The Royal Netherlands Embassy
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Architects: Dick van Gameren, Bjarne Mastenbroek, Abba Architects
The Royal Netherlands Embassy complex lies amidst the urban sprawl on the southern outskirts of Addis Ababa, occupying a five-hectare steeply sloping site, enclosed within a dense eucalyptus grove. The guiding principle of this architectural collaboration between Ethiopian and Dutch designers was to preserve and respect the topography of the surrounding landscape while addressing the functional requirements of a working embassy. They took care to maintain existing contour lines and leave the vegetation and wildlife undisturbed.
Located at the centre of the site are the chancery and ambassador’s residence. The landscape cuts through the building and separates the two functions. At this point the road sunk into the landscape intersects the building and descends to the covered visitor entrance to the ambassador’s residence.
The main building, an elongated horizontal volume, cuts across the sloping terrain on an east– west axis. Walls, floors and ceilings are pigmented the same red-ochre as the Ethiopian earth and are uniformly composed of concrete, creating the effect of a cave-like space, reminiscent of the rock-hewn architecture of Lalibela, Ethiopia. By contrast, the roof garden with its network of shallow pools alludes to a Dutch water landscape.
An unashamedly contemporary and simple organization of spaces the Dutch Embassy in Addis Ababa overcomes the complexities of security and surveillance normally associated with the design of embassy compounds, intersecting with the landscape to create new and unexpected relationships with the host site — a walled eucalyptus grove in the city. The massif architecture, at once archaic and modern, belongs as much to the Muslims, Christians and the indigenous tribes of Ethiopia as it does to its Dutch homeland.
In its conception and daily operation, the building responds to its social and physical context with inventive design and poetic sensibility. This is an architecture that works with its environment, reducing the use of mechanical services and relying instead on natural ventilation and high insulation. The project’s sensitivity to process has left its mark in the raw character of its formation – another delicate reminder of how buildings, as formations of material culture, can register and enhance spaces of encounter.
A new European embassy in Africa is often an imposed (or at least imported) affair, using materials and human resources brought from outside. The Dutch Embassy in Addis Ababa is different. It was realised entirely by local contractors, using the only widely available local construction material, concrete, coupled with Ethiopian stone and timber for the interior finishes. The brief required new buildings for the ambassador’s residence, chancellery and staff housing, and the renovation of the existing deputy ambassador’s house. Along the way (the project took eight years to realise) a small school was added to the programme.
Video and images are courtesy the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the award-winning design of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ethiopia.
Jul 15, 2010 | Categories: Architecture, Videos | Tags: Addis Ababa, Churches, Ecology, Embassy, Ethiopia, Lalibela, Landscape, Residence, Rock-Hewn, Stone | Leave A Comment »
Le Medi Housing Estate
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Client: Com Wonen Rotterdam, Era Bouw
Architects: Geurst & Schulze, Korteknie Stuhlmacher
Landscape Architects: DS&V, Geurst & Schulze
Completed in late 2008, this urban residential block in Rotterdam sits on a block in the 19th century district of Bospolder. It is much larger than the surrounding ones, and has two interior streets that are closed off during the night by gates.
This represents the first contradictory move: the grain of the block is simultaneously larger and smaller than is usual in the surroundings. The facades are even more puzzling. There are very few contextual nods. The windows are square. They do not resemble the surrounding sash windows at all, and their spacing is at odds with the typical transparency of the Dutch bourgeois house. The houses are clad with grey bricks, forming all sorts of decorative patterns. The roof line is irregular. There are ornaments around windows and doors — mostly in stone, but occasionally brickwork — which in places shift vertically or horizontally, causing graphic complications in the grid of the facade. Railings and doors are decorated. An arched gate provides access to the interior streets which are even richer in their appearance, lined with houses that are each painted in a different colour.
Central in the block is a rectangular square, distinguished from the rest of the scheme by its purity — all facades are white and there is a continuous concrete colonnade with a fountain in the middle. Its drain runs in the pavement back to the arched entrance gate. Some of the houses in the scheme are designed by a second office, Korteknie Stuhlmacher, which further compounds the project’s sense of complexity.
The layout at Le Medi consists of six parallel rows of housing, the two outer pairs carefully masking residents’ parking garages. The main arched gate at the eastern perimeter is supported by a recessed pair of houses, and addresses a street connecting directly to an important local shopping avenue and to public transport. One of the southern gates is set at an angle which supports a diagonal pedestrian route likely to be intensively used.
The project is an initiative of Hassani Idrissi, a successful immigrant entrepreneur. He is known in Rotterdam for having built a fountain (“Shrab oe shoe!”, Drink and admire!) and for establishing a successful Moroccan restaurant. His brief for Le Medi had something of the quality of a dream - an architectural wish list that was way too long.
There had to be a gate, a square, a fountain, ornaments and decorations, small streets, large streets, and the estate had to reconcile a commitment to Moroccan culture with the context of Rotterdam. Idrissi convinced a social housing trust and a developer to look into his ideas, but it proved difficult to translate his desires into architecture. Various designs failed.
However, architect Jeroen Geurst — probably informed by his travels to northern Africa — did not fall into the trap of going completely mediterranean. The layout of the block is rational and economic, and is located with great precision both in the local urban grid and within the capabilities of the Dutch building industry. This was key in achieving a level of finish and craftsmanship that has become unusual in the Netherlands.
Today, the value of architecture cannot be easily measured in terms of its authors’ ethical inclinations. Idrissi’s emancipatory dream does not automatically validate Geurst’s architecture. But there is more to this project than offering a mere symbol for the emancipation of immigrants in Dutch city life.
What Geurst applied to the rational foundation of the project is not at all about mystification. Its iconography is referential rather than symbolic. Images refer to things that are exotic but tangible. This makes it very different from other urban housing developments which offer no more than plastic ornamentation.
By contrast, Geurst & Schulze’s housing has a constant base tone which is much too self-conscious and too urban in quality to really become “ugly”. The rear facades and the pergolas in the back yards are firmly attached to the overall spatial and aesthetic ideas.
Le Medi exhibits exaggeration, contradiction and conflicts in every aspect, but also demonstrates great compositional control. Moreover, there is an element of differentiation within the differentiation – differences between the outer facades (grey brick all over), the interior streets (each house painted in a different colour) and the square (painted white, gridded by the colonnade, and uniform again).
With the careful detailing of façades that feature articulated frames around the windows, stepped ornamentation in the expanses of brickwork and strategic use of colour, columns and embellishments, the neighbourhood refers to classic stylistic elements that still appeal strongly to a large and diverse group of house buyers in the Netherlands.
Le Medi is the provisional culmination of an oeuvre that is celebrating the architectonic culture of today’s city. In that oeuvre, the absorption of exotic architectures happens as a matter of course.
Oct 07, 2009 | Categories: Architecture | Tags: Housing, Islam, Mediterranean, Morocco, Netherlands, North Africa, Residential | Leave A Comment »
Kampala Serena Hotel
Kampala, Uganda
Client: Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development
Architect: Symbion Architects
Interior Design: Symbion Architects, Paul Smith
Landscape Design: Glenn Wagner-Landmark Studios
Almost 100 years ago, in 1908, a young Winston Churchill dubbed Uganda “The Pearl of Africa.” And it was. With its fertile soil and natural resources, it was a Garden of Eden in the heart of the continent.
Since 1986, Uganda has found a new confidence and stability. Its luster has been restored and the capital, Kampala, now vibrates with optimism and energy. So it is no surprise that the prestigious Serena Group decided to transform the old 65-room government-run Nile hotel, built in 1975, into the region’s most sophisticated and stylish resort. Owned and operated by Tourism Promotion Services, an arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), Serena also owns and manages properties in Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Mozambique.
The company awarded the project to Symbion International, a Nairobi-based architectural and interior design firm with which it had collaborated on a number of hotel projects over the years.
Symbion architects Jon A. Cavanagh, Pius Muli and Michael Lord, along with interior designer Paul Smith, drew on the country’s cultural and natural heritage for inspiration. Says Cavanagh, “We have brought the colors of Africa—the lakes, rivers and fertile soils—to almost every aspect of the project.” These themes appear in both the exterior features of the hotel and in the room décor, where softly flowing fabrics, muted colours and organic themes prevail. The skills of numerous local artists were also called upon to create the stunning carved panels, mosaic pillars, beaten copper fretwork, sensational traditional jewellery, beaded wall hangings and hand-carved ‘bambara birds’, which bedeck the communal areas.
At the opening in 2006, Prince Amyn Aga Khan, a principal shareholder through AKFED, reiterated this concept. “We took the Nile as our theme,” he said, “the Nile as the place where different peoples met, different philosophies, cultures and aesthetics crossed each other and which, from this intermingling, produced a continuous swell of artistic creativity and originality.”
Says Cavanagh, “The building was positioned on the upper portion of the 17-acre site, which allowed the landscape to wrap around it.” All of the 152 guest rooms and suites have views of the city and surrounding hills and the lush garden.
Photo Credit: Tim Beddow
Boasting luscious grounds which provide shelter for a wide selection of indigenous trees; and protection for a beautiful array of flowers, birds and butterflies, the hotel’s extensive grounds provide a haven of calm in the centre of Uganda’s most cosmopolitan city. Water is a theme that appears throughout. A thin curtain of water falls from the top level of the reception area into a substantial pebble-lined basin at the bottom and from there magically sweeps out of the building into a man-made lake. Meandering paths link bridges over ponds and rocky outcroppings and lead to a giant cascade, created by Kenyan rockwork specialist Julius Mutungi, that falls into a serpentine swimming pool.
Nearby, in the Lakes Restaurant, the water theme continues. Columns are covered in a mosaic depicting Lake Victoria’s fish and aquatic plants. Fish motifs are also incorporated into the wrought iron balustrades, the beaten-copper frescoes and the organically carved mahogany columns throughout. And in some of the guest rooms, the carpets have a wave pattern.
Mist Bar acquires its jungle theme from Uganda’s forests and mountain gorillas. Giant plaster reliefs with jungle scenes adorn the walls, and the bar front has panels carved with a leaf motif by Ugandan artist Expedito Mwebe. Handcrafted artificial tree trunks, cane furniture and jungle fabrics help to establish an exotic atmosphere.
In the Explorer Restaurant, the designers took their cue from some of the region’s early explorers. It is filled with 19th-century safari memorabilia, reminiscent of a scene out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Woven-cane chairs are mixed with period pieces, adding to the safari ambience. “We wanted to evoke the romance and mystery of early explorations, that feeling of discovery,” Smith explains.
Cavanagh and his team at Symbion have, at the Kampala Serena, created what can only be described as an opulent, world-class hotel, one that is wholly appropriate for its site. Says Cavanagh, “The harmonious synchronization of the interior and exterior themes was certainly the most rewarding aspect of the project.” Also central to the hotel’s success are the attentiveness and efficiency of the staff. Here Ugandan hospitality shines through. This landmark hotel, like Uganda itself, truly is a Pearl of Africa.
Click here for an interactive Virtual Tour.
Related Articles:
The Kampala Serena, A Celebration of African Culture
Aug 14, 2009 | Categories: Architecture, Interiors, Landscape Architecture | Tags: Architecture, Hotel, Interiors, Kampala, Landscape, Luxury, Mahogany, Tropical, Uganda, Water | Leave A Comment »
For centuries, complex and intricate adobe structures, have been built in the Sahal region of western Africa, including the countries of Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso. Made of earth mixed with water, these ephemeral buildings display a remarkable diversity of form, human ingenuity, and originality.
In a fascinating book, published in 2003, titled ‘Butabu: Adobe Architecture of West Africa’, and co-authored by British photographer James Morris and Harvard professor Suzanne Preston Blier, a stunning visual array of these structures is displayed.
In his Preface to the book, Morris writes:
“Too often, when people in the West think of African architecture, they perceive nothing more than a mud hut—a primitive vernacular remembered from an old Tarzan movie. Why this ignorance to the richness of West African buildings? Possibly it is because the great dynastic civilizations of the region were already in decline when the European colonizers first exposed these cultures to the West. Being built of mud, many older buildings had already been lost, unlike the stone or brick buildings of other ancient cultures. Or possibly this lack of awareness is because the buildings are just too strange, too foreign to have been easily appreciated by outsiders. Often they more closely resemble huge monolithic sculptures or ceramic pots than “architecture” as we think of it. But in fact these buildings are neither “historic monuments” in the classic sense, nor as culturally remote as they may initially appear. They share many qualities—such as sustainability, sculptural beauty, and community participation in their conception—now valued in Western architectural thinking. Though part of long traditions and ancient cultures, they are at the same time contemporary structures serving a current purpose.
The mud from which these buildings are made is itself a controversial substance that tests our conventional views of architecture. It is one of the most commonly used building materials in the world, and yet in our urban-dominated society it is seen, effectively, as dirt. Buildings subtly alter in appearance each time they are re-rendered, which can be as often as once a year. Yet the maintaining and resurfacing of buildings is part of the rhythm of life; there is an ongoing and active participation in their continuing existence. If they lost their relevance and were neglected, they would collapse. This is not a museum culture…”
In this review of the book from The Guardian Newspaper, journalist Jonathan Glancey writes:
“What these magnificent mosques prove is that mud buildings can be far more sophisticated than many people living in a world of concrete and steel might want to believe. Mud is not just a material for shaping pots, but for temples, palaces and even, as so many west African towns demonstrate, the framing of entire communities. The very fluidity, or viscosity, of the material allows the architects who use it to create dynamic and sensual forms.
Morris’s photographic trips through the region in 1999 and 2000 record a world of architecture that, sadly, is increasingly under threat. Perhaps it is mostly poverty rather than culture and memory that keeps this rich and inventive tradition of building alive…”
This book is a treasure trove of imagery and information to any architecture enthusiast. Critical elements like space, light, and texture are explored in intimate detail, revealing a strong argument for this kind of architecture to be studied, documented, and profiled more wildly. As Morris sums up his preface: “I am still curious why West Africa’s adobe buildings receive so little serious consideration. If architecture is a cultural expression, perhaps it is the culture from which these buildings have evolved, so alien to the European mind, that keeps it in the academic wilderness, hard for the commentators to place.
Sadly, the English version of the book is now out of print. There are, however, used and new copies avaibale from independent oulets via Amazon.com
Photographs and Preface published courtesy of James Morris.
Jun 08, 2009 | Categories: Architecture | Tags: Africa, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Islam, Mali, Mosques, Mud, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Vernacular, West Africa | Leave A Comment »
Gando Primary School
Gando, Burkina Faso
Architect: Diébédo Francis Kéré
A recipient of a 2004 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the story behind Diébédo Francis Kéré‘s design for the Primary School in Gando, Burkina Faso is even more fascinating that the building itself. It is a story of philanthropy, the importance of education, local tradition and skills, and one man’s desire to make it all happen.
Architect Francis Kéré is the first person from Gando – a small town about 200 km (125 miles) from the country’s capital Ouagadougou – to study abroad, choosing to pursue an architectural degree in Berlin. Believing that his hometown needed a good school facility, Kéré set up a fund-raising association (Bricks for the Gando School) with friends and eventually received support from the Burkina Faso government organization LOCOMAT to train masons in the technique of compressed earth. In effect the building’s undertaking is a mix of local and international components, the latter helping to fund the project though thankfully not influencing its form; rather local climatic concerns are the greatest form-giver.
The simple plan arranges three classrooms linearly, broken by covered outdoor areas. The classrooms are separated by covered exterior teaching spaces, that link the building to the surrounding landscape. A corrugated metal roof hovers above the load-bearing walls of compressed earth, also used for the ceiling. The roof, wall and ceiling construction all allow for cooling of the interior, an important consideration in Gando. The heavy block work ceilings, walls and beaten earth floors make use of the materials thermal mass in moderating internal temperatures. A wind channel has been formed between the roof and ceiling to expell hot air, drawing in fresh air at low level.Commonly found industrial materials have been carefully used to create a simple yet poetic piece of architecture.
From the Aga Khan website: “All the people involved in the project management were native to the village, and the skills learned here will be applied to further initiatives in the village and elsewhere. The way the community organized itself has set an example for two neighbouring villages, which subsequently built their own schools as a cooperative effort. The local authorities have also recognized the project’s worth: not only have they provided and paid for the teaching staff, but they have also endeavoured to employ the young people trained there in the town’s public projects, using the same techniques.”
The community cohesion and project management has demonstrated to local villages the benefits in using local building techniques and inspired them to complete their own projects. A second phase has recently been completed and provides teachers accommodation. As with the first phase, it has been managed and built by local people
May 18, 2009 | Categories: Architecture, Videos | Tags: Architecture, Burkina Faso, Gando, Local Materials, School, Village | 1 Comment »
Bristish Council
Lagos, Nigeria
Architect: Allies and Morrison
In 2004, the British Council decided to relocate and rationalise its Nigerian headquarters in Lagos to the eastern district of Ikoyi. The site is a large leafy compound, which, in its physical insularity and lack of engagement with the public realm, is typical of the hermetic character of the neighbourhood, and, indeed, of Lagos generally. Following an initial feasibility study by the Council’s in-house architects, London-based Allies and Morrison were appointed to refurbish the existing staff houses on the site and design a new learning and information centre that would act as a flagship for the Council’s activities in Nigeria.
At the heart of the project was the dilemma of how to engender a sense of physical openness and accessibility against the intrinsic insularity of the surroundings, security concerns and the intensely hot and humid equatorial environment. Allies and Morrison’s response is eminently practical, yet also subtle and considered, as the building gradually reveals itself through a sequence of permeable layers of metal, timber and glass.
Placed along the north-west edge of the garden compound, the new building is a plain, two-storey volume enclosed by crisply rendered white walls. Set back from the street, overlooking a small, semi-formal garden, its short north-west end forms its main public face. Instead of the more usual protective wall, however, the building is delicately veiled behind an open metal screen giving it a dignified and comprehensible street presence, albeit necessarily at arm’s length.
The metal screen marks the compound boundary, and its vertical bars are reprised in an intermediate colonnade of ribbed iroko that extends across the width of the building, framing and defining the main entrance. Resembling a giant garden trellis, the colonnade, an obvious archetype for hot climates, shades and protects, moderating between inside and out. Though essentially free-standing, the timber structure is lightly connected to the building’s concrete walls for lateral support. Behind the colonnade is an inner membrane of clear glass held in anodised bronze mullions that encloses a double-height information centre.
Materials are chosen with an appropriate regard for local sources and aptitudes. The locally sourced iroko timber of the colonnade is immaculately jointed and worked, but the concrete, which proved more of a technical challenge, is largely rendered, in the vernacular way, or simply left raw and boardmarked, its roughness a foil to the creamy Ancaster limestone of the floor. The hot, wet Lagos climate meant that some air conditioning was necessary to cool the interior and protect computers and books, but it is a much less demanding environmental control strategy than the local, aggressively airconditioned norm.
Throughout the project, there is a sense that, while intelligently acknowledging place and tradition, the design team was determined not to let the more unforgiving local conditions compromise what has turned out to be a very decent piece of modern tropical architecture.
The materials are a mixture of the local language of rendered stuctures and some carefully implemented translations of details which are more recognisably British. The timber screen which is shared by both the new garden and the building further accentuates the sense of transparency by graduating the otherwise formal transition from outside to inside.
May 15, 2009 | Categories: Architecture | Tags: Lagos, Nigeria, Timber, Tropical | Leave A Comment »
Freedom Park Museum
Freedom Park
Salvokp, South Africa
Architect: Obra Architects
Set in a clearing near the Sculpture Garden of the Freedom Park, the Memorial in honor of the victims of apartheid is surrounded by indigenous sugarbush trees at the end of the trajectory of the spiral path. Scheduled to be built in the first phase of construction, the Memorial will anchor the site as a pilgrimage destination, while other buildings undergo continued development. Inspired by the African tradition of carving a grave from within a Baobab trunk as repository for the remains of important community members, the Memorial can be seen as a hollowed-out tree trunk. Its voided interior 30 meters high, 20 meters in diameter and open to the elements through an oculus 5 meters in diameter, it will be more suggestive of a womb than a grave.
The Freedom Park Museum aspires to create an educational experience brought about by a “summoning of the senses.” The everchanging chiaroscuro of light played out on plastered walls of the galleries, the ramps reminding bodies of their own weight as they move through space, and the curved surface of the cavernous interior, subtly invoke a spiritual transcendence only understood with the whole body. The building is configured as four soaring “trunks,” containing ten gallery spaces that can be traversed in sequence as if they were fused into one. Just as trees in close proximity would, with time, grow into one. The museum unfolds as a historical continuum, a spatial journey of the struggle for democracy in apartheid South Africa.
To provide relief from this experience, glazed openings in the wall of the museum mark the ascent with framed views of the city and surrounding countryside below. These relief spaces provide moments of quietude for reflection and contemplation, before the final ascent to the top-level galleries and soaring space of the peace oculi above.
Freedom Park includes the Museum, the Memorial, the Garden of Remembrance with an outdoor gathering space for the celebration of civic festivities, and the Freedom Park Administration buildings. By necessity developed and built collectively over time and inspired by African culture and traditions, the project will strive to transform inevitable symbolic value into an almost pre-linguistic physical presence, slightly irregular and rugged, almost as a rock growing out of the hilltop’s landscape, the product of an alliance between man and nature. Architecture is such only when embodying spiritual essence, it can then help transcend the limitations of our human condition and provide a glimpse of the infinite. The role of architecture is not only that of creating meaningful inhabitation, but also that of telling the story of man’s achievements in a way no other art can. The elements of emancipation against evil in the history of South Africa is such a story, one of universal significance, its dissemination and celebration both necessary and urgent.
The building’s curved exterior walls form a double layered enclosure that serves mechanical, structural and programmatic functions. The cavity space between the walls becomes an artery essential to the life of the building; providing space for air distribution and economical passive heating and cooling systems, emergency egress, and for the storage, installation and maintenance of gallery multi-media equipment and exhibition fixtures. It performs as a sustainable environmental control device, acting as a trombe wall during the winter and as a hot-air exhaust chimney during the summer.
The structure of the Freedom Park Museum has been conceived as a double shell of masonry and concrete. The inner walls of the conical domes are a composite structure of reinforced concrete and infill brick masonry. Radially-arranged narrow concrete fin-columns support concrete slabs and flat concrete beams at floor and ramp levels. These serve to support the inner masonry walls built tight to the concrete fins and slabs. The completed inner structure is ultimately monolithic though it can be constructed sequentially-concrete frame followed by masonry. The outer wall is made of two wythes of brick sandwiching a 10 cm wide lightly reinforced concrete filled cavity. This outer wall is self supporting and tied back to the fins and slabs, thus slender for its height since the core of the inner wall structure provides good buckling and lateral load resistance. The resulting structure is a constructed composite of different orders of structure and material-frame, infill wall and outer shell, concrete and brick-that registers both its own construction and a clear progression of outer lightness to inner core of strength and resilience.
The oculi skylights are proposed as inflated pillows made out of self-cleaning ETFE (ethyltetrofluoroethylene film). This system will allow transparent colorless frameless skylights cleaned by rainfall and immune to air pollution and UV radiation.
May 10, 2009 | Categories: Architecture | Tags: Baobab, Cavernous, Culture, Museum, South Africa, Tradition | Leave A Comment »
Banyan Tree Corniche Bay,
La Gaulette, Mauritius
2006
Client: Corniche Bay/Tatorio Holdings Ltd.
Architects: Foster + Partners, Jean Michel d’Unienville & Associates Architects Ltd
Landscape Architects: Newton Landscape Architects
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.
On the mountainside, a cluster of elegant villas are discreetly inserted into the vegetation. With panoramic views over the Indian Ocean they balance privacy with a sense of community.
The concept evolved from a single line that is the starting point for the dynamic curves that categorise the scheme. Drawing with this single straight line, we created a language of curves that enliven the design and recall the organic forms of the lush setting of Mauritius.
The design of the interiors celebrates outdoor and island living. characterized by the use of natural materials that echo those found on the site, the design concept creates a holistic experience without any division between the exterior and interior spaces.
The architect’s philosophy of intergration was a big influence on this development, which is designed to fit perfectly into its natural environment, seamlessly blending into its spectacular surroundings as attractively as possible. Attention to detail is paramount, with every aspect of the development carefully designed to be as ecologically sound, culturally relevant, and aesthetically pleasing as possible. Luxury becomes a self sustaining quality with the use of local materials, and high efficient energy systems incorprated into the design.
The resort is due for completion in 2011.
May 10, 2009 | Categories: Architecture | Tags: Ecofriendly, Luxury, Mauritius, Resorts, Sustainability, Thatch | Leave A Comment »
African Institute of Science and Technology (AIST)
Abuja, Nigeria
2006
Client: Nelson Mandela Institute
Total Area: 240,000 m²
Architect: Massimilano Fuksas
Consultants: Arup Italia
The African Institute of Science and Technology has as its main inspiration principle the effort to foster Africa’s economic, social and political growth and development through the promotion of excellence in education. The Institute will address all the requirements of a modern world class academic centre, including teaching buildings, research facilities, residential space, a hotel, sport facilities and the associated infrastructure.
The site is on a green field plot between the city of Abuja and Nnamdi Asikiwe International Airport, with a design aspiring to wisely combine African tradition and cultural values with innovation applied to construction and cutting edge building management.
The buildings are organised along the main pedestrian axis, which crosses Nelson Mandela Square. The paved areas on the square are engraved with Mandela’s words to inspire new generations to build the peaceful common future of Africa.
“…Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor; that a son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine; that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
The Architecture adapts to the geography as a patchwork of African weavings.
The campus is arranged around a central axis which points to Aso Rock. Aso, means “victorious” in the language of the (now displaced) Asokoro (“the people of victory”). A visual axis towards the holy rock, a path that will drive students to their individual “victories”, to become the outstanding professionals who will use their knowledge and leadership to transform local communities and improve the human condition across the African continent.
Constructed from local timber, stone and brick, campus buildings will incorporate sustainable technologies, such as water harvesting and photovoltaic technology. Traditional textile patterns and African “red earth” structures inspired Fuksas’s design: In plan view, residential quarters are designed as long, sinuous interconnecting shapes. Individual faculty complexes, each one different from the other, comprise buildings grouped around internal streets and courtyards. Vertical openings in the buildings’ timber skin will filter light and promote natural ventilation.
May 09, 2009 | Categories: Architecture | Tags: Abuja, Africa, Campus, Competition, Masterplan, Nigeria | Leave A Comment »
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
The New York Times
I’ll admit my expectations are pretty low when it comes to new architecture in the nation’s capital.
True, Norman Foster completed a pretty little canopy for the National Portrait Gallery’s central courtyard in 2007. But over all the crop of monuments and museums that have risen along the National Mall in recent decades have been so mediocre that it seems to be only a matter of time before this sacred strip of land becomes a national embarrassment.
So the first reaction to the announcement that the team of Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup has been selected to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture should be a big round of applause. David Adjaye, the project’s 42-year-old lead designer, is a rising star in the architecture world.
The design’s strong, somber exterior — a stack of zigzagging blocks clad in shimmering bronze mesh — could be the most important addition to the mall since I. M. Pei’s East Building at the National Gallery of Art opened three decades ago.
It is also a history lesson. Mr. Adjaye, who was born in Tanzania and lives in London, says that the museum’s form is based on late 19th- and early 20th-century tribal Yoruban sculpture.
The sculptural reference is an obvious attempt to express the frayed cultural threads that link black America and West Africa. Yet it also carries subtler cultural associations: the stacked wood blocks, which evoke an African version of the Parthenon caryatids, remind us that Washington’s neo-Classical buildings represent only part of a vastly more intricate cultural narrative. The new design’s ziggurat-shaped form evokes the work of Constantin Brancusi, one of many Western artists who were profoundly influenced by African tribal art.
This effort to broaden the narrative of Classical Washington — and to challenge how many Americans still view their history — continues inside. Two huge stone canopies extend out from the building to the north and south, fudging the boundary between the formal world of the museum and everyday life outside. The lobby floor, which slopes down from the Mall toward Constitution Avenue, is a reversal of the conventional grand stair. Instead of lifting art up onto a pedestal, it allows the public to flow right through the building.
For museumgoers, however, the design’s greatest strength lies in the delicate balance struck between the need to move crowds and the stillness that is so vital to the experience of viewing displays. A dense forest of wood columns is suspended from the lobby ceiling. The columns dip down at the center of the lobby, gently pushing the crowds toward the edges of the room. From there, visitors will climb a broad staircase to the main galleries, which are on the second, third and fourth floors.
In a cheeky inversion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Guggenheim rotunda, Mr. Adjaye clusters all of the galleries at the center of these floors. To get to them, visitors will follow a series of stairs, corridors and walkways that will spiral up around the building’s perimeter.
The layout allows Mr. Adjaye to isolate the main circulation route from the galleries, which should give them a wonderful calm. But it also lets him forge a strong relationship between the inner world of the museum and the city outside.
Big windows — reminiscent of the trapezoidal ones at the Whitney Museum of American Art — will angle out toward carefully framed views of the city’s monuments. Rather than puncture the building’s bronze mesh skin, Mr. Adjaye gently stretches it to allow people to see through it. At other points the pattern is denser, so that the light filtering in will have a mottled, bronze glow, as if it were streaming through a canopy of trees.
(The changes in the density of the bronze mesh should have a powerful effect on the building’s exterior at night, too, giving it an eerie, uneven pattern, like a lizard’s skin, when it is lighted from within.)
Still, expect plenty of nail-biting moments in the months and years to come. The design is still in the earliest stages, and the high degree of refinement in Mr. Adjaye’s work means that its success will depend on the kind of details that have yet to be fully worked out. These include the precise layout of the galleries and the position of a number vertical cuts through the building that will be used to bring light into the lower levels.
What’s more, Mr. Adjaye has never designed a cultural building of this scale. Nor has he ever worked with a bureaucratic culture as byzantine as Washington’s. Finally, he will have to find a way to work with a sprawling team of associate architects without diluting the power of his original vision.
It will now be up to the museum’s director, Lonnie G. Bunch, to ensure that he will have the kind of creative freedom necessary to thrive in this former swampland.
(A version of this article appeared in print on May 4, 2009, on page C1 of the New York Times, New York edition).
May 07, 2009 | Categories: Architecture, Interiors | Tags: Adjaye, African American, Freelon, Museum, Washington DC, Yoruba | Leave A Comment »
