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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Yves Saint Laurent Museum / Studio KO

While studying the couturier’s archives, Studio KO became intrigued by the duality between curved and straight lines, and between loose and precise approaches to cutting fabric. The facade of the building appears as an intersection of cubes with a lace-like covering of bricks, creating patterns that recall the weft and warp of fabric. As with the lining of a couture jacket, the interior is radi...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research / DHK Architects

The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research, commonly referred to as Ahmed Baba Institute, is a library and research complex located in Timbuktu, Mali. Its location in Timbuktu, is an ancient town with rich history dating back to the Trans-Saharan Trade, required the architects to come up with a design that would respect its unique context. The result was a building construc...

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...

Philip Kleijnhans' Architecture's Survival for the Fittest

In this article originally appearing in Leading Architecture in 2008, Philip Kleijnhans talks of the ability of an architect to adapt to a cruel market, how response, debate and intricate notions of running a business visavis a practice can be handled, and how as a principal, one needs to go beyond working for your business rather than in your business. He says "I can tell you (with certainty),...

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...

Working Smarter: Architects and their Apps

Smart phones are all together taking over how we communicate and relate. Why not let them also take a swipe at how we design. Here are apps that could make an architects design process a little less bulky.

10 Greenest Buildings in Africa

The world is moving towards green buildings for sustenance of generations to come where attempts are geared towards global movement and our collective mission to create sustainable built environments and architecture that touches the earth lightly. Sustainability has been a key driver of the 21st century architecture and with that we look ten of the architects and creative built environments ac...

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...

Diébédo Francis Kéré: Architecture is a Wake-Up Call

"Architecture is much more than art. And it is by far more than just building buildings". Meet award-winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré from Burkina Faso in this interview about his architectural philosophy.

11 Irritating Things That Drive Designers Crazy

A designer's day is a constant battle to fight through constant chaos and opinionated self absorbed egos that rage on within the soul. Be it an architect, a graphic designer, a rocket scientist, okay i added that in just because we need to have scientists too in this category, we daily struggle with nuances and external forces that threaten to vanquish us on a whim. Here are parts of the greate...

Want to be a Starchitect? Come, Sit Down and Listen

As architects we are all speculators, admirers of the greater of us, the ones that make the rest of us look bad. The Starchitects. They are the ones with all the answers, the pristine, wrapped up in magic adorned solutions to simple problems and complex ones. Whilst they seem more connected than ever to the architectural profession, the rest of us seem more atomized and dislocated than ever. Th...

Architecture: From Nothing to Something

"What is architecture about? i have seen architects in Kenya and their attempt at designing in the sub-Saharan Africa. We see buildings coming up every day. But an in-depth call to action for you as Architects would be that what can you do as a steward in your field? What do you have to offer your country as an architect that can change the scope? We see skyscrapers coming and mushrooming all ...

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 ...

Who Is The Architect For The Common Man?

One of the many questions that students of architecture are faced with in the early stages of their school life is the question of whether architecture is a profession or a business or both.