Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
A historic new museum is set to take shape in West Africa, the vision of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and designer Mariam Kamara of Niger’s atelier masōmī. Bët-bi is said to be the first institution dedicated to the (temporary) collection and display of repatriated objects taken from... View full entry
I never saw myself connected to this big thing. I was just using my skills to create comfortable spaces and beautiful schools and housing for my people. No, I never dreamed to see this work connected with Pritzker. No, no, never. — NPR
NPR’s Michel Martin got the newest Pritzker laureate and recently-named Dakar Goethe Institute designer to harken back to his childhood village in Burkina Faso, which he credited as a strong influence beginning with his educational experiences in darkened classrooms that frequently hovered... View full entry
Diébédo Francis Kéré has been awarded the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize, widely considered one of the industry's highest honors. "Francis Kéré has found brilliant, inspiring and game-changing ways to answer these questions over the last decades," said the jury citation for the award... View full entry
Senegal is taking a big step towards further establishing itself as an architectural capital thanks to Francis Kéré’s design for the Goethe Institute that has officially broken ground in Dakar. The 56-year-old architect was on hand Wednesday for a ceremony which included German President... View full entry
Their obsessive geometrical composition was an attempt to answer the call of Senegal’s first president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, for a national style that he curiously termed “asymmetrical parallelism”.
Senghor never quite defined what this brave new style should look like, but he spoke vaguely of “a diversified repetition of rhythm in time and space”. Forceful, faceted forms and strong, rhythmic geometries became the vogue.
— The Guardian
Dakar is known as a regional hub of modernism, which is equally the product of Senghor’s arts-centered vision and of its past colonial linkage. Wainwright traced the history of post-independence architecture in Senegal from the 1974 International Fair to Abdoulaye Wade’s controversial outsized... View full entry
Architects, officials, and villagers confirm the trend: People are discarding traditional materials, mostly mud, in favor of concrete, as soon as they can afford it. As living standards increase making concrete more accessible, some of the world’s hottest, poorest landscapes are rapidly morphing from brown to cinder block grey. — National Geographic
Architects like Francis Kéré have been attempting to buck the trend of using concrete by experimenting with upgraded versions of terrestrial materials like mud bricks that simultaneously provide tools for community-building in developing countries like Burkina Faso. Facade detail of Kéré... View full entry
A new polytechnic training campus has sprung up in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, standing out in the sprawling lowlands region thanks to three terracotta-colored ventilation towers that took their inspiration from termite colonies in the growing East African technology hub. Image ©... View full entry
Kéré Architecture has revealed its design for the parliament of the Republic of Benin's new national assembly building. According to the architects, "the project takes inspiration from the palaver tree, the age-old West African tradition of meeting under a tree to make consensual decisions in... View full entry
The world’s first 3D-printed school will soon rise on the African island nation of Madagascar. With a speedy construction timeline and a process that can be easily replicated, the school could become a new model for providing much-needed educational spaces in underresourced communities. — Fast Company
The project was designed by Studio Mortazavi, an architecture firm based in San Francisco and Lisbon, in collaboration with Thinking Huts, a nonprofit aiming to increase global access to education through 3D printing, reports Fast Company. Moreover, according to Fast Company, architect... View full entry
Here at Archinect, we highlight academic events and lectures that provide insight and access to public programming created by architecture schools. Year after year, these events welcome various leaders and innovators within architecture, design, and its adjacent fields of study. While in-person... View full entry
The three-story building, designed by David Adjaye, looks almost like a palace from the ancient Kingdom of Benin.
On Friday, the architect, the British Museum and the Nigerian authorities also announced a $4 million archaeology project to excavate the site of the planned museum, and other parts of Benin City, to uncover ancient remains including parts of the city walls.
— The New York Times
In October 2019, Adjaye Associates was selected to design a new museum to house historic artifacts looted by colonial powers in Benin City, modern-day Nigeria. Designs for this planned Edo Museum of West African Art were unveiled on Friday. "We are proposing an undoing of the objectification that... View full entry
[...] Kamara is mounting a quietly radical revolt against the “Western dictatorship over our space,” which still insists that African architects should only build clinics and rural schools, never addressing higher aspirations. For Kamara, that attitude is not just constraining, it’s an affront to the humanity of the place she comes from and the people for whom she builds. She prefers instead “to elevate lived experience,” to “dare to do something that would make someone dream.” — The New York Times
The New York Times in conversation with Mariam Kamara, the founder of Niger/Rhode Island-based architecture and research practice atelier masōmī. Hikma Religious and Secular Complex in Dadaji, Niger by atelier masōmī + Studio Chahar. Photo: James Wang, Mariama Kah. Among other distinctions... View full entry
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is embarking on a new initiative aimed at understanding "architecture's historical role in decolonization, neocolonialism, globalization, and their manifestations" across the African continent, according to a recent announcement. The focus on... View full entry
Architect Francis Kéré has completed work on Xylem, a new pavilion at the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana that is fashioned from a collection of tree trunks. The 2,100-square-foot pavilion, described as "a quiet place to contemplate nature" by the organizers, draws inspiration... View full entry
The idea of establishing the museum dates back more than 50 years, to Senegal's late poet-president, Léopold Sédar Senghor.
Along with Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, Senghor was a creative force behind the philosophy of Négritude, which opposed the imposition of French culture on colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.
— BBC News
Senegal's new Musée des Civilisations noires opens this week in the capital, Dakar. Anyone know who the architect is? Nothing I could find/Google Translate seems to indicate. Perhaps, some nameless bureaucratic office or Chinese ExtraStateCraft(er)? See also from Al Jazeera View full entry
