Buildings
Fuksas to Design Science and Technology Institute in Nigeria
(archrecord.construction.com - 08/08/2006)
By Robert
Such
“I wanted to design something to
remember the Mandela philosophy,” says Massimiliano Fuksas
of the African Institute of Science and Technology (AIST).
In May the Italian architect won the RIBA-organized international
competition to design the AIST, which will be located immediately
south of the Nigerian capital of Abuja and will help foster
the economic development of Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Built for the private organization The
Nelson Mandela Institution for Knowledge Building and the
Advancement of Science and Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa,
the 2.6 million-square-foot, $360 million complex will provide
research and education facilities for scientists and engineers.
Faculty and administration buildings will surround the central
Nelson Mandela Square.
Constructed from local timber, stone
and brick, campus buildings will incorporate sustainable technologies,
such as water harvesting and photovoltaic technology. Traditional
textile patterns and African “red earth” structures
inspired Fuksas’s design: In plan view, residential quarters
are designed as long, sinuous interconnecting shapes. Individual
faculty complexes, each one different from the other, comprise
buildings grouped around internal streets and courtyards.
Vertical openings in the buildings’ timber skin will
filter light and promote natural ventilation.
The site will be crossed by access roads
linking the institute to a planned public park and open-air
museum on a former mining site to the west and a future sports
complex to the south. The Abuja Technology Village, a cluster
of high-technology companies and for-profit research intuitions,
will develop around the campus.
Fuksas was selected from a shortlist
that included Allies and Morrison Architects, Office for Metropolitan
Architecture, Saucier + Perrotte Architectes, SeARCH, and
Rafael Vinoly Architects. “This is much more than a huge
project,” says Fuksas. “It is also a way of seeing
whether it is possible to do architecture in a continent which
has seen so much suffering.”
The provisional start date of phase
one of the three-phase operation is 2007.
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