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.
Dar / Atelier FL
DAR is a family house on the Northern coast of Tunisia, overlooking the sea. The project consists in two separate volumes strongly connected to the garden, the pool and the sea view, set on top of a massive "platform".
African Modernism Exhibition at Shifteye Gallery Studios Nairobi by Manuel Herz
Manuel Herz was in Nairobi early last month to open the exhibition based on his book, African Modernism, to over 100 architects and artists who showed up. The organisers, the University of Nairobi and Goethe Institute Nairobi gave the opening remarks before Manuel Herz gave his informative lecture.
David and Peter Adjaye's Vinyl Factory: How Architecture and Music Intersects at the Highest Level
If architecture is frozen music, as Goethe said, then Peter Adjaye has been busy taking a blowtorch to his brother’s buildings. The result, released this week in the form of a limited-edition vinyl album, sees 10 of David Adjaye’s projects melted down into a liquid cocktail of electronic sounds, plucked strings and deep percussive beats, in a series of experimental soundscapes composed by his m...
Africa Architecture Awards Announces 20 Shortlists For the Inaugural 2017 Fete
The inaugural Africa Architecture Awards has just shared with us the 20 shortlisted projects out of an unprecedented 307 entered projects situated in 32 African countries.
Karoo Wilderness Center / Field Architecture
The architecture of the Karoo Wilderness Center is a result of a thorough process of investigation into the origins and character of the Karoo landscape and the flora and fauna that result from its particular qualities. The tectonic events that produced the specific topography of the site, trajectories of water runoff, wind movement, soil composition, and effects of plant and animal species on...
Currency Museum / Costalopes
The new Currency Museum is located on the bay waterfront of Luanda, in the heart of the city downtown, at the Major Saidy Mingas Square, nearby the charismatic headquarters of the National Bank of Angola. The program was pretext for two major interventions. On one hand, it disposes the museum spaces below ground, becoming more reserved and quiet. On the other, its roof establishes a new urban s...
Francis Kere Opens Radically Simple Exhibition
The Architekturmuseum der TU München presents »Francis Kéré. Radically Simple«, the most comprehensive exhibition yet on Kéré’s work, covering both his completed designs and his ongoing projects. In addition to the buildings that he planned and realized in his home village of Gando, the exhibition displays his buildings in Africa and China, as well as his projects and designs in Germany, where ...
Shelfie: Cradle To Cradle
Africa is known to be the cradle of mankind as evidenced from the archeological findings in Koobi Fora and Meroe. This goes to state that the continent itself is to serve as a point of reference going forward, the book cradle to cradle, takes a multi-disciplinary approach to sustainability where the origin and life of a product is well thought through. The Authors, William McDonough is a traine...
Alice Lane Phase 1 Marsh / Paragon Architects
The design of this building formed the last important piece of an urban puzzle. The volumes of the building needed to terminate views on the piazza design. It needed to allow a transparent view through the building’s punched views with gardens but also defining the edge without killing the piazza’s relationship with the sky or the views. The building was awarded Best Commercial Building at the ...
The Craft School / University Build Collective
The Craft School is an effort by Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Technical University of Munich, University of Augsburg at sustainable urban living and technological interplay of materials and aesthetics towards achieving a harmonious and intellectually secure school environment. It is often a challenging aspect in developing countries to convincingly pull across a viabl...
The Styled Chic and Shack Architecture Drawings of Jo Noero
Joe Noero is no stranger to critical and conscious South African Architecture. A signature definition of his achievements is perhaps that he an International Fellow of The Royal Institute of British Architects and an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects but his accomplishments perhaps lies in building small worlds of order and creating socially purposeful architecture
Africa Centre For Peace / Mass Design Group
Mass Design Group have released plans for the African Centre for peace in Kigali, a monolithic architectural language that seeks to integrate the culture and ideologies of Rwanda as it continues to convene ideas and testimonies towards the 1994 genocide that wiped out a significant percentage of their population. The building in itself seeks to combine elements from the 'New Rwanda' towards est...
Does Makoko Floating School's Collapse Threaten Whole Slum's Future?
Like most Lagos residents, I was familiar with Makoko Floating School. Its steep, three-storey triangular roof was visible from the Third Mainland Bridge, which cuts dramatically across the Makoko lagoon, the city’s vast waterworld slum. Designed by the Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, the Floating School was the winner of multiple awards for architecture and urbanism, attracting great interna...
Al Alfy House / Shahira Fahmy Architects
Located on the coast, the 25-year-old main house is within a gated community that faces the ocean waters of Egypt's Al ‘Alamayn. It is alaboured effort towards rejuvenating an existing house and giving it permanence and relevance in contemporary architecture, something that has been at the forefront of guiding the styles of the day. While architecture cannot be solely spoken of as emphasis on s...
Changing Skyline: What Western Architects Can Learn From Africa
In this article originally published in the Philly, Inga Saffron, an architectural critic, looks at the influence of Francis Kéré on sustainable community architecture and skill building and how it has reverberated in Western countries with similar excitement surfacing in different forms within Africa and the rest of the world.had to travel long and far from his tiny farming village in Burkina ...
Technology School of Laayoune/ Driss Ketani, Saad El Kabbaj & Mohamed Amine Siana
The project of the School of Laayoune Technology is part of the policy of decentralization of educational centers in different regions of Morocco and responds to a request from local graduates. The program is built around lessons spaces (classrooms, TP, amphitheater), documentation, administrative, educational and services like workshops and staff accommodation
African Design Centre Fellowship Opens To Applications
Mass Design Group's Bauhaus of Africa recently opened its doors in Rwanda to applications. As Africa’s cities experience explosive growth, the continent will need designers to build critical infrastructure in a sustainable way. Otherwise, health and environmental crises will undermine the continent’s potential. MASS is creating the African Design Centre to train the next generation of human-cen...
Pin Up: A metaphysical Iwan Baan in Best of Africa
A simple explanation will describe Iwan Baan as a Dutch photographer. A more metaphysical outlook of him is that of an artist who among others has challenged a long-standing tradition of depicting buildings as isolated and static by representing people in architecture and showing the building's environment, trying "to produce more of a story or a feel for a project" and "to communicate how peop...
Residence Andalous / Serge Santelli and Cabinet Gerau
Traditional Tunisian domestic architecture consists of one- or two-level houses arranged around courtyards or patios. To achieve a contemporary expression of these indigenous arrangements for this hotel, the architect created an ordered series of symmetrical interior courtyards connected along a main longitudinal axis, from which secondary axes open. The hotel courtyards are paved, and are ente...
Under The Sails / SCEG Architects
With the House of Sails, four primary volumes on two levels house the interior of the residence. It utilizes a primary organization with independent spaces connected by wooden pathways and the central patio, mediating element between the inside and the outside, connects the front to the rear, the sea and the forest. The roof, like a straw tent, covering the volumes to the beach and protects the...
AU Dormitory / Terrain Architects
The dormitory for students from various countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is located in Uganda. Right on the equator and high above sea level, it offers a comfortable climate, so walls lie in east and west side to keep sunlight out and windows lie in south and north side to bring light and wind into rooms. In order to maximize local builders’ technique and character of local materials, it used lo...
How The Queen of Curves Zaha Hadid Touched Africa
ArchiDATUM particularly focuses on Zaha Hadid’s influence on Architectural landscape in Africa. Albeit concentrated to Egypt and Morocco and all of thes projects only proposals, Zaha Hadid’s buildings perhaps show her courage and beauty under any circumstance. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect carried with her the same tenacity and magnanimous altruism in all her projects regardless of geogr...
Datum Antique: Hassan Fathy's New Barris Village
"No other project dominates this mature phase of the architect's work as much as the village of New Baris, in a way that is comparable to the notoriety of New Gourna twenty years before. There are so many contrasting factors between the two projects that it is beneficial to examine the parallels between them. Discovery of a large water well sixty kilometers south of the Kharga Oasis in 1963, wh...
Women’s Opportunity Center / Sharon Davis Design
Located on a one-hectare site in the Kayonza district in eastern Rwanda, the Women’s Opportunity Center is energizing one small community’s subsistence-agriculture economy through female empowerment. Traveling to the center’s daytime classes and events on foot, residents—many of them survivors of war—learn income-generating skills, such as animal husbandry and processing techniques that can sus...
Move Over, Paul Klee: Pancho Guedes And My Guardian Angel
A guardian angel, exactly 1,94 metres high, lives under the Jacaranda trees in our garden in Johannesburg. This is not one of those golden European baroque angels, the kind that lives in cathedrals, and which consists only of a head and wings and a chubby butt. This one does not sing sweetly. This is an angle-grinder angel. Made in Jurie van der Westhuizen’s security steelwork business in Indus...
Freedom Park Museum / GAPP + Mashabane Rose Architects + MMA
Situated on a prominent "koppie" (hill) overlooking Tshwane, Freedom Park’s vision is to become “a leading national and international icon of humanity and freedom.” Its Mission is “to provide a pioneering and empowering heritage destination that challenges visitors to reflect upon our past, improve our present and build on our future as a united nation.”(1) At the core of this mission is reconc...
Pancho Guedes, A “Legend of African Modernism Architecture, Dies at 90
Pancho Guedes, one of the pioneering architects of lusophone African architecture has just passed away at age 90. Pancho died Friday at the age of 90. Famous for his artistic look at architecture and a keen eye for spatial acquity, Pancho is famously known for his buildings such as the Smiling Lion, the Saipal Bakery, and a a host buildings across Mozambique. His work perhaps tied the modern er...
Sinthian Thread Arts Cultural Centre / Toshiko Mori Architect TMA
The design of the Sinthian Cultural Centre is described as a parametric transformation of the traditional pitched roof, which is literary inverted to collect rainwater. The construction of this structure is found in a remote Senegalese village of Sinthian, close to the Mali border. This construction, begun by the New York Studio of Toshiko Mori, is designed in collaboration with two non-profit ...
Malabo Basilica / Saraiva-Associados
The project for Malabo Basilica conveys values such as strength, serenity, austerity and tranquility. The rectangular shaped building emerges from the ground, forming a semi-arch and rises 40 m height, culminating with a zenith opening above the altar. The Basilica can receive until 1,000 people, includes multipurpose rooms for educational activities and diocese services and a priest residence.
Falatow Jigisayo Orphanage / F8 Architecture + Gérard Violante
A humanitarian project designed by F8 Architecture in collaboration with Gérard Violante on a plot of two acres 50 km south of Bamako, Falatow Jigiyaso Orphanage clearly illustrates how the traditional building codes of the sub-Sahelian region can be adapted to the extreme conditions of a desert climate.This rather modernist orphanage complex offers accommodation for children and staff with to...
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