Archinect - Features

LowDO on Building Societal Equity Through 'Low Design'

2021-04-19T12:15:00-04:00

Featured in our latest Studio Snapshot is Low Design Office, a small, integrated, and highly collaborative architecture studio based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana. Founded by Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare during their grad school years at Harvard GSD, the firm's work on both continents is driven by a compelling ethos of resourcefulness, practiced sustainability, and equity building through design.

The team was recently honored for its accomplishments by The Architectural League of New York with one of this year's coveted Emerging Voices Awards.

Sino-African Architecture; A Look at the Rise of Chinese-Built Projects Across the African Continent

2020-02-18T11:46:00-05:00

A boom in Sino-African trade relations since 2000 has catapulted China from being a relatively small investor in Africa into becoming the continent's largest economic partner. This shift, in combination with a decreasing profit margin for construction projects in mainland China, has encouraged both Chinese state-owned construction firms (SOC’s) and private contractors to seek new project opportunities on African soil. In 2011, Chinese contractors surpassed European construction companies to become the biggest player in the continent’s construction explosion and rapid urbanization.

In addition to SOC and private enterprise developments, there is a strong political will from Beijing to increase Chinese presence in Africa. At the close of the ‘China-Africa Forum for Cooperation’ summit held in 2018, the Chinese government announced that it had set up a new $60 billion funding pot for the development of projects on the African continent. Today Chinese firms, with their proven track reco...

The Emerging Female Architects of East Africa

2019-10-16T13:09:00-04:00

The East Africa region—which includes the countries of Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda—is currently in the middle of a construction boom that is transforming the region’s built environment. According to Deloitte’s 2018 African Construction Report, the total number of building projects in East Africa rocketed up by 96-percent between 2017 and 2018, with a substantial increase of 167-percent in the total value of projects. The report also notes that China is directly funding 25.9-percent of the construction projects in the region, far outweighing investment from the various East African governments, which valued at 12.9-percent. How will this new wave of fast-paced development reshape the landscape of East African countries in the decades to come?

Since last November I have been living and working in southern Tanzania on a construction research project that looks into the effect of housing on family health. During...

"African Modernism: Architecture of Independence" showcases a history of no easy answers

2016-03-27T11:44:00-04:00

"African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence" is a sprawling and immersive exhibition that uses every inch of available gallery space at Chicago’s Graham Foundation. Curated by Manuel Herz with input for this particular exhibition by Sarah Herda, head of Graham Foundation, the show is based on Herz’s voluminous tome of the same name. At over 700 pages, Herz’s scholarly investigation and cataloging of modern architecture in Ghana, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia provided a surplus of projects and information, requiring a careful distillation to produce the exhibition.

Art + Architecture: Felix Melia and Josh Bitelli in the Gaps Between Buildings

2014-10-17T12:44:00-04:00

Felix Melia and Josh Bitelli are artists who live and work in London. We met last year and have remained in contact through email since then, exchanging periodic updates and continuing our fragmentary, rambling conversations over shared interests (and confusions) regarding the contemporary urban experience. Threads of continuity arise between individual emails with each of them, unsurprising since the two are old friends, share a new studio space, and often collaborate. Our conversations are inescapably informed by the digital media that allows them but at the same time bears traces of a perhaps nostalgic notion of letter exchanges. Both Melia and Bitelli investigate the city through the (often unnoticed) infrastructure and industrial processes that support it, while also grappling with the shifts in phenomenological experience produced by the internet – all of which is often tinged with an undeniable romanticism.

In Search of a Rwandese Regionalism; ‘Learnt in Translation’ lecture by Peter Rich, Kigali, Rwanda 2011, by Killian Doherty

2011-10-24T12:00:00-04:00

‘The reality I have known no longer exists’ laments the narrator at the loss of the Paris of his youth. This extract from Marcel Proust’s ‘A la recherché du temps perdu’ (In Search of Lost Time), is referred to in Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s seminal essay ‘Why Critical Regionalism today?’ in an attempt to poetically capture the concept of the loss of a place and its identity. A loss synonymous with modern architecture, particularly in relation to contemporary global development , in this essay they argue for a ‘Regionalist Architecture’ , an architecture of place making which preserves the fibres of ‘collective social structures and the collective representations’(i) that are etched within community and place ; things that cannot be recaptured if lost.

ShowCase: Butaro Hospital in Rwanda

2011-08-12T19:10:00-04:00

ShowCase is an on-going feature series on Archinect, presenting exciting new work from designers representing all creative fields and all geographies.

We are always accepting nominations for upcoming ShowCase features - if you would like to suggest a project, please send us a message.