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The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has released images of its just-completed first phase of the Tosin Oshinowo-designed Ngarannam village reconstruction project in Northeast Nigeria. The project to resettle villagers displaced by Boko Haram was begun last year as part of the UNDP’s... View full entry
Pritzker Prize winner Francis Kéré’s firm has shared photos of their just-completed Kamwokya Community Centre project in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. Designed for the city’s informal settlement of Kamwokya, the center hosts a variety of activities and educational resources for residents... View full entry
A proposed new residential project in Zanzibar, Tanzania, could challenge Milwaukee's Ascent tower for the title of world’s tallest mass timber structure after being unveiled to the public on October 1. Rising 28 stories to a height of approximately 315 feet, the Burj Zanzibar is designed by the... View full entry
Kargbo grew up to become a banker, but she has spent the last several years working in the administration of Freetown mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, a noted climate activist. Before becoming the city’s chief heat officer, she headed up the city’s sanitation department [...] Kargbo says her work is to keep climate change on the agenda, however many other things are tugging the world’s attention away. — Experience Magazine
A former aide to the noted climate activist Mayor of Freetown Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Eugenia Kargbo is one of five official Chief Heat Officers (CHOs) in the world. After being appointed in 2021, she joins fellow CHOs from Athens, Miami, Santiago, Chile, and Monterrey, Mexico in a program... View full entry
Speaking at the Triennale di Milano, which kicks off tomorrow in the Italian finance capital, Francis Kéré lamented the Western notion that his “unknown” home continent is a vast but homogeneous place when in reality, it is comprised of 54 countries and over 1,000 different language... View full entry
The African Futures Institute (AFI) has announced that it has received a grant totalling $150,000 from the Mellon Foundation. As stated on the Foundation’s website, the funding will be used “to support program planning and activities for the establishment of an independent graduate... View full entry
The theme and title of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale have been announced as The Laboratory of the Future, vetting a decolonized vision of Africa as a petri dish for the hopes of the broader world to come. As the Biennale’s curator, architect and academic Lesley Lokko, explains... View full entry
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
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
“Despite its vast size, sub-Saharan Africa has never been proportionately represented on Unesco’s world heritage list…
Now, the first African to be made head of the world heritage centre has said that needs to change – and fast. Lazare Eloundou Assomo, a Cameroonian who led the reconstruction of the Timbuktu mausoleums after they were badly damaged in 2012 by Islamist fighters allied to al-Qaida, has said it will be a priority of his time in office.”
— The Guardian
Africa is currently the least represented continent (behind the Arab nations) in terms of the representation of cultural sites on the U.N. list, though it does account for 30% of all sites the organization considers to be endangered. Assomo was appointed as Director earlier this month and told The... 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 spiraling new supertower hopes to grace one of Tanzania’s most spectacular coastal islands thanks to an ambitious, albeit repurposed design from Dubai-based firm xcassia. Taking its design from a set of dominoes, the proposed 70-story tower will inhabit a manmade island on the Zanzibar... View full entry
As part of the architect’s ongoing commitment to his native country, David Adjaye has revealed designs for a massive new public infrastructure project that will provide over 100 new healthcare facilities to the people of Ghana. Dubbed Agenda 111, the government-backed initiative will add... View full entry
