Contents: 1. House Inspired by vernacular architecture and traditional cultural jewelry
2. Apartment Interior design that adapts hand-weaving techniques and patterned colorization from fabric, ornamentation and basket making
3. Shopping Centre Utilizes woven surfaces at a magnified scale for their translucency and functionality as partitions and partial enclosures
4. Chapel A series of structural shells made of bamboo and gum-tree lattices to exemplify their lightness and flexibility
Monk Huts, Ethiopia
1. House
Masonry Curvilinear walls characterize traditional dwelling enclosures whether woven, thatched or built in stone and rammed earth. Similarly, the house maintains an undulating exterior wall built out of rough textured concrete. At its base, colorful masonry which collectively resembles Maasai beaded jewelry serves as a footing for the exterior wall.
Maasai Beaded Necklace, Kenya
Samburu Manyatta (Hut), Kenya
Dorze Hut Construction, Ethiopia
The Hearth
Weaving techniques were used to construct traditional dwellings across the East African region. Using stems, leaves and rope, the initial enclosure of a typical residence was woven into shape and at times covered by a secondary layer of either masonry, thatching or rammed earth. Incorporating a woven hearth, reminiscent of the traditional enclosures, led to the introduction of a surface which demarcates space while adding visual and tactile texture to the interior space it surrounds.
The staircase folds around the woven hearth, serving as a backdrop for the living room while allowing accessibility to the upper floor without being obstructive to the hearth. The bathroom similarly sits beside the hearth with its walls curving in response to the adjacency.
The first floor plan highlights the isolation of the kitchen from the rest of the house, which is designed to facilitate cooking traditional cultural dishes more efficiently. Above the kitchen, the rooftop serves as a balcony for the bedrooms on the upper floor. A bridge walk-way connects the kitchen to the living room. Several openings along the exterior walls allowing cross ventilation and a flowing indoor-outdoor connection with unobstructed views.
Firewood Jiko, Kenya
Separate Kitchen In many traditional dwellings, cooking was done in a seperate compartment from the rooms where people slept. The cooking methods such as grilling, boiling and baking were intensive in requiring fire pits and firewood which would produce a lot of smoke. A number of cultural dishes still require similar preparation methods done today using a firewood or charcoal jiko, therefore the provision of a detached kitchen space allows for the intense cooking methods within the confinement of a modern house.
Mesakin Quisar Clustered Dwelling, Sudan
2. Apartment
Woven Wall Partition The additional layer of weaving along the living room wall is an allusion to the traditional construction methods used. Aside from the aesthetic value, the added layer serves as a partition, dividing the living room and kitchen area. The use of a woven surface within the modern dwelling is explored as a visual and tactile addition which adds to the room’s aura. Given its flexibility and compatibility with several weaving techniques, the addition allows for much more experimental and colorful design incorporation drawing inspiration from the vibrant traditional fabric and jewelry across East Africa.
King’s Hut, Rwanda
The living room chandelier is fitting in its placement as a contrast to the heavy use of wood through out the interior. Crafting metal panels into life-like replicas is widely done, especially in Nairobi’s artisanal open-air workshops.
Mursi Ornamentation, Ethiopia
Living Room Furniture Set The set features furniture designed with simple form and minimal addition. The wood texture is highlighted in the pieces and this is echoed by the woven wall surface made of bamboo stems and sisal rope. Traditional furniture has predominantly been crafted out of wood, often quite simple in structural composition with embellishment in the form of shallow carved out patterns and symbols along the wood surface.
Granary Basket Weaving, Botswana
Arm Chair The simplicity of the tribal birth chair, constructed using just two pieces of wood, is a fascinating precedent because its construction seems simple while its broad wooden surfaces provide ample area for etching art on to. Tribal Birth Chair, Egypt
Borana Neckbead Jewelry, Kenya
Coffee Table Weaving produces an array of intricate artifacts, many of which are baskets. Applying the basket-weaving technique to create a coffee table allowed for playful fusion of furniture design and hand weaving, bringing together materials in ways that wouldn’t typically be used to create baskets. Although the result is sturdy enough to function as a table, it retains the simplicity, shape and transparency of a basket.
Sofa Zulu Headrest, Southern Africa
Etching artistic patterns onto the wooden surfaces of furniture is very characteristic of traditional pieces across Africa. The sofa is designed with similar simplicity in structure, and the carved out patterns along the inner surface of the supporting wood give texture to the furniture.
Traditional Ashanti Stool, Ghana
Mursi Tribe Ornamentation, Ethiopia
Dining Room Furniture Set Carving is typically suitable for the patterning of wood, and the long surfaces of the dining room chairs exemplfy this technique. An addition of color gives an added artistic quality to the patterns. The base surface of the table features a number of colorful triangles as an allusion to similar design on Ethiopian baskets as well as Maasai beaded jewelry. Metal rods in a spiral attach the base to the table top in order to give the table a quality of lightness and translucency, almost like a woven mesh holding it together.
Woven Baskets, Ethiopia
Kamba Three-legged Stool, Kenya
Maasai Beaded Bangle, Kenya
Kitchen Vibrant color is prevalent through out traditional African design, especially on fabric and jewelry. The kitchen is designed to echo that eye-catching quality of radiant colorful patterning while maintaining simplicity, synonymous with the modern kitchen. The stone mosaic reproduced from an alluring painting by Angu Walters acts as a backdrop for the cooking area and is fitting as a stand-alone wall feature that captures the full range of the artistanal quality of East African crafts. The mosaic’s placement also helps to brings out the color added to the side panels of the kitchen cabinetry.
Painting by Angu Walters, Cameroon
Maasai Warrior Rungu, Kenya
Lighting fixtures, especially chandeliers, retain a quality of experimental design amidst clean-cut interior furniture and fixtures which allows them to stand out in a typical room. The sizing of this kitchen chandelier ensures it remains conspicuous. However, the thinness of the bamboo stems woven together gives it a delicate lightness, counterbalancing the massive silhouette while adding striated patterns to the light emitted from inside the fixture.
Fisherman’s Woven Fish Trap, Lake Malawi
Bedroom Unlike the living room, dining room and kitchen, the bedroom maintains simplicity in its architecture as well as its furniture. Basket weaving is incorporated in the design of the study chair, whereas patterning similar to that on baskets and colored fabric is applied to the duvet cover.
Patterned Basket, Rwanda
Bathroom Inspired by the intricate wood carving of the Kenyan coastal door designs, the bathroom cabinetry and fixtures borrow design elements directly from the richly ornamented doors and door ways.
Lamu Door, Kenya Maasai Neck Beads, Kenya
3. Shopping Centre
Weaving presents a wide range of functionality aside from clothing and basket-making. When applied at an architectural scale, woven material serves as a porous translucent surface which lets continous flow of air and light through a building while maintaining its role as a facade, enclosure or partition. In this building, the woven sisal rope held within triangulated wood panels serves as a facade alongside the inner brise soleil concrete enclosure. The colorful sisal rope within the wooden panels throughout the facade collectively turns the building into a figurative gigantic basket.
Woven Sisal Baskets, Burundi
The structure of the building enables free-plan design which allows for the flexibility of interior partitions. Concrete shells make up the exterior walls of the building and feature foldable glass doors which open to facilitate free flowing circulation onto the numerous sunlit terraces, where shopping as well as lounging can take place given the great tropical weather.
Open-Air Workshop Artisanal work is often carried out in the open air within a number of metropolitan workshops across East Africa, popularly referred to as Jua Kali in Kenya. Spaces for design and fabrication of uniquely crafted artifacts are key to the innovation, implementation and marketing of authentic local design. Such areas are frequented by locals and tourists alike, therefore placing them alongside established brick and mortar stores formalizes the industry and boosts its credibility. In this open-air space, weaving is used to create the exterior surface in order to provide shading, without necessarily acting as a weather barrier.
Dorze Hut Weaving, Ethiopia
4. Chapel
The roofline created by a cluster of huts is always unique because of the irregular sizing and characteristic pointed apexes of the individual huts built close together. Given that churches are spaces for communion and gathering, the design of the chapel figuratively echoes the same quality of community by mimicking traditional clustered dwellings. The building is formed by a linear array of four similarly built shell structures fitted into each other to enclose a single space with high ceilings and adequate lighting. The undulating form is achieved by binding together a lattice of flexible bamboo stems which are then covered by bamboo thatch.
Dorze Huts, Ethiopia
The flexible bamboo lattice is designed to explore the dynamic ways in which architectural form can be woven into shape, creating unique undulating surfaces. Given that the hollow stems offer structural support while appearing thin and flimsy, an illusion of weightlessness can be achieved.
Church pews inside the chapel are designed simply with a woven fabric added at the base of the backrest to give visual and tactile texture while allowing a free flow of air for comfortable seating over the period of a service. The exposure of the structural material along the inner surface of the chapel provides patterning though it remains muted enough so that it wouldn’t pull focus away from the altar. Along the ceiling and side walls where the four shell structures overlap, sweeping clerestory windows create a symbolic halo (crown of light) above the central altar, alluding to religious iconography while providing adequate sunlight when the sun is overhead and facilitating natural stack ventilation.