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.
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.
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...
Stellenbosch University Faculty of Medicine / MLB Architects
The client for this project was SU's Facilities Management,with the end user being SU’s Faculty of Medicine. The brief called for two 450 seater auditoriums, with break out areas. The budget was tight, the program fast-tracked and siting crucial.
Black Rhino Academy / NLE Works
The Black Rhino Academy is a proposed primary and secondary boarding school located in Karatu, Tanzania. The 7 hectare hilly site is situated just outside of the Ngorongoro Crater conservation area, surrounded by rich natural vegetation and abundant wildlife.
Rwanda Cricket Stadium / Light Earth Designs
The RCSF is not only building a future for Cricket in Rwanda, but is facilitating reconciliation, and the rebuilding of communities through the essential values of cricket. Light Earth Designs- an integrated architectural and structural consultancy specialized in sustainable technologies and communities- takes us through the design of the first dedicated international cricket ground in Rwanda. ...
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.
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.
Africa Fintech Foundry Headquarters / MOE+ Art Architecture
This project is a technology accelerator and co-working space in Lagos, Nigeria. During the summer of 2016 a competition was launched to design a building for a team of software developers and system architects at the African Fintech Foundry. The brief was a contemporary and stimulating workspace for fostering innovation through the collaborative production and incubation of ideas. Also importa...
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.
The Why Not Academy / Gaetano Berni, Ivan Cosentino and Giulia Celentano
The Why Not Academy is a school but above all a multifusion center for the Mabatini community, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Mathare slum in Nairobi. The school building project takes place in several phases. In the first phase of construction, wooden calls (twin pillars) were left in view of extending the school on a second floor.
Anura Vineyard New Events Venue / Inhouse Brand Architects
Anura Vineyards, a breathtaking wine farm situated in the Cape Winelands, has revealed ‘spankingly’ modern interiors for its new events venue. Nestled between the towns of Paarl and Stellenbosch, this venue provides more than just idyllic surroundings and award-winning wines – it offers a contemporary design direction in a landscape usually associated with traditional architecture…
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...
Prayer & Meditation Pavillion / Studio Tam Associati
The prayer and meditation pavilion is an integral part of the recently realized Cardiac surgery centre in Sudan, built by the Italian humanitarian organization, EMERGENCY NGO. The complex, planned and designed by Tamassociati architecture studio, is the only one of its kind to provide free health-care to patients in an extensive area within a ten million square km. radius and counting three hun...
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 ...
Phase 2 University of South Africa (UNISA) Building / Michelle Sandiland Architects
Beyond the world-famous horizon line of Table Mountain and beyond the equally familiar horizon line of the Hottentots Holland mountain range is a context that hardly ever receives a positive mention in the press, let alone the architectural press. This sandy and windswept wasteland is euphemistically known as the Cape Flats. Parow, where the Phase 2 University of South Africa (UNISA) building i...
John Brown Media South Africa Workspace / Inhouse Brand Architects
Led by Inhouse Brand Architects’ director, Aidan Hart, the re-design of John Brown Media’s premises aims to increase connectivity among staff members while aligning the physical environment with John Brown’s charged work ethic and creative output. The new space incorporates John Brown’s corporate colour, teal, which is uplifted by vibrant yellow, and expands on the company’s informal bird theme...
PORET Permaculture Community Kindergarten / Anna Heringer
The permaculture community PORET in Zimbabwe is a client who has inhaled the philosophy of a holistic sustainability. With this project we want to be gentle to the soil, the water, the atmosphere and the people. The lesson from Bangladesh is, that the most successful development strategy is to make the best out of existing potentials and resources. In that way I kept my eyes open for the specia...
Villa K / Studio KO
Located at the very end of a traditional village facing the Atlas Mountains, its earth blocks create an enigmatic first impression when seen from below. Echoing old surrounding houses, those volumes constitute the ultimate built layer of the village before the great emptiness.After reaching the main level located on top of an outdoor stairway, a black infinity pool brings the sight far south. C...
Villa Agava / Driss Kettani
Villa Agava is a contemporary house, Yes, but not in the conventional sense. It explores the tenets of traditional Moroccan space planning, manouvering the modern building codes and council requirements to achieve elements of privacy, solidarity in forma and the good old courtyard expereince. It is easy to see how Driss Kettani, in this instance apart from the dynamic duo of Amine Siana and Saa...
Laayoune Adult Education Centre / Urban Agency and OUALALOU+CHOI
The project for a 10.000m2 adult education centre, located in the south-west of Morocco in a harsh and isolated area, aspires to create a robust world class education facility that will give generously to its community. Although the given site is quite large, the building occupies half of it in order to create a compact and introverted building, with a humble and simple exterior leading into a ...
Gangouroubouro Primary School / LEVS Architecten
In the open plain near the Malian village Gangouroubouro LEVS designed a new primary school. Similar to the primary school in Tanouan Ibi and the practical training college in Sangha, the architecture of the school reflects a connection between the local building traditions, culture and function. Compared with the rich architectural areas near the rocky walls in the Dogon area, particularly at ...
Backpack for Modernist Lady / Phillip Lühl
The original house was designed in 1968 by Stauch and Partners as a house and studio for an artist, the sister of the architect. It is a striking example of modernist architecture with clear references to the early Bauhaus, where Stauch had studied. Even though sited on a large Erf of nearly 3000 square meters, it was designed as a double-story pavilion, with the artist's studio, garage and ser...
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...
Kasungu Maternity Waiting Village / Mass Design Group
Malawi suffers from one of the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality in the world: in 2010, one in thirty-six Malawian women had a lifetime risk of dying during pregnancy or delivery. Over 85% of the country’s population lives in rural settings, with little access to professional medical care. As part of an effort to address this, the Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health and Safe...
Banyan Tree Corniche Bay / Foster + Partners
The masterplan is for a discreet and environmentally intelligent architecture that blends harmoniously with the lush and extensive landscape. Green fingers of lush vegetation extend down towards the sea, with a series of contemporary buildings inserted amid tropical plantings to create an architecture that at once responds to the contours of the landscape and recedes into the green totality. Fo...
Mzamba Bridge_CUAS + buildCollective NPO
The community driven project ´bridging Mzamba` originated in the urgent need of and request by surrounding inhabitants for a safe crossing of the Mzamba River and included design and implementation of a 140 Meter long suspension bridge in a collaborative manner. As Nonhle Mbuthuma, chairperson of the Community Committee points out: “Our community is used to not getting anything from government ...
Innonative House / Joe Osae Addo
Joe Osae-Addo, a highly gregarious, Ghanaian-born architect, was living in Los Angeles, designing buildings and acting as the unofficial social coordinator of the local architecture scene. But on a visit to Ghana in 2000 he ran into, and subsequently fell in love with, Sara Asafu-Adjaye, an old high-school classmate who was living in London. The two embarked on a long-distance relationship, and...
Copyright © 2025 ArchiDATUM |
All Rights Reserved .
All images are © relevant caption
All Rights Reserved .
All images are © relevant caption
