The Nike Football Training Centre is a billboard of a building in the loud and proud tradition of Soweto, South Africa's biggest and most ambitious township. From the rooftop of the three-story building, you can see an endless fabric of low-rise government housing and ad hoc shacks, but also signs of change: BMWs parked at the Maponya Mall, cabs heading to the revamped taxi stand at Baragwanath Hospital, and worshippers crowding into new Pentecostal churches. On most days, you will find groups of kids at play and in training on the immaculate soccer fields below. These scenes suggest a new
One of 20 football facilities that Architecture for Humanity is designing across Africa for the nonprofit Play Soccer, the Oguaa center is a place for disadvantaged youth to learn soccer, health, and social skills.
The village of Gando is more than a three-hour drive from the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, on occasionally unpaved roads that thread through a landscape of scorched orange dust and isolated trees buffeted by sub-Saharan winds.
Set at a crossroads in Zwide, a township in Port Elizabeth, this multipurpose center provides pediatric HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, as well as spaces for dance classes, performance, and social functions. By including non-health-care activities and placing the building at an important intersection, the Ubuntu Education Fund aims to integrate the center with the local community and make HIV care a part of people's daily lives. Stan Field, who grew up in Port Elizabeth, and his son Jess designed the building as a series of poured-in-place concrete structures that seem to lean on each other and embody the client's mission
In addition to designing the Girubuntu school, MASS Design Group founders Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks helped select its site, get approvals, and build the organizational infrastructure to support it.