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...

Red Location Museum / Noero and Wolff Architects

Red Location Red Location was the first settled black township of Port Elizabeth. It derives its name from a series of corrugated iron barrack buildings, which are rusted a deep red colour. These were part of a Boer concentration camp in Uitenhage and moved in 1900 to Red Location, where the first urban lack families settled. It became a site of struggle during the years of Apartheid. Many prom...

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...

Volubilis / Kilo Architectures

Set within the most visited archaeological site in the Kingdom of Morocco, this project seeks to enhance the historical and symbolic significance of this unique UNESCO World Heritage site. The site is an exceptionally well-preserved example of an ancient Roman colonial town and one of several antique sites in Morocco. Due to the lack of urban development in the immediate surroundings, the site...

Nubian Museum / Mahmoud El-Hakim

The Nubian Museum celebrates the culture and civilization of the Nubian region of Egypt from prehistoric times to the present. It is located in the city of Aswan, on the eastern bank of the Nile, 899 kilometres south of Cairo. The museum is a three-storey building with an outdoor exhibition area. It houses the main finds of the UNESCO salvage campaign carried out at the time of the building of ...

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...

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...

Freedom Park, Phase 1 / GAPP + Mashabane Rose Architects + MMA

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa MOCAA / Heatherwick Studios

Thomas Heatherwick's new MOCAA establishment in Capetown is almost nearing completion, and the building takes over from what was once one of the tallest building on the Capetown Skyline. Poised to hold one of the most analytic and comprehensive African art collections in the world, the project seeks to give Africa one of its major institutions of African art. Heatherwick tries to mimic the ches...

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...

MNBH Museum of Earth Architecture_Sama and Kasa / BC Architecture and Studies

Sama & Kasa (high and low in the Hausa language) is the project we presented for the pavilion, to promote earth architecture, in the national museum Boubou-Hama in Niamey. Logically the project was inspired by the vernacular architecture of Niger. It contains characteristics of traditional materials, techniques and forms to obtain a contemporary architecture in harmony with the local culture.

Meroe Royal Baths Protective Shelter / Kere Architecture

Kere Architecture has been chosen to develop the Meroe Royal Baths Protective Shelter in Sudan and they are doing it in clay and stone. Reminiscent of what the firm has come to be known of, the structure is an understated quiet edifice that uses local materials such as clay and stone to construct a long term structure. This is a culminated effort of a competition that needed to portray both sen...