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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Villa Opale / Driss Ketani

This house is projected on a north-south oriented plot with a sea view on the first floor at the northwest corner. The footprint of the house is generated by the need to perfectly fit with the adjoining house and by the urban regulations. The pedestrian entrance is on a private allotment street while the parking entrance is on a street on the north side of the plot. The plan is organized to hav...

Armando Tivane 178 / Promontorio

The project is located in downtown Maputo, capital of Mozambique. Due to both economic growth and speculation in recent years, the urban pressure in the centre of the city has resulted in a series of new buildings being built in its main avenues, some even of disproportionate height.

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...

LAP Marina Residence / 5+1AA Alfonso Femia Gianluca Peluffo + Peia Associati

The main target regarding the LAP residential complex is not only to provide a luxury compound of modern villas with all the full residential services, allowing a sophisticate and environmental way to live in the growing town in a peaceful, tranquil and familiar way. The main issue that substantially stays back the idea of this plan is the reinterpretation of the African identity, reinventing t...

House Steyn / Thomas Gouws Architects

The house is situated on a golf course in a residential estate close to Johannesburg in Gauteng, South Africa. The brief called for a contemporary minimalist house that provided security and privacy, while exploiting the golf course views. The site is exposed to extremely windy conditions year-round and protected outdoor living areas were a necessity. A priced collection of antique Cape furnitu...

The Ecomo Home / Pietro Russo

The ecomo home is a compact home designed for modern, simple living in collaboration with nature. The design is based on basic sustainable, green design principles. The ecomo home offers a low-maintenance, modern, well-designed green housing alternative.

House in Camps Bay / Luis Mira Architects

The house is used as a holiday home by a single person, who often invites guest to stay. It needed to be a space that could be used as a controlled studio with the feeling of being open, as well as to be able to morph into private and individual spaces when the house is full of visitors.

House Gauché / Earthworld Architects and Interiors

The House is situated in one of Pretoria's oldest Golf Estates, which has already been extensively developed. Our client was particularly open-minded in buying one of the last open plots in the estate, an extremely rocky piece of ground not many would see opportunity in.

Nettleton 195 / SAOTA

Our client purchased the site, after we had completed an initial Design Concept for the previous property owner. Our client loved the design, and the visual direction the home was going, and accordingly shaped his brief around the design he saw.

Right-Side Down / Oualalou+Choi

The pavilion of morocco at the 14th Venice Biennale focused on territorial speculations in the Sahara: “inhabiting the uninhabitable.” The Sahara, with its extreme geography and climatic conditions, remains an unexplored territory for architectural speculation. We proposed an urban structure for this territory, a means of putting down roots, implanting urbanity and civilization.

Ebrah Pavillion / Koffi & Diabaté Architectes

More than a pavilion, here we have a residence that is structured around individual yet interconnected building spaces (common living areas and private bedroom spaces)… Functionality, here, was key, as every part of the residence is designed to serve a specific purpose all the while transpiring openness and well‐being.

Villa Amina / Pascal De Souza

Benin-based architect Pascal De Souza recently completed this beautiful eco-villa situated in Cape Coast, Ghana. The villa, a combination of a traditional technique of palm concrete, isolation in ceilings with grass and brickwork, explores the breezy coast with open facades and indoor outdoor spaces that connect the specific rooms of the house into one seamless spatially inclusive space.

The Midden Garden Pavilion / Metropolis Design

The project forms part of a larger renovation to a freestanding villa located high up on the slopes of the Vlakkenberg. The clients required a pavilion within their extensive and beautiful garden, from which to appreciate the natural landscape around them.

Casa C / Ramos Castellano

Sao Vicente, Cape Verde archipelago, is a volcanic island, dry and arid, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where the elements of nature are extreme and dominant, technology and hand labor are basic and not very specialized, life is simple and flows slowly, following the cycles of nature. A foreign customer, adventurous and without budget constraints, decided to build a home that contains his...

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".

Rehabilitation Of Four Caravansérail Of Fès Medina / Oualalou+Choi

The Medina of Fez constitutes an outstanding example of a medieval town created during the very first centuries of Islamisation of Morocco and presenting an original type of human settlement and traditional occupation of the land representative of Moroccan urban culture over a long historical period. The Medina of Fez bears a living witness to a nourishing city of the eastern Mediterranean havi...

Tree House / Van Der Merwe Miszewski Architects

Trees are precious in Africa. They provide shelter for the elders at meeting time, for school children in the midday heat, for all to shield against the unrelenting elements. In a sense the tree has become iconic, almost mythical.

Urban Patios / Pedro Sousa

The Angolan urban patios explore the home as a city and the city as a home. Architecture and a city are different manifestations of the same theme. The city isn’t simply the reunion of buildings or houses; it is a big and complex building.

Rooiels Beach House / Elphick Proome Architects

This vacation beach house located near Cape Town, South Africa, is carefully crafted to respond directly to the brief from the client, a maverick businessman from Johannesburg. Primary requirements were to create an extraordinary living experience, conceptually capture the client’s brief to create a single space vacation house and fully embrace the remarkable seaside location.

Tree House / Malan Vorster Architecture Interior Design

Malan Vorster have been involved with previous projects on this tree-rich property, and were commissioned to design a small contemporary house to complement the existing collection of buildings - spatially organised around a modern interpretation of the Cape Werf.

Eco Moyo Education Centre / The Scarcity and Creativity Studio

Eco Moyo is an educational Community Based Organisation located in Ezamoyo in Kilifi county, Kenya, providing free Montessori based education to children from poor families. Eco Moyo have recently bought a 5 hectares site half an hour drive from Kilifi town center. The site has a house, and Eco Moyo is building the infrastructure necessary to make it usable as an education centre.

Datum Antique: Houari Boumedienne Agricultural Village By Ricardo Bofil Taller Architects

The experience that RBTA has gained in the construction of housing developments was called on by the Algerian government, through the agency of France, to be applied to the construction of new centres of population in semi-desert areas where agriculture was to be promoted.

Bridge House / Van Der Merwe Miszewski Architects

The site consists of three separate but adjacent sites forming one entity, located in the heart of Higgovale, which lies upslope from the Cape Town CBD and below Table Mountain. All three sites are traversed by a “DONGA” – a dry river course. The overall site, roughly triangular, is bounded by Glen Avenue to the South and East, public open space (a Pine forest) to the West and houses to the Nor...

Looking Up / Francesco Bonanomi, Michael Goldoni, Riccardo Bovo

Cult, introspection, spirituality, rest, identity: these are some of the themes translated through an architectural perspective to design a versatile space which can serve several varieties of cult. This is the place where every visitor can seek his own spirituality through an experience of personal introspection and detachment from reality; the centre around which architectural spaces and shap...

OVD 525 / Three14 Architects

OVD525 is a private home located in Bantry Bay, Cape Town. The steep mountainside site boasts un-disturbed views over Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard and Robben Island to the north and north-east. The city is seen in the distance towards the east and the iconic Lion’s Head Mountain towers over the house from the south. Western views take advantage of spectacular ocean-sunsets.

Tudor Swahili Gem Apartments / Urko Sanchez Architects

Urko Sanchez Architects releases the newly completed Swahili gem in Tudor creek, a development that explores the complexities of traditional cultural extrapolations and the rigor of environmental comfort within the modern demands of aesthetics. This is a scheme that is terse but pith in the way it handles the elements that it sets out to tackle and ultimately explores the narrow and delicate el...

A Studio - A Tree House / Phillip Lühl + Nina Maritz Architects

The idea for this tiny studio of about 35 usable square meters was born out of its spectacular setting. The incredibly dense garden is home to everything from porcupines to guinea fowl and slopes down steeply to the dry ravine beyond. The clients’ insistence that no single tree may be cut required an unconventional approach. The only buildable space available was a 3 x 3m storeroom between the ...

Eco Maison / Studio Tamassociati

TAM associati inaugurated the 'eco-maison', the first batch of the H2OS project, which envisages the construction of an eco-village in Senegal’s Keur Village, 200 km from Dakar in a scheme that consists of common spaces and autonomous housing modules from the point of view of Energy and water in an area where desertification proceeds inevitably. The project predominantly focuses on desertificat...

Akili Towers / Richard Keep and Henry Goss Architects

Akili Tower is a 30 storey mixed use tower in Upper Hill, Nairobi designed by a Richard Keep Architects and Henry Goss Architects collaboration. The proposed site is on the prow of the hill over looking the Uhuru Park and the Central Business District. The shape of the tower is defined by the above ground requirement for car parking which forms the 6 levels separating the lower 3 levels of reta...

KN10 / Costa Lopes

The KN10 building – among the first to be completed by COSTA LOPES and home to its head offices – roots itself in its location in Rua Kwame N’Krumah, opposite to Rua Moisés Cardoso, a continuation of the upper city ridge (one of Luanda´s main urban structures) and, on the other hand, in its generic programme which at the time met the need for qualified office spaces. It also takes in account th...