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Social Rehabilitation: Exploring Community Involvement in Architectural Restoration

Rehabilitation involves repairing, renovating, altering, or reconstructing any building or structure. It addresses the need to significantly improve a building's failing features, primarily through strengthening or replacing elements to restore the structure's optimal performance. The impact of building rehabilitation on the physical environment is significant. It is a sustainable strategy for preserving the built environment and mitigating the construction industry's impact on climate change.

The Distinctive Mosques of Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to an enormous number of religious adherents – within which there is extraordinary diversity in religious expression. Iconic buildings serving a religious purpose are found throughout the continent, such as The Cathedral Basilica of the Holy Family in central Nairobi or the Hare Krishna Temple in South Africa. What is evident is that architecture that hosts religious gatherings makes up a key part of the urban fabric of sub-Saharan African cities and that in a lot of cases, religious structures go against the grain – leaving aside or tweaking classical models in favor of a unique architectural approach.

Places of Protest in Africa: Public Spaces for Engaging & Fostering Democracy

Protest has always been a powerful tool for creating change, and public spaces provide a platform for social engagement in societies. As part of the International Day of Democracy, we examine Africa, its series of emerging protests in the past year, and how citizens in various countries question political justice, demand better living standards from their government, and interrogate their nation’s sovereignty. With demonstrations ranging from organized large-scale marches to smaller spontaneous outbursts, residents of these countries have explored public spaces in symbolic and significant ways to amplify their voices. These spaces include public squares with cultural and historical meaning, sites of political buildings, or makeshift protest areas such as roads and open areas. Through this, African cities show how people make these spaces their own and how the power of their conglomeration cannot be ignored in unwrapping the democratic essence of public spaces.

The Architectural Language of Scaffoldings in Cityscapes: Exploring the Impact of These Temporary Structures

As one takes a visual tour through the city, one might spot structures that break the rhythm of finished architectural products. These are buildings encased in grids of metal or wooden sections, sometimes wrapped in colored nets, that communicate a moment of construction, repair, renovation, or demolition. They are called scaffolding systems, temporary structures built in the city to aid in the erection or maintenance of buildings. However, they have evolved to speak their own architectural language. As city-making is a continuous process, scaffolds serve as beacons, proposing silhouettes of the height, shape, or forms of new buildings. They step into the sidewalks, acting as shade or obstructions to the flow of human and vehicular traffic. In contrast to the permanence of architecture, they exhibit a sense of temporality that helps communicate time, the growth of neighborhoods, and the evolution of a city.

The Fractals at the Heart of Indigenous African Architecture

Fractals are complex geometric shapes with fractional dimensional properties. They have emerged as swirling patterns within the frontiers of mathematics, information technology, and computer graphics. Over the last 30 years, these patterns have also become important modeling tools in other fields, including biology, geology, and other natural sciences. However, fractals have existed far beyond the birth of computers, and have been observed by anthropologists in indigenous African societies. One of which is Ron Eglash; an American scientist who presents the evidence of fractals in the architecture, art, textile sculpture, and religion of indigenous African societies. In his book, “African Fractals: Modern Computing and indigenous design”, the fractals in African societies are not simply accidental or intuitive but are design themes that evolve from cultural practices and societal structures.

Cross-Cultural Collaboration: A Tool for Imagining Africa's Future

As Venice Architecture Biennale presents its 18th edition titled "The Laboratory of the Future", it centers on Africa as a place of exploration that will offer a template for solutions to the world. According to its curator Lesley Lokko, the Biennale explores entrenched concepts such as climate, land rights, decolonization, and cultures. It challenges us to question how Africa's history can be a radical tool for imagination and reminds us of Stephen Covey's statement: “Live out of your imagination, not just your history.” The biennale's title is probably the most ambitious question in years. It forces us to revisit all boundaries of the continent's historical societies, explore the influence of imposed colonial borders on them, and examine the dual identities they gave birth to. We must consider how these identities can be instruments of creativity, and, more importantly, recognize that every African society has a unique point of view. This viewpoint yearns for cross-cultural collaboration as a powerful tool for imagination.

Francis Kéré: Get to Know the 2022 Pritzker Winner's Built Work

Diébédo Francis Kéré founded his architecture practice Kéré Architecture, in Berlin, Germany in 2005, after a journey in which he started advocating for the building of quality educational architecture in his home country of Burkina Faso. Deprived of proper classrooms and learning conditions as a child, and having faced the same reality as the majority of children in his country, his first works aimed at bringing tangible solutions to the issues faced by the community.

Projects in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Indonesia Among the Winners of the III Abdullatif Alfozan Award for Mosque Architecture

The Abdullatif Alfozan Award for Mosque Architecture has honored seven awarded mosques in its third cycle under the theme "Mosque architecture in the twenty-first century", evaluating their unique architectural concepts as well its connectivity with local communities.

National Parks: An Architectural Journey

The world is home to thousands and thousands of national parks – spaces allocated for conservation, hosting land usually left in its natural state for people to visit. The term “national park” itself differs in meaning around the world. In the United Kingdom, for example, the phrase simply describes a relatively undeveloped area that attracts tourists. In the United States, this terminology is a lot more rigid, describing 63 protected areas operated by the United States National Park service.

How a Return to Vernacular Architecture Can Benefit the People of Mali's Dogon Region

In our article in February, "11 Vernacular Building Techniques That Are Disappearing," we discussed vernacular techniques that, through the introduction of modern building and the waning prevalence of traditional lifestyles, were slowly becoming lost forms of knowledge. What we didn't discuss, though, was that few of the techniques were disappearing without some form of resistance. After the article was published we were contacted by Dutch architecture firm LEVS Architecten, who highlighted their efforts work in the Dogon region of Mali, where they work with local communities to continue--and improve--the vernacular Dogon tradition.