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.

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Adrian Kasperski on Coexisting with Nature: The Island of the Future

The first impulse for choosing a future work topic was seeing one of the reports by Fernando Guerra – a famous Portuguese photographer of architecture. The photos presented an almost unnoticeable building hidden in nearly lunar landscape. After analysing the topic, it turned out that this building served as the Cultural and Administration Centre of the National Park of the Fogo island in Cape V...

Poems from Future Architects

In 2009, the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology in Kigali, Rwanda began the first architecture program in the nation's history. In 2011, as part of a theory seminar, visiting professor Yutaka Sho had students create poems and photographic studies of their country, using the George Ella Lyon poem "Where I am From" as an inspiration. In 2014, these students began to graduate and start th...

The Plantation: A Visual Diary of Charcoal, Oil, and Mixed Media in-Situ Drawings

This book is intended as a tool for the viewer/reader of this exhibition to immerse themselves visually into the more abstract realm of the Nasrec precinct of Johannesburg’s southern mining strip. It is to share, and to form the basis of a discussion between myself and you, the reader. Please take this book to your friends, family, and peers. Tell them to engage with it or throw it away. If the...

The Plantation: A film By Jaco Jonker For the People of the Forest

Jaco Jonker smiles when I ask him how his thesis should be read, almost as if it is an obvious allusion to further clarify that it simply evokes the element of reason, the idea that maybe you might read it wrong. And then he hands me the film, and says "This is For the People of the forest". Together with his final year thesis, there is an element of somewhat hidden conclusions, transitioning i...

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 ...

Jarred Pincus and the Fortress of Faith: Architecture as a Religious Mediator

Whether with a resolved architectural identity or an analogous mood that simply seeks to express an idea, architecture has been bequeathed with a mandate that exposes the stark social modernity vis a vis the chaos that punctuate our everyday lives. How can we then as designers navigate and solve the seemingly harsh overtones and critical scrutiny that we have subjected ourselves to and with the...

Mtamu Kililo and the Brick by Brick Battle in the Savanna: Voi Community Library

It’s viewed that most traditional buildings and especially in the African continent are sympathetic to the environment they are located in and uses low tech local available materials. However, due to globalization and high technological standards these buildings have been associated with primitivism and branded elementary. In Africa people have universal standards, technology and design that ar...

Adeline Gruber on Translating the Man Made : An underwater Observatory on the Shoreline of Lake Malawi

There is something about the portion placed in a designer’s mind that elicit a problem solving approach, a sort of social dynamics that though conjoint within many a man, seems well kept at bay from the majority of them. Adeline Gruber’s attempt at translating the man-made, connecting the realm of nature and the possibilities of man at the shores of Lake Malawi touch at the very epitome of soci...

Dennis Mukuba And The Unbowed Hues of Justice: Meru Judicial Law Courts

Following the Chief Justice word on the need for more spaces and built forms for justice through long term plans of building High Court in each of the new counties defined by the constitution this final year Architecture student at the university of Nairobi decided to come with a court in Meru county that incorporates all the tenents of the modern court but also respects and borrows heavily fro...

George Yagomba And A Sail Across Diplomacy: Parliament Of South Sudan

Parliaments are symbols of the aspirations of nations. It is a fusion of tradition (authentic, organic, emotional, and symbolic) and modernization (highly functional, iconic, unifying, and environmentally conscious). Such are the words of the student architect that is the author of this work, an iconic parliament in South Sudan that des well to remind you of just how rich the African architectu...

Msafiri Mwazighe And The White Fields Of Sustainability: Swahili Cultural Centre

The project is a contemporary approach at modernizing the coastal region and still maintaining the tenets of Swahili architecture. This approach to maintaining the doctrines of Swahili Architecture are however not the main focus in the project as the more dominant project element has been on reacting to climate change within the Coastal region. The design has succeeded in propagating the Swahil...