It was late morning in Gando, a rural community in the West African country of Burkina Faso, and the fierce sun was beating down on the arid, ochre-colored landscape.
When they founded Work Architecture Company (WORKac), in an apartment facing a brick wall in 2003, Dan Wood and Amale Andraos had two jobs lined up: a bathroom renovation and a doghouse.
A revamped station serves more than just minibus taxis. It engages the entrepreneurial spirit and social vitality of a settlement outside of Johannesburg.
Under African Skies: The first phase of an ambitious national university creates a community of buildings and outdoor spaces adapted to a hot, dry climate.
Under African Skies: The first phase of an ambitious national university creates a community of buildings and outdoor spaces adapted to a hot, dry climate. When Perkins+Will's Ralph Johnson first visited the site of the new campus of Universidade Agostinho Neto, near Luanda, Angola, in 2001, the five-mile drive from the city center involved military checkpoints, refugees living in squalid camps along the road, and warnings to steer clear of land mines. Back then, the country was still in the throes of a decades-long civil war. But Angola was beginning to use oil revenue to improve its social infrastructure. At
Where Defiance Began: A cultural complex honors the legacy of the fight against apartheid, while bringing it alive for a new generation of South Africans.
Red Location is the oldest surviving relocation site in Port Elizabeth, where thousands of native Africans were forced to settle by the colonial government in the early 1900s.
The late German film and theater director Christoph Schlingensief convinced Berlin-based architect and Burkina Faso native Di'b'do Francis K'r' to build the Opera House for Africa, a music-education complex, in the landlocked country known as a center of African film and music.
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.
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.