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Call for Papers: Plant Histories, Plantation Architectures

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June 20, 2025
call for papers, Historiography
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Plant Histories,
Plantation Architectures.

Singapore; Rome

TWO-CHAPTER SYMPOSIUM

Chapter 1: Singapore Botanic Gardens, 29—30 January, 2026

Chapter 2: Istituto Svizzero (Rome), 25—27 March, 2026

Call for Papers
Deadline: 31 August 2025

The symposium is organized by the research group “Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures” led by Dr. Will Davis at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), with Dr. Rixt Woudstra (University of Amsterdam), Siddharta Perez (NUS Museum), and Pina Kalina Haas (USI). The symposium is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is organized in collaboration with and support from Singapore Botanic Gardens, National Parks Board (Nparks), National University of Singapore Museum, the Swiss Institute (Rome), and Università della Svizzera italiana.

Description

Palm leaves loosely thatched create a bushy screen wall. The screen is part of a large building designed to shelter the pieces of other plants and make them dry out quickly. They are tobacco leaves, hanging from the rafters in neat rows swaying in the breeze. Nearby, the dried ones are being plucked and gathered into sorting bags, where they find themselves stacked by quick fingers into piles of like-colored leaves and pressed into baskets woven from the fronds of the pandanus plant. Finally, they are stowed into ships built with trees far from home, hulls of oak and elm, decks of pine. Altogether, they will float back towards Europe. Dry, sort, stack, press, stow, sell.

The plantation system is a term used to describe forms of monocrop agricultural land use, of shaping land after the cultivation of single crops in climates suitable to them. Scholarly discourse in recent years has traced the historical genealogies of extraction and de-diversification of the natural world that the system, with its rapacious claims to territory over four centuries, has come to represent. Because of their low seasonal variation and consistent sunlight, tropical zones—also some of the most biodiverse places in the world—have historically been sites where the most intense forms of plantation agriculture took place. In a broader sense, from at least the seventeenth century on, the plantation system fundamentally altered how people perceived land, property, plants, people, and their environments. Artificial species flows combined with trade and commerce created a disembodied system with disastrous consequences for the ecological complexity of the world and its climate.

The recognition of this system has led to contemporary shifts in perspectives of the environment, that it is interconnected and needs diversity in order to thrive, revealing the extent to which a reimagining of existence outside of plantation logics is necessary. Conceptually, therefore, to understand the history of the plantation is also a method to understand its opposite: biological complexity and inter-species flourishing.

Architecture has had a troubled historical relationship to plantation environments. As an ordering system, dwelling device, and apparatus for synthetic plant growth, one can project a range of examples. In Europe these range from the stately residences in the British countryside of erstwhile plantation owners in the Caribbean to greenhouses for testing banana plant hybrids to tobacco auction houses in Amsterdam. Geographically removed, yet deeply intertwined are the examples in Europe’s elsewheres: coffee processing warehouses under a tropical sun, watchtowers framing their perimeter, rudimentary barracks for workers; and as counterpart, examples of living outside of or in spite of the plantation system, such as maroon communities and so-called slave gardens.

What can plants tell us about these stories, and in what ways do plant histories diversify our understanding of the plantation system and its architectures?

This two-chapter symposium is interested in the entangled histories that the plantation system produced, and each location is chosen for its historical role in specific plantation stories. Singapore Botanic Gardens was founded in 1859 under the auspices of an Agri-Horticultural society for research and experimentation and played host to a series of botanists and plant explorers as a place to grow, experiment, and distribute potentially useful plants (among others, one early success was the cultivation and propagation of Hevea brasiliensis, Para Rubber). Chapter 1, “Plant Histories” takes place in two former colonial bungalows designed by architect Alfred J. Bidwell at the turn of the century that are now part of Singapore Botanic Gardens’ recent Gallop Extension. Chapter 2, “Plantation Architectures” takes place in Villa Maraini, the former home of Emilio Maraini who made his fortune in sugar beet plantations and refineries centered in Terni, Italy. The villa was designed by Maraini’s brother, Otto Maraini in 1905, and stands on an artificial hill (a former dump) in the Ludovisi district of Rome where since 1948 it has played host to the activities of the Swiss Institute.

Chapter 1: Plant Histories
Singapore Botanic Gardens, 29–30 January, 2026

Plant Histories focuses on the stories that plants tell about the plantation system in monsoon Asia. This first chapter of the symposium invites contributions that explore how people use plants in/as architecture, plants that travel between places, ethnobotanical relationships on and around plantations, and the historical connections that shaped the environment, people, and architecture on plantations. We are also interested in contributions (papers, performances, artworks) that reflect on the methodological challenges and affordances of thinking-with plants and their histories.

Chapter 2: Plantation Architectures
Swiss Institute (Rome), 25–27 March, 2026

Plantation Architectures re-centers the plantation as a system not only rooted in colonial geographies but also within Europe itself. In this second chapter of the symposium we welcome contributions that critically engage with the selective remembering of the past, and how Europe’s distance from sites of plantations obscured its role in the system even as it universalized itself globally. How have social, spatial, and architectural modalities informed this obfuscation? How have European claims to cosmopolitanism been grounded in histories of violence and extraction? In what ways do buildings, as architectural objects part of urban landscapes, reflect these underpinnings? 

General Information

Interested participants decide which chapter they would like to attend and indicate this in their submission. A travel bursary will be available for a limited number of participants. Please indicate in your proposal if you do not have institutional funding and require travel support. The conference language will be English. All presentations are to be made in person unless urgent circumstances prevent attendance. If participants need childcare or any other accommodations, please let us know so that it can be arranged.

Submission

Please send your abstract (max. 350 words), a short CV (max. 1 page), and preferred location of participation to: voyaging.vapors@usi.ch by 31 August, 2025. Notifications will be sent out in September. The program for each chapter of the symposium will be announced in October.

Architect Frank Mbanefo and Michael Olutusen in the CCA Archive

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June 10, 2025
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Historiography, Ibadan, Nigeria, Tropical Architecture
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Two fascinating articles and resources have been shared on the CCA website recently – Abigail Duke explores the architecture of Frank Mbanefo in ‘Weaving Modernity and Tradition’ and Asuru Lutherking Petercan examines the legacy and design philosophies of one of Nigeria’s first architects, Onafowokan Michael Olutusen

Duke writes, “In 1960, the same year that the nation gained Independence and after ten years of studying in the UK and working in the offices of Fry, Drew and Partners, Ronald Ward and Partners, and John Burnet, Tait and Partners in London, Mbanefo was invited by Godwin & Hopwood to join their office in Lagos.”

After working at Godwin and Hopwood for four years (the first Nigerian architect to do so) Mbanefo set up his own practice in 1964.

“…the Nigerian Government proposed establishing museums in four capitals—Sokoto, Maiduguri, Ibadan, and Enugu—to promote unity and establish reconciliation among the heterogeneous cultural groups across the country. While the museums in Sokoto and Maiduguri never went ahead, the National Museum in Ibadan, designed by Mbanefo, was completed in 1992. Today, it is a prominent institution and plays a vital role in promoting cultural awareness, education, and preservation for the region through showcasing the country’s rich cultural heritage. Similarly to the government’s development of architecture around the time of Independence, projects such as these museums were again tools for unification. Both the function of the museum and the style of the architecture were important.”

Petercan writes: “Onafowokan attended the Public Works Department Technical School in Lagos from 1933 to 1937—a time of questioning of the dominant colonial conventions—and went on to work as a junior technical staff member in many Nigerian and Cameroonian regions before moving to Scotland in 1946 to pursue his studies at the Royal Technical College and the University of Glasgow.

Returning to Nigeria in 1953, Onafowokan started working as a town planning officer in the Old Western Region. His knowledge and experience made a lasting impression as he moved through the departments of the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Lands and Housing in Ibadan. After retiring as the Regional Chief Architect in 1968, he went into private practice under the name of Onafowokan Cityscape Group.”

Over 500 architectural drawings made by Onafowokan and his practice have been scanned and made available by Creative Commons here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Buildings_by_Michael_Olutusen_Onafowokan

Section Only for Ikorodu Lagos State Town Hall By Onafowokan Michael Olutusen – Find & Tell Elsewhere is an initiative of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal that uses a post-custodial approach to make visible and available for research previously inaccessible architectural archives and to support local historians and researchers in sharing their work globally. The Nigeria project is a collaboration with Heritage Conservation Integration (Prof. Warebi Gabriel Brisibe, Dr EO Ola-Adisa, Arc. Yinka Williams, Abigail S. Duke, Asuru Lutherking Petercan) to curate and digitize the architectural drawings of first-generation Nigerian architects, celebrating their foundational contributions to the architectural landscape.Access to drawings of Chief Arc. Michael Olutusen Onafowokan was provided by Onafowokan Cityscape Limited, who are the custodians of his work.For more information: CCA Find and Tell Elsewhere, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151642567

You may read the articles here:

https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/95183/onafowokan-michael-olutusens-vision-of-tropical-modernism

https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/99051/weaving-modernity-and-tradition

CFP: III International Congress on Colonial and Post-Colonial Landscapes: Architecture, Colonialism and Labour 

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April 14, 2025
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, call for papers, Conferences, European Transnational, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Tropical Architecture
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11-13 February 2026
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon​

After questioning Architecture, Cities and Infrastructure (2019) and Architecture, Colonialism and War (2023), the third edition of the Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes Congress (2026) will intersect the topics of Architecture, Colonialism and Labour.: https://www.archlabour.com/cpcl-2026

Although a common topic in colonial historiography, the influence of large-scale labor on the creation of built environments—including the design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure, buildings and landscapes—has not been fully explored in the context of colonial architecture. The topic has significant implications not only for the description of past societies, but especially for the comprehension and support of present-day communities with colonial pasts and their relationship to the production of space. Connecting architecture and labor in these contexts offers a promising avenue for addressing some of the challenges encountered by postcolonial societies. These include the relationship with “Western” construction technologies and materials, scarcity of traditional building systems and their undervalued insights on climate adaptation and sustainable solutions, and persistent racial and gender inequalities in public works labor environments.

This congress welcomes contributions from diverse geographical, disciplinary, and chronological backgrounds to promote a wide and tough-provoking debate, crossing the history of colonial architecture, labour and social history and construction technology.

https://www.archlabour.com/cpcl-2026

New Publication: Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company

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March 25, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Congo, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Ibadan, Lagos, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Our monograph Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company has just been published with Bloomsbury. We’re delighted to finally share our findings with you on the architecture of Western and Central Africa. The work begins with an critique of the archive and the UAC collections, before examining the Royal Niger Company, the development of Burutu and Lagos; the Lever’s concessions in Congo, the timber townships of Samreboi and Sapele; real estate and construction, the Kingsway Stores, and much more.

In addition to the main chapters the monograph includes specially commissioned essays from ‘responders’ as well as a series of photographic essays using previously unpublished images from the superb Unilever archives.

You can read the entire book here – it’s all open access: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350411340

Thank you to Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, Claire Tunstall, and our excellent responders for all their hard work and contributions.

Symposium CFP: Spaces for Health and Healing in Africa

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March 23, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, call for papers, Conferences, European Transnational, Ghana, Global Architecture, Historiography, Lagos, MENA, Nigeria, North Africa, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, Zanzibar
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Spaces for Health and Healing in Africa

Symposium 16 – 17 April 

Liverpool School of Architecture 

Liverpool School of Architecture, at the University of Liverpool and the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology of the Johns Hopkins University invite proposals for a hybrid symposium to be held in Liverpool from the 17-18 April 2025.  

Pathology Labs, Korle Bu Hospital, Accra, c1958

We welcome presentations that explore various settings for health and healing, such as shrines, sacred healing huts, and herbal ‘apothecaries’ and other spaces for indigenous medicine and healing practices; ‘basic’ health care infrastructure incorporating dispensaries, clinics, and hospitals  developed for early missionary and colonial medicine; post-independence medical centres. We are also interested in papers examining the use of healthcare ‘vectors’ such as barefoot doctors, travelling midwives and paramedics and their spread of health care practices such as vaccinations, and childhood nutrition programmes in urban and rural areas. 

We are interested in the settings for full range of medical specialisms from paediatrics to psychiatry and also more contemporary physical design responses to contemporary pandemics such as Ebola and Covid. Evidence and records of mixtures of indigenous and western healthcare practices in some community settings and the emergence and involvement of teaching hospitals in healthcare planning is also of interest.  

Other possible topics include the role of military hospitals, colonial and modern, and contemporary healthcare infrastructure and provisions for displaced persons and refugees.  We encourage interdisciplinary approaches–history of medicine, medical anthropology and sociology, oral history, among others. 

Our area of interest is the African continent, from the ‘MEANA’ countries of the maghreb, north of the Sahara, to all countries South of the Kalahari and East and West of the Sahara. Health and healing facilities on islands in proximity to main continental mass such as Zanzibar, Mauritius, Fernando Po and Cape Verde are also of unique interest. 

We are seeking to publish selected outputs from the symposium in a volume currently under negotiation with the publisher. We welcome abstracts (500 words max) and short CVs (1page) Please also indicate whether you intend to deliver your paper in person or online. For more information please contact  Ola Uduku o.uduku@liverpool.ac.uk or Bill Leslie, swleslie@jhu.edu

Liverpool School of Architecture: AHUWA Studio Field trip to Ghana 2025

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February 6, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Heritage, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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We’ve just returned from a Liverpool School of Architecture BA3 field trip to Ghana. 17 students from the AHUWA studio visited Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, and Aburi. We’ll be setting a theoretical design project at the former Kingsway Stores site on Accra’s High Street. Students will be using the site to test climatically appropriate design solutions, naturally cooled interiors, and how a new botanical research station, exhibition, and garden could be reimagined in the historic core of Accra.

We visited Jamestown, the Padmore Library, Accra Library, Black Star Square and various streets and buildings around central Accra.

Joe Addo kindly gave us permission to visit his home in Medina, and from there we went to the University of Ghana.

In Kumasi we visited the KNUST campus as well as the Ejisu Besease Shrine – an early 19thC shrine and one of the few surviving Asanti traditional buildings (now all UNESCO heritage sites).

The large new build with the white columns behind the glazing is going to be the new arts and architecture building on campus. It sits at the end of the road axis leading to the library and great hall. It’s not finished yet and we couldn’t visit the interior. From there we went to the Kumasi Cultural Centre to see the Nickson and Borys designed Asanti Regional Library before heading to Adum and central Kumasi. We travelled by bus to from Kumasi to Cape Coast where we visited the Cape Coast castle – with an excellent tour of its disturbing and poignant history. We returned along the coast road back to Accra to continue our buildings visits there and to the Botanical Gardens at Aburi.

We visited the dot atelier new artist studios and gallery spaces designed by Adjaye Associates too. A 3-storey rammed earth building with concrete frame and distinctive saw-tooth roof above the gallery. The clerestory windows set within the roof are north-facing. The vertical circulation has large openings offering views out over the suburb and allowing the sea-breeze to circulate through the building. A metal flashing detail was being retrofitted below the exposed concrete floor and the pisé – the mud was being eroded at that point and required some additional protection. It’s a fascinating structure and clearly an experimental project that requires fine-tuning and testing.

I gave a talk on some of our research and studies of Accra’s heritage structure for the Ghana Institute of Architects and Centre for Architecture and Arts Heritage. Architect David Kojo Derban kindly organised the event – and is pursuing an important mission to preserve, list, and celebrate the heritage structures and spaces within Ghana. David kindly showed us a project he’s been tasked with restoring. It’s the Osu Salem Presbyterian Middle Boys Boarding School – founded by the Basel Mission of Switzerland in 1843. The timber frames, shutters, windows, and verandahs were all pre-fabricated in Germany and then imported. The wattle and daub walls were infilled using local adobe, stones, and plaster. The school is now severely dilapidated and in urgent need of repair. It may not survive the next rain season.

New Paper: Stanek Ł. “Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry”

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October 10, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Eastern European, Ghana, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Stanek Ł. Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry. Comparative Studies in Society and History. Published online 2024:1-34. Full paper available here: doi:10.1017/S0010417524000185

Soviet Uzbekistan Today (Through the Republican Press Pages). August. (Tashkent: The Uzbek Society of Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 1963).

This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War.

Shadow Work: Architecting While Black in British Guiana, by Michelle Joan Wilkinson

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April 13, 2024
British Colonial Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, West Indies
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Charles Eric Wilkinson, late 1940s in British Guiana. Source: Michelle Joan Wilkinson.

My grandfather, Charles Eric Wilkinson, was a black architect-builder involved in major government-sponsored building and infrastructure projects in British Guiana from the 1930s to the 1970s. I place Wilkinson’s built work and its surviving archive of bookkeeping ledgers, letters, photographs, and architectural drawings in conversation with material from national archives in Guyana and England, adding oral histories from family members. White architects stationed in British Guiana and the Caribbean reported back to England about the “skilled craftsmen” (carpenters and building contractors) that they observed. Based on family lore and archives, I question the interactions between the supposed foreign “expert” architects and the local builders, seeking to document this period more accurately through architectural work that has remained in the shadows.

Wilkinson’s concrete house in the late 1950s, before he added a concrete fence and bridge from the front yard. Source: Michelle Joan Wilkinson.

The backdrop to my research is the rise of foreign-aided, self-help building schemes in British Guiana in 1954, the same year that Wilkinson endeavored to build a concrete house for his family. British and US architects were involved in British Guiana’s planning and housing development work. Howard Mackey, a Black American professor at Howard University, was on a team contributing to the self-help project. This period of Britain transitioning its so-called dependencies to self-sufficiencies provides an important context for understanding the role that black builders would play in shaping the built environment of the (independent) nation to come.

The full article is available here at Architecture Beyond Europe Journal : https://journals.openedition.org/abe/14943, full citation : Michelle Joan Wilkinson, “Shadow Work: Architecting While Black in British Guiana”, ABE Journal [Online], 21 | 2023, Online since 07 July 2023, connection on 13 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/14943; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.14943

The Architectural Gift: Lukasz Stanek in conversation with Frances Richard, Places Journal

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April 10, 2024
Africa, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Middle East, Poland, transnational
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Gifted buildings are potent mechanisms of geopolitical reshuffling, premised on an uneven power relation between giver and receiver. How do such exchanges shape cities in transition?

Frances Richard: You have been working for several years on ideas of the architectural gift, and have realized this research in a number of projects. To cite a few: an exhibition you’ve co-organized with Damjan Kokalevski called “The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture” recently opened at the Architectural Museum in Munich. In 2022, you were convener for a conference at the British Academy titled “The Gift of Architecture: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives.” And your 2020 monograph Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War explores issues of international largesse and exchange — what you call “socialist worldmaking.”

Housing project for Libya, designed by Romproiect (Romania), 1980s. The design and construction of buildings such as this were typically subject to barter agreements. [Arhivele Naţionale ale României, f. Romproiect, 7288]

A focus on architectural gift-giving affords new ways of thinking about the worldwide processes triggered by capitalist industrialization and colonial exploitation.

Would you talk about the parameters and findings of this research? What is the architectural gift, as exemplified in what kinds of sites? Why has the inquiry followed the trajectories it has?

Łukasz Stanek: Architectural gift-giving is embedded in a long tradition of imperial and religious donations of buildings. But my collaborators and I have been interested in its relationship to modern urbanism; in how a focus on architectural gift-giving affords new ways of thinking about the worldwide processes triggered by capitalist industrialization and colonial exploitation since the 18th century. In my book, the temporal frame is more restricted: I studied Cold War collaborations — often unequal — between architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist countries in Eastern Europe, and their counterparts in West Africa and the Middle East. The movement of labor, blueprints, and construction materials and technologies across these geographies shaped cities such as Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, and many others, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Gifted buildings were among the most visible interventions by means of which the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries both supported the newly independent countries, and hoped to achieve political leverage and economic gains. To cite a few examples: the National Assembly Building in Conakry, a Chinese gift to Guinea; the Kikwajuni housing district in Zanzibar, an East German gift; or the House of Culture and Youth Theatre Complex in Darkhan, a Soviet gift to Mongolia.

The conversation continues at https://placesjournal.org/article/the-architectural-gift/

Timothy Latim: Reflections on Kigali writing workshop

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March 17, 2024
Africa, Heritage, Historiography, Rwanda
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Timothy Latim: Reflections on Kigali writing workshop

Context

I was invited to the one week writing workshop as a guest mentor to discuss with the students of architecture, how photography can be used to support architectural writing and design. The workshop held at the University of Rwanda was in close proximity to three of the buildings being studied and I got a chance to visit and discuss the buildings with the students.

First Impressions

Kigali is coined as the city of a thousand hills. An apt description of it. Standing at any one hill one observes the landscape unfolding, the undulating hills reveal themselves in layers to the observer. While it serves as an incredible sight, the topography is also a major influence in the design and development of Kigali. The varying layers of landscape can as a metaphor to the influence that the city has had over its history. This is apparent in the diversity of essays and research topics presented by the students. A broad reflection would categories these into three main ideas in regards to time. Colonial history, contemporary influence and ambitions of the city.

Historical – Colonial influences.

The influence on Rwanda predates the shadow of genocide. Into the realm of both native history and colonial influences. A guided tour and with the student to the Administration Building reveals an interesting dialogue between the architectural influences from the Belgium in the design and construction of the building. These were noted to be the fair faced used of materials in construction. While changes in the dynamics of Rwanda socially and politically influenced the use of the Administration building over time, from the use by military all the way to a university campus. Similar traces of the Belgium influence can be found all around the Univeristy. Which was interesting to being to unravel alongside the students.

Administration block University of Rwanda 

Contemporary influences.

Completed in 2014 by Kigali by FBW Group. The Library complex serves an example of a contemporary building. A reflection of the trends and issues currently being resolved by the architecture fraternity. The use of form in the composition of the building. A conscious effort to design the building to be passive in regards to heating and cooling. And the use of locally available materials to clad the building.

Library college of science and technology, University of Rwanda 

The School of Architecture, serves as an example of the wave of international architects responding to the regional influences on Rwanda. The School has a similar approach to its design. The form is prominent, a metaphorically it can be an interpretation to the hilly landscape. And the use of volcanic stone to clad the exterior of the building.

School of architecture, University of Rwanda 

While both these buildings have a very strong relationship between form and programme. The studies done were focused more on the spatial and programmatic response of the architecture. From the space planing to the layout and interpretation of the materials on programme.

Future ambitions.

A walk around the civic Centre in Kigali, draws ones attention to the values being sought after. An egalitarian space, inclusive for all walks of life. And its in this context that Norsken is found, a stone throw away from the civic heart of the city hall. The building reflects on its insides what the civic centre reflects on its outsides. The buildings programmes vary across different fields with low tech to very high tech, future and contemporary issues with possible solutions. A hybrid of activity. Startups and established companies alongside each other.

The student investigations into this building were user-centric. Focus was placed on what layout and design choices were done; so the building created an egalitarian space and facilitated encounters among its users with the hope to encourage cross pollination of ideas in these chance encounters.

Its interesting to see that the same complexities on a country level, can still be found in the rich diversity in a small group of students. The workshop served as a fantastic incubation ground for research topics. Which was witnessed in the ideas presented by the students at the end of the workshop. The duration of the workshop forced the students to narrow down to the core ideas they could investigate. This was made possible perhaps by the daily feedback sessions between the mentors and the students. The mentors placed emphasis on reviewing what was written over what was said. One observation was that there was a some articles whose conclusions were presented without an understanding of the evidence. This was also addressed in the remarks given by the mentors. A suggestion would be to allow them a period of one week after the workshop, to research their topic and review their essay after.