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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Ruhehe School / African Design Centre

In September 2016, MASS Design Group launched the African Design Centre in Kigali to train and empower the creative leaders who will design a more equitable, just and sustainable Africa. The program gives fellows the training and hands-on experience required to execute social impact driven solutions to the continent’s most pressing challenges.

Wall of Knowledge / Tarik Zoubdi Architects

"Wall of knowledge" is a construction project of a middle school in the city of El Jadida (100 km south of Casablanca). The school was built for the OCP employees' children. The irregular shape of the site and its orientation to the sun suggested a spatial distribution of the project in three main areas. The central area is a building reserved for teaching. It occupies the middle of the plot. T...

Manuel Herz wins Tambacounda Hospital Project in Senegal

Tambacounda Hospital is the only hospital in a large region of eastern Senegal. It serves the 100,000 inhabitants of the city of Tambacounda - declared the hottest metropolis on the planet - and more than a million people from the surrounding region and Mali, whose border is about an hour and a half away.

Noomdo Orphanage / Kere Architecture

Situated in the rural countryside of the Boulkiemdé province of Burkina Faso, the Noomdo Orphanage lies approximately 2 kilometers outside of the city of Koudougou. Mimicking the nearby residential compounds, the project is layed out in a similar way to a small village clustered around a communal outdoor space. The complex consists of 5 modular courtyard buildings, a shaded open-air dining hall...

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...

Nelson Mandela Children's Hospital / Sheppard Robson + John Cooper Architecture + GAPP + Ruben Reddy Architects

The Nelson Mandela Children's Hospital in Johannesburg is the first purpose built paediatric hospital in South Africa. The commission for the hospital, provided by the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund was won by John Cooper Architecture with Sheppard Robson, in an international competition. The design is one of four dedicated children’s hospitals on the African continent, creating a much needed f...

Kisito Children's Home / Albert Faus Architects

Kisito Children's Home is a Residential Childcare for babies 0-24 months. Recent years some children have come presenting disabilities result of encephalopathy, which is why it has been impossible to find a host family until now. The orphanage is permanently at the limit of its capacity which forces babies and infants with disabilities to share resting place. As the responsible explained, this ...

American International School Johannesburg Aquatics Center / Flansburgh Architects

The American International School of Johannesburg is an independent school in South Africa serving students grades PreK-12. The school’s main campus in Johannesburg is sited on 58-acres of land located on the city’s northern edge. Formerly a horse farm, the school’s original buildings recall their rural roots in their building materials; white brick used to construct existing buildings remember...

COP 22 Village / Oualalou+Choi

Temporary Urbanism: Every year for the past twenty years, thousands of delegates from 195 countries have met for the United Nations conference on climate change in order to address questions concerning the future of the planet. This year, the office OUALALOU+CHOI was chosen to design the exhibition spaces for the COP22 which will take place from the 7-18 of November in Marrakech. This project, ...

Lideta Mercato Market / Vilalta Architects

The Lideta Mercato was supposed to be a shopping mall like many in the city of Addis Ababa. After analyzing the existing ones we realized that they have 3 weak points: they are empty because the shops are too big, their glass facades create heating and bring too much light in the inside and their image does not reflect Africa, neither Ethiopia’s character. On the other hand, the Old Mercato of ...

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...

Empower Shack / Urban Think Tank

While South Africa is usually seen as a source of stability and prosperity in its region, approximately 7.5 million people live in informal settlements and the country faces an overall housing shortage of 2.5 million units. Arising from this context, Empower Shack is an interdisciplinary development project directed by U-TT and the local NGO Ikhayalami Development Services, in collaboration wit...

The SEED Library / Architects Of Justice

In 2010 the Architects Of Justice were commissioned by the MAL foundation, South Africa’s first non-profit creative agency, to design a world class library for the MC Weiler Primary School in Alexandra, Johannesburg. The intention was that this design could be used as a blueprint for future libraries in South African schools. The design started by identifying the various spaces that make up a c...

Tabanlioglu Architects Releases Plans for Marrakech Congress Center

Tabanlioglu Architects have released plans for the new Marrakech Congress Centre in Morocco in a design that continues with the firm's tradition of pattern based architecture. The design follows an authentic ideology of incorporating culture and identity into the busy city, southwest of Rabat. Living Culture Marrakesh is a major city of Morocco. It is the fourth largest city in the country, aft...

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...

Re-Tour – Casablanca / Kilo Architectures

The Re Tour project marks a marked emphasis on the maintenance of 20th century heritage and offers new ways to ever changing dynamic of investment and seeks to solve the ever troublesome matter of preserving architectural heritage vis a vis commercial investment.

Oasis Kindergarten Kibera / Maisha Trust

At the heart of Kibera slums located in Nairobi Kenya sits a small beautiful, well laid out kindergarten school. Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, and one of the biggest in the world, is home to over 250,000 impecunious dwellers. The make-up of Kibera comprises some of the most modest dwelling spaces for any urban set-up, not to mention the capital city of one of the fastest growing economies...

Mahiga Rain Water Court / Dick Clark Architecture + Architecture for Humanity

How can a tree inspire a project? A local of Mahiga, Nyeri county Kenya wanted to plant a tree in the school his child attended, the school needed water to allow the tree to grow, but more importantly to provide clean drinking water to his students. The success of focused learning is through content children, by providing safe clean water to students equates to safe access to sanitation thus pr...

Legson Kayira Community Center and Primary School / Architecture for a Change

Malawi, officially the Republic of Malawi, is a landlocked country. It is bordered by Zambia to the northwest, Tanzania to the northeast, and Mozambique on the east, south and west. The country is separated from Tanzania and Mozambique by Lake Malawi. Malawi is among the world’s least-developed and most-densely populated countries. Around 85% of the population live in rural areas. The economy i...

Nike Football Training Centre Soweto / RUF Project + Nike Global Football

Cities are living organisms- without the right cultivation, they wither and die. Architecture has the power to stitch individuals into a community and energize forgotten corners of our urban fabric. Nike football in conjunction with RUFproject and MMA architects have designed and built an architectural solution to the urban problem present in Soweto, and has shown its potential as a tool for en...

Port Sudan Pediatric Center, Red Sea State / TamAssociati

The Port Sudan Pediatric center is essentially a link, one that ties the elements of purpose in medicine via vis aspects of freedom. Freedom not in the sense of the physical institution but in hope and care, on e that only medicine can bring. For mercy architecture is essentially that, the ability to offer extensive comfort and care to areas that know none and although the built merits f the ho...

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...

Alliance Franco-Senegalaise / Patrick Dujarric

Built to house the Alliance Française, and to provide the provincial town of Kaolack with much needed library space, meeting areas, and classrooms, as well as performance and entertainment areas, the mission of the Franco-Sénégalaise Cultural Centre is to promote knowledge and understanding of the French language and culture. Its architect, Patrick Dujarric, grouped the various functional space...

Konokono Vaccination and Educational Clinic / Selgas Cano and MIT Open Studio Students

Turkana, for anyone who has had the priviledge of travelling there, is a hot and dusty environment, one that among others provides the kind of environment necessary for expansive views, open air movement and natural hard wearing materials. It is with this mindset that Architect José Selgas, of the Spanish firm SelgasCano, worked on the design of a vaccination and educational center for the noma...

The Outreach Foundation Community Centre / Local Studio

The Outreach Foundation Community Centre was completed in early 2015, and is one of the first new social infrastructure projects to be built in Hillbrow since the 1970’s. The project is situated within the broader Hillbrow Lutheran Church/ Friedenskirche precinct, a site given to the Lutheran church by Paul Kruger at the turn of the century. The actual building site is the staggered rooftop of ...

Freedom Park, Phase 1 / 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...

Datum Antique: Jean Francois Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin's Dakar International Fair Grounds

The Dakar Exhibition centre is a psychedelic 70s baby, a building that perhaps represented a provoking, almost tickling and sparkling idea to the African foray of foreign architects at the time. This was an architectural building that purely and strikingly reveals the political factors that were affecting senegal at the time, and shows a clear depiction of the government's forge of character on...

Koudougou Central Market / Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation + Laurent Séchaud

Designed as an urban community project, the mission and end goal of the design was to improve the human spirit by responding to the growing need for clean water, power, shelter, healthcare and education. Being an Aga Khan Award-winning design, the Central market in Koudougou involved not just the construction of a physical urban infrastructure, but also the elaboration and implementation of a p...

St Jerome’s Children's Centre / Orkid Studio

Built with a diverse group from a small Kikuyu community in the rapidly developing agricultural outskirts of Nakuru, Kenya, we have recently completed a new home which will house local disadvantaged and abandoned children. Challenging the typology of the typical African orphanage where children sleep en mass in large dormitories, the new home limits each room to just four children providing amp...