has had a marked influence, not only on The Mauritius Commercial Bank as a brand , but to the wider public of Mauritius. People have reacted very positively to the building and identify it to representing themselves . Its instantly recognisable shape has bec...
Sarah De Villiers And The Fantastical Realm of Growth: The Idea Bank
Architecture is a solution oriented process and it aims at making life more valuable. Through questioning the present, designs are able to develop important stepping stones into the future. And though ideas at times seem wild at their inception, in the long run they prove formidable. Sarah De Villiers questions and challenges the present financial institutions with her heartwarming and welcome ...
Embassy of the Netherlands / Dick Van Gameren and Bjarne Mastenbroek
The new Embassy of the Netherlands is a building that thrives within its environment, seeking new ways to deal with both the thermal nemesis and the contextual significance of a growing architectural language in Ethiopia's stone architecture. It is a vision that is intended to set an example for a sensitive and sustainable approach towards existing natural and landscape values in Ethiopia
Karura Forest Environmental Education Centre / Boogertman + Partners.
The winning entry in an open competition to design an environmental education center in the Karura urban forest in Nairobi, Kenya. Located in the northern part of Nairobi County, bordering the Muthaiga, Gigiri and Runda residential areas, the Centre will seek to educate people on the many species of plants, birds, insects and mammals to be found within Karura's diverse landscape.
KE Ochieng/SAOTA
A family home in Nairobi on a site that slopes steeply down towards a river. A series of open interconnected living spaces creates a house that allows the inhabitants to enjoy Nairobi’s mild climate.
Extension Labattoir College in Dzaoudzi/ Architecture Centre Network
The Extension Labattoir College is such versatile in function and allows for flawless transition of functions from the inside to the outside. Visual and spatial continuity is enhanced by the courtyard as all the functions open to it.
College Ouangani, Mayotte/ TERRENEUVE architects
The identity of Ouangani College is forged in the inclusion of the landscape as an integral part of the design. The ground floor plan is divided in an open regulating line: in its geometry, with vistas of the distance, but also in its evolution, to accommodate several phases of extensions that will be structured in line with the first buildings.
Warka Water/ Architecture and Vision - Arturo Vittori
“WarkaWater is designed to provide clean water as well as ensure long-term environmental, financial and social sustainability,” Says the Architect. “Once locals have the necessary know how, they will be able to teach other villages and communities to build the WarkaWater towers.” Each tower costs approximately $550 and can be built in under a week with a four person team and locally available m...
French Diplomatic Campus in Nairobi/ TERRENEUVE Architectes
The project design is strongly marked by the antagonism between the high level of security requirements and its home office. The geopolitical context of increasingly unstable and defensive aspects is dominant in most diplomatic designs and heavily constrains development and architecture of this campus which is aimed at expressing the universality of values held by the French culture: openness...
Australian High Commission / Planning Systems Services
Designed in 1987 for the Government of Australia, this building, on Riverside Drive, Nairobi exists entirely as a result of the efforts of Planning Systems Services and the Quantity Surveyors D G Jones. Knowing that the High Commission wished to move out of the City Centre, the two practices identified the Riverside Drive site, introduced the landowners to the High Commission, and negotiated th...
New Rugo Social Housing / George Pericles Architects
Affordable housings in the Africa are, most of the time, just seen as a quantity issues. Most of the buildings are done as a necessity and not much thought is put into their design. Not so for the New Rugo social housing which is quantitave and qualitative in approach. It combines the tenents of traditional design and the modern parameters to achieve social housing concepts that cut across the ...
Mayotte Airport / REC Architecture
A combination of the modern, the vernacular and environmental consciousness is the conspicuous image that the edgy Mayotte Airport portrays. The earthy palette makes it merge comfortable with the natural landscape. Its floating roofs are not only generated by the will to offer thermal comfort by shading the extensive glazed facades but give the airport its character. The airport is double code...
NIB Mixed Use / Xavier Vilalta Architects
The NIB mixed-use program is enclosed by a concrete façade with different type of openings for each program under common proportions and parameters. Depending on the interior use it increases or decreases its thickness with terraces, similar in geometry and properties to the historical buildings of Dire Dawa but in a contemporary way. It’s not a copy paste approach but rather an interpretation ...
Village Health Works Staff Housing / Louise Braverman
“Sustainability is not an added benefit in Kigutu. It is a necessity.” Braverman. This quote from the Architect sums the deceitful simple project in Kigutu and shows the importance of the skills learnt by the locals in the execution of the housing.
Long Beach Resort / Stauch Vorster Architects
The 5 star Luxury Resort is planned around a contemporary beach experience with the central piazza as the focus point. It is an interpretation of the vernacular in the modern context. Simple forms with high level of detailing borrowed from local architecture characterize the resort. With unobscured sea views and the courtyard the resort both deals with the environment, the humid climate, and al...
FOCHTA Vocational Training Centre/Sam Crawford Architects
How could Sam Crawford Architects, with their experience designing houses for well-off Sydneysiders, contribute anything of value to the design of a Vocational Training Centre for children orphaned by AIDS – in a foreign continent and context? Wouldn't it be better to employ a local architect? Why impose western ideas on Africans? The brief was simple yet daunting. It basically called for a Mal...
Upeo Camp, Lake Jipe / Urko Sanchez Architects
Most man made features are placed in nature, additions so to speak, but few individuals have developed high levels of empathy to it that they touch nature so lightly. Upeo Camp doesn’t only touch it lightly but rather enhances the existing by imitating and developing it. With two types of units one resembling the existing boulders and the other almost tucked inside the earth one will not even n...
AACCSA Headquarters / BC Architects
Urbanism, in common perception, comes before architecture: urbanism creates potential by generating conditions to orchestrate the city’s latter architectural objects. Urbanism is a very generous way of thinking, since a lot is left open, whereas architecture is a more selfish discipline, which uses up the potential generated by others. In some rapidly changing cities of the global south though,...
Don Bosco Catholic Church/ Space and Systems Architects
This youth church stands out from the traditional Catholic Church which was more solemn, more linear and with cold colors in a curvilinear, natural lit stepped high volume space that remains true its spirit.
Cove 6 – Pezula Knysna/ SAOTA
Designing out of context and non site-specific projects has been one of the most criticized approach of modern architecture. It follows then in these modern days a project brief that requires the integration of design into its locality, site and context is not a walk in the park. The challenge is even more pronounced when the architects wants to make a statement of the current time, materials a...
Cove 3 – Pezula Knysna/ SAOTA
Most successful projects are those that the architect clearly understands the objectives and needs of the client. The product is usually a value addition to the basic needs of the project. For the Cove 3 house Project Partner Greg Truen had this to say, “The brief was to create a home for a Johannesburg based family that could eventually be used as a family home but would initially be used for...
US Department of State Bujumbura / Perkins and Will
Located on a 8.3-acre gently sloping site, the new U.S. Embassy in Burundi provides a modern, safe, and energy efficient campus for promoting democratic principles and economic growth in Burundi. Contemporary in design and function, yet respective of local context, the new embassy building features an open and welcoming entrance with security integrated into the design to ensure the safety and ...
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