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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Angama Mara Lodge / Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens
Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens have spent the past 20 years developing a hand-crafted haute couture body of work in Africa. Where possible, their design philosophy has been to live onsite (in many instances in exotic locations such as North Island in the Seychelles), managing one project at a time by developing and creating a total design: a new language of architecture and lifestyle specific ...
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...
Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre / Peter Rich Architects
How do you design for fallen glory? For a people who were once the most sophisticated and dominant force in culture and social system, to modernize their way of living but still maintain a sense of arterial connection to their roots? Peter Rich, the man known for domed brick architecture, carefully maneuvered the intricacies of cultural intonations and sustainable mantra to build the Mapungubwe...
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...
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...
Maisha Film Garden / Tamassociati
The new headquarters of “Maisha Film Lab” want to synthesize life in cinema and architecture. Starting with the name Maisha, which means ‘life’ in Kiswahili, we thought about the project as a film sequence inspired by the evolution of life.The walking path, which develops in the garden, begins in childhood and develops through different stations in the evolution of the human being until the fin...
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...
Lokko House / Lesley Lokko
When Lesley Lokko isn't travelling between cities and continents, she likes to say she thinks about architecture. I have had a chance to sit down with her and in a social conversation over wine (way too much wine) in a quaint suburb in Hyde Park Johannesburg and speak to her on her thoughts about architecture (apparently nowadays she has too few thoughts on it unless you can interest her in the...
Abdel Wahed El-Wakil / The Benefits of Traditional Construction in Contemporary Architecture
One of the foremost students of Hassan Fathy, Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil is an Egyptian architect, who is the recipient of two Aga Khan Awards for Architecture as well as the prestigious 2009 Driehaus Prize. He is considered the foremost practitioner of masonry construction in Islamic architecture today. His commitment to the traditions of construction as an integral component of contemporary archite...
ArchiDATUM Dates: Paragon's Henning Rasmuss on Pouring Concrete in Africa
This week archiDATUM Dates Henning Rasmuss, a highly gregarious South African architect at the helm of Paragon Group. Henning tells us what he thinks about sustainable design and what the modern architect has come to stand for, the role of an architect should be in society, what it’s like pouring concrete in Africa and his long standing love with the pen and paper, not to leave out his strongly...
Highveld Pavilion / Studio Mas
Instigated in a highly contemporary environment, the Highveld pavillion is reminiscent of a Mies van der Rohe structure, touched and ordained by the masters of their trade. The building is located in a lush plot, south of johannesburg and oozes structural neatness, and extravagance with crisp clean glass lines and a air of permanence on the ground that it stands on. It is a project that within ...
Gando Primary School / Kéré Architecture
If you have had the chance to interact with the works of one Diebedo Francis Kere, then you will understand why ArchiDATUM loves this man. His work speaks volumes about architecture in Africa; designing for what we know, and where our heart is. If you have heard the opportunity to listen to Kere talk about his work, then you know he is a passionate man, and a humorous one, if I might add. Susta...
ArchiDATUM Dates: SAOTA's Greg Truen On Modern Day Silky Contemporary High End Designs
This week, we interview Greg Truen, a Director at SAOTA who has worked extensively through West African and increasingly into East Africa. With a proclivity for ‘ingenious innovations’ and modern day silky contemporary high end designs that resonate well with the architectural landscape, he talks to us about the pursuit of happiness in an architectural atmosphere, the love for design and the ev...
Confessions Of A Critic: Architecture The Lady
We live with architecture every day and we can’t avoid the experience it creates either. Many styles come by and experts have had big words to describe them. In the day architecture one will hear of modern architecture, postmodern architecture, deconstructivearchitecture, critical regionalism architecture and even showy architecture. It’s a mix of both professional accepted descriptions and mad...
Architectural Language: The Myths and The Reality
Most architects consider themselves at the top of the thought chain in the design industry. They basically purport to be all knowing and will readily profess how the profession requires them to know something about everything. But as it goes a jack of all trades is a master to none and it begs the question of whether architects do know the much they claim or they are better off specializing in ...
Catholic University Of East Africa Learning Resource Centre / Musau Kimeu
There is a misconception that all green buildings are expensive, this project just serves do demystify green buildings by its use of local, seemingly simple materials to create a master in terms of function, aesthetic and most important environmental design. This type of architecture shows how technology can be merged with local levels of skills and how local materials can be intelligently used...
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