Christian Benimana on The Next Generation Of African Architects And Designers

Christian Benimana wants to build a network of architects who can help Africa's booming cities flourish in sustainable, equitable ways -- balancing growth with values that are uniquely African. From Nigeria to Burkina Faso and beyond, he shares examples of architecture bringing communities together. A pan-African movement of architects, designers and engineers on the continent and in diaspora a...

Mass Design Group's Documentary Made In Ilima Premieres at Architecture and Design Film Festival

On Friday, November 3rd 2017 at 9:00pm, MASS premiered a new feature-length documentary film titled Made in Ilima at the Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF)in New York City.In the center of Equator Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Ilima community remains one of the most isolated in the world. They have coexisted with endangered wildlife in their surrounding forest ...

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.

Pavilions For Okana / Laura Katharina Strähle & Ellen Rouwendal

Pavilions for Okana is a Design & Build Project and an interdisciplinary challenge that seeks to make architecture strudents involved in the daily lives of their clients, predominantly focussing on sustainable architecture and narrowing down on cost.

UJ GSA Lecture Series: Bjarke Ingels Speaks in Johannesburg on Hedonistic Architecture and the Art of Giving Form

Bjarke Ingels spoke last week to over 750 enthusiastic architecture lovers in Maboneng, Johannesburg, continuing on the Lecture series run by the Graduate School Of Architecture at University of Johannesburg. Ingels, perhaps one of the most divergent critically acclaimed contemporary architects, sort to take the audience through a journey of his famous "process" of architecture, one now made kn...

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...

Francis Kéré Unveils Burkina Faso's New National Assembly in Ouagadougou

At the 2016 Venice Biennale, Francis Kere unveiled, as part of the exhibition “in search of a new Ouagadougou” the schemes for the design of the Burkina Faso National Assembly. In the transformative time for Burkina Faso, the scheme can be summed as tackling the fundamental question of “How do we move forward”. It consequently not only seeks to address the democratic values of transparency, ope...

Poems from Future Architects

In 2009, the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology in Kigali, Rwanda began the first architecture program in the nation's history. In 2011, as part of a theory seminar, visiting professor Yutaka Sho had students create poems and photographic studies of their country, using the George Ella Lyon poem "Where I am From" as an inspiration. In 2014, these students began to graduate and start th...

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 Plantation: A film By Jaco Jonker For the People of the Forest

Jaco Jonker smiles when I ask him how his thesis should be read, almost as if it is an obvious allusion to further clarify that it simply evokes the element of reason, the idea that maybe you might read it wrong. And then he hands me the film, and says "This is For the People of the forest". Together with his final year thesis, there is an element of somewhat hidden conclusions, transitioning i...

Pin Up: The Timelapse Beauty of Nairobi Through The Xi-Xo Collective

A new generation of African artists are emerging, a sort of renaissance within the continent of awareness and character, an awakening that has seen expression at various levels of art. Xixo Collective, a group of Kenyan creatives have just released a time lapse portrait of Nairobi through the magnificent collective of Sigma and Canon lenses with a mission of creating possibilities.

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...

African Design Centre Fellowship Opens To Applications

Mass Design Group's Bauhaus of Africa recently opened its doors in Rwanda to applications. As Africa’s cities experience explosive growth, the continent will need designers to build critical infrastructure in a sustainable way. Otherwise, health and environmental crises will undermine the continent’s potential. MASS is creating the African Design Centre to train the next generation of human-cen...

Film: Torill Kove's 'Me and My Moulton' Has 5 Signs That Your Parents Were Architects

This short animation by Oscar®-winner Torill Kove (The Danish Poet) follows a seven-year-old girl and her sisters, who ask their parents to get them a bicycle. Our young protagonist struggles with her sense that her family is somehow unconventional, and her loving yet hopelessly out-of-touch parents prove to be a source of quiet embarrassment and anxiety. With a bright palette, this film views ...

How The Queen of Curves Zaha Hadid Touched Africa

ArchiDATUM particularly focuses on Zaha Hadid’s influence on Architectural landscape in Africa. Albeit concentrated to Egypt and Morocco and all of thes projects only proposals, Zaha Hadid’s buildings perhaps show her courage and beauty under any circumstance. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect carried with her the same tenacity and magnanimous altruism in all her projects regardless of geogr...

Stone Towers / Zaha Hadid Architects ZHA

Stone Towers, named for an ancient petrified tree at the heart of this new development, comprises state of the art office facilities for a rapidly expanding city, alongside a five star hotel, serviced apartments, restaurants, bars and a central landscaped area, the ‘Delta’. Our design mediates two distinct ‘edges’ – high speed ring road to the north and residential component to the south. Delib...

Hassan Fathy and The Architecture for the Poor: The Controversy of Success

In this article originally published by The Cairo Observer as Hassan Fathy Architecture For The Rich, there is a critical re-look and rework of the principles and philosophies of Hassan Fathy's work in New Gourna and his deliberates vis a vis personal ideologies. The article tries to delve into the idea of why Hassan Fathy perhaps emerged as a solitary force in sustainable architecture for the ...

The Elemental Alehandro Aravena Scoops 2016 Pritzker Prize for Architecture

Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, just 48 years of age has been named as the 2016 recipient of the Pritzker, architecture's equivalent to the Nobel prize, ahead of curating this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. Alejandro Aravena is leading a new generation of architects that has a holistic understanding of the built environment and has clearly demonstrated the ability to connect social r...

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...

Africa Design Center: Training New Generation of Creative Leaders

As Africa’s cities experience explosive growth, the continent will need designers to build critical infrastructure in a sustainable way. Otherwise, health and environmental crises will undermine the continent’s potential. MASS is creating the African Design Center to train the next generation of human-centered designers. Watch Christian Benimana, MASS' Rwanda Programs director present his visio...

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...

The Lo-Fab Movement 2015 Campaign

MASS Design Group, the Boston based architecture team has launched their 2015 campaign dubbed The Lo-Fab Movement . MASS Alan Ricks says, "How we build, and who builds, matters."

Joe Osae Addo on the Connecting Tissues of Resilience

Joe Osae Addo, a societal extrovert,  is a Ghanaian architect that reinterprets and engages his design  senses in a pseudo modern yet traditional palette. He tries to see Africa beyond its problems and tries to look at the architecture based on African architecture that has come to be defined from great pedigree and resilience rather than the problems facing it. In this video via DITV, he speak...

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.

Circa Gallery on Jellicoe / studioMAS

The new free standing gallery annex is a functional extension of the existing gallery, located in Rosebank. The building consists of a single flexible gallery space, storage, business lounge, offices and patio roof. It is designed to display modes of art such as video installations and large scale sculptures and can host global art auctions. In addition the building may be made available as a m...

Working on Water: Al Jazeera

Architect Kunle Adeyemi sets out to solve the issues of flooding and overcrowding in Nigeria's waterside slums.

H.E. Amb. Martin Kimani on Architecture in Africa

The inaugural article of archiDATUM Audio focuses on H.E. Ambassador Martin Kimani, Kenya's Permanent Representative to the United Nations where he talks about the state of architecture in Kenya and the larger African region and a retrospective look at the Western cities towards learning and adaptation of our own cities in newer fresher ways.

Diébédo Francis Kéré: How To Build With Clay... and Community

Diébédo Francis Kéré knew exactly what he wanted to do when he got his degree in architecture... He wanted to go home to Gando in Burkina Faso, to help his neighbors reap the benefit of his education. In this charming talk, Kéré shows off some of the beautiful structures he's helped to build in his small village in the years since then, including an award-winning primary school made from clay b...

Biennale Architettura 2014 - Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014

In 2014 the National Museum in Norway was in charge of curating and organizing the Nordic Pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia, in collaboration with the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in Stockholm. The Nordic Pavilion at the “Biennale Architettura 2014” was co-owned by Sweden, Finland, and Norway. La Biennale di Venezia, regarded as the world’s ...