NLE’S FIVE TOP PROJECTS
African Water Cities
African Water Cities is the bigger picture that our Makoko Floating School project is part of.
The project aims to plug the gap in knowledge and understanding around the challenges
and opportunities represented by the diverse characteristics of Africa’s formal and informal
coastal settlements, to create innovative, sustainable, urban solutions for adaptation to
Climate Change, in Africa and beyond. It’s a wonderful project, which allows us to collaborate
and build partnerships in order to gain such strong cases and knowledge to then use when
creating more sustainable, efficient and socially enriched environments. Definitely one to
keep your eye on!
CDL
Credit Direct Ltd Microfinance Bank is an exciting one for us because it allowed us to redefine
the conventional notion of a bank building as a closed and private institution, by creating a
more approachable, open and civic space to meet the needs of the customers – the everyday
people. The bank will become part of the community with distinct private and public
functions including an auditorium, roof garden and open walkway leading to the restaurant
café while remaining sustainable with the folded roof incorporating a rainwater harvesting
system.
Makoko Floating School
To us, the Makoko Floating School project is a favourite, not necessarily due to it’s form, but
due to the idea it instills. Using water as an infrastructure it allows us to see a challenge as an
opportunity. Our goal is to have it validated as a prototype for building on water, which I don’t
think there is a precedent for.
Chicoco Radio
Another project which is also part of the bigger picture of our African Water Cities project.
Chicoco Radio is a floating media platform in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The process was a
favourite method of ours as it brought in the local community to express their visions and
desires for their beloved radio station and it allowed us to again become the agents of change.
With the waterfront community of some 480 000 people, the building is seen as the voice
of the community and it is designed to provide them with social gathering spaces, learning
spaces, a cinema, amphitheatre, recording studios as well as community radio station. The
mast itself is integrated as an architectural component, raising the structure like a bridge
with one end of the building in the water with the other suspending in the air. As a ‘bridge
to transformation’, the amphibious nature of the building offers a reconnection between the
communities’ life on land today, their historic past, and potentially future lives on water.
Black Rhino Academy
This is a favourite for a number of reasons, one being it is in the beautiful area of
Karatu, Tanzania – just outside of the Ngorongoro Crater. The Black Rhino Academy is a
proposed primary and secondary boarding school and fuels our passion for socially and
environmentally conscious designs. Almost everything that we need to design and build a
beautiful building is within a 50km radius of the site, while the buildings and campus design
was based on the planning principle vested in the region for millennia – the Iraqw/Masai
Boma. The school program, schedule and activities are divided into three ‘Islands’; Live, Learn
and Play. Interconnected by a protective pathway it creates a safe yet open environment,
protected from yet within the wildlife.
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