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MIT researchers have published details of a new open-source forced-air evaporative cooling chamber. Described as being less expensive than refrigerated cold rooms, the chamber is intended to offer accessible cold storage for smallholder farmers, as well as significantly reduce post-harvest... 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
Materials engineer Nzambi Matee heads a recent start-up called Gjenge Makers, which creates low-cost lightweight building materials from recycled plastic and sand. Beginning with pavers, the company has introduced a product that is stronger and more flexible than concrete, heightening its... View full entry
Studio Libeskind unveiled their design for the proposed Ngaren: Museum of Humankind in Loodariak, Kenya. Commissioned by Dr. Richard Leakey, a renowned Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician, the museum will be the first center of its kind that is dedicated to the research... View full entry
Having to work through a flurry of logistical challenges from 3,700 miles away, Lucerne-based Roeoesli & Maeder Architects (or ro.ma) led an international design team to successfully complete the new Swiss Embassy in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. The architects describe the design as “an... View full entry
In this round-up of notable architecture in Africa, Wired takes a closer look at projects from Morocco to South Africa, including the Lideta Mercato in Ethiopia by Xavier Vilalta and the Bosjes Chapel by Steyn Studio. As the piece notes, "Contemporary African architecture is extremely varied: it... View full entry
Due to the large influx of refugees, sheet walls of many temporary houses have begun to wear out. And there are other major constraints. There’s low water supply, deforestation, and extremely hot temperatures, and a rainy season which often results in heavy flooding. Plus Kalobeyei remote location creates many obstacles. There are no commercial flights to the area, and it can take up to 3 days to get there by road for the capital, Nairobi, where some materials may have to be sourced from. — UN-Habitat
Shigeru Ban has signed an agreement with UN-Habitat to design up to 12,000 new homes in the Kalobeiyei refugee settlement site in Northern Kenya. Commissioned in response to the settlement’s rapid growth, which is expected to outnumber its original capacity of 45,000 within a year, the new... View full entry
What's the most efficient, ethical, and sustainable way to remake public spaces? If you're in Nariobi, Kenya this May 3-4th, you'll have the opportunity to answer that question by attending the "Making Cities Together - The City We Need through Safe, Inclusive and Accessible Public Spaces"... View full entry
Kenya has vowed to close the world’s biggest refugee camp within a year and send hundreds of thousands of Somalis back to their war-torn homeland or on to other countries, a plan decried by aid and human rights groups as dangerous, illegal and impractical.
Kenya says it needs to close the sprawling Dadaab camp, home to 330,000 mostly Somali refugees, to protect the country’s security after a string of terror attacks by al-Shabaab.
— The Guardian
With most of Europe and the Middle East grappling with an unprecedented refugee crisis, it's easy to lose sight of the millions of other displaced peoples around the world. But the largest population of refugees isn't in Germany, Sweden, or France.Rather, with a population of... View full entry
In the old days of policymaking by aphorism—give a man a fish, feed him for a day!—simply handing money to the poor was considered an obviously bad idea. How naïve—you can’t just give people money. They’ll stop trying! They’ll just get drunk! The underlying assumption was that the poor weren’t good at making decisions for themselves: Experts had to make the decisions for them.
As it turns out, that assumption was wrong.
— Slate
"[...] GiveDirectly, has decided to try to permanently end extreme poverty across dozens of villages and thousands of people in Kenya by guaranteeing them an ongoing income high enough to meet their basic needs—a universal basic income, or basic income guarantee."[Update: according to... View full entry
Several African countries gained hard-fought independence from their colonizers during the 1950s and 1960s, and one way the countries expressed their new national identities was through architecture. The book African Modernism delves into this relationship between architecture and the... View full entry
For his master's architecture thesis, Geoff Piper proposed reorganizing a Kenyan village with an estimated 70% HIV infection rate so that instead of being isolated in their post-colonial individual land plots, people would regularly cross paths. "There was a funeral every few days," Piper... View full entry
Hot young Spanish architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano of SelgasCano have designed a pop-up exhibition pavilion for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's latest exhibition, Africa: Architecture, Culture, Identity. Made of low-cost materials, such as scaffold poles and plastic sheets, which the architects have jazzed up inspired by traditional sub-Saharan settlements, the pavilion is due to travel to Kenya. The show in leafy Humlebaek near Copenhagen closes at the end of September. — theartnewspaper.com
SelgasCano's airy, bright and colorful pavilions are a sought-after commodity this summer: less than a month ago, the practice unveiled its completed design for the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion in London.To learn more about the Africa: Architecture, Culture, Identity exhibition, click here. View full entry
Chairman Gideon Mulyungi said 24 buildings have collapsed in the country since 1996. “Forty-one lives have been lost and 47 people injured over the same period,” Mr Mulyungi said in an interview. — nation.co.ke
