Sahara: The Latest Architecture and News

In an age so obsessed with skincare and appearances, few architects are truly interested in the intestines of our buildings. With a practice rooted in contextual awareness and technical pragmatism, sensitive to the needs of the people it serves and to resource limitations, Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni focuses on the hidden systems that allow architecture to be. Over the past two decades, she has been working on projects across different geographies, particularly in the Saharan region, actively engaging with its communities and heritage.

Currently leading the South–North (SoNo) Lab for Sustainable Construction and Conservation at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, Chaouni brings to the academic realm her architectural expertise in operating under pressing constraints, advocating for reciprocal collaboration between the Global South and the Global North. ArchDaily had the opportunity to speak with Aziza about her experience in Africa and how it can foster more sustainable ways of designing buildings for the future of our cities.

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In some languages, the very word for building refers to its immovability. The discipline of engineering related to buildings is referred to as statics. Thus, architecture is closely related to the fixed and the immobile. And yet, for millions of nomadic people around the world, shelters must be of a light and distinctly movable structure, while home is the vast landscape in which they reside. Such lifestyles, which carry centuries of traditions, are constantly under threat from the pull factors of sedentary life in towns and cities. In Tunisia, one project acknowledges the risk of heritage loss and attempts to improve conditions for nomadic herders.

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The colorful houses of Aswan in the south of modern-day Egypt attract tourists who venture that far up the River Nile. Accessed by small river boats, islands like Suheil West are the homes of Nubian communities, some of whom had had to relocate after the building of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. Behind the picturesque views of plastered walls covered in murals and motifs, perched on rocky hills overlooking the Nile, is a construction technique used locally for centuries. It uses locally sourced materials, conserves nature, and regulates internal temperatures against the heat in the day and the cold at night.

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The institution of slavery shaped landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. And in turn enslaved and free Africans and their descendants created new landscapes in the United States, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. African people had their own intimate relationships with the land, which enabled them to carve out their own agency and culture.

At Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., a symposium — Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora — organized by N. D. B. Connolly, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Oscar de la Torre, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, sought to highlight those forgotten relationships between people and their environment.

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Compared to that of the West and East, awareness and knowledge of the architecture of sub-Saharan Africa—Africa south of the Sahara Desert—is scant. A new book intends to mitigate this oversight, and it’s a significant accomplishment. Architectural Guide Sub-Saharan Africa (DOM publishers, 2021), edited by Philipp Meuser, Adil Dalbai, and Livingstone Mukasa, was more than six years in the making. The seven-volume guide presents architecture in the continent’s 49 sub-Saharan nation-states, includes contributions by nearly 340 authors, 5,000 photos, more than 850 buildings, and 49 articles expressly devoted to theorizing African architecture in its social, economic, historical, and cultural context. I interviewed two of the editors—Adil Dalbai, an architectural researcher and practitioner specializing in sub-Saharan Africa, and Livingstone Mukasa, a native Ugandan architect interested in the intersections of architectural history and cultural anthropology—about the challenges of creating the guide, some of its revelations about the architecture of Africa, and its potential impact.

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African nations are fighting climate change with an 8,000 kilometer long Great Green Wall meant to combat the desertification of the Sahel region, home to over 100 million people. Spanning the entire width of the African continent, the movement aims to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create 10 million jobs in rural Africa by 2030. Stretching from Senegal in the West to Djibouti in the East, the project is the joint effort of 21 African nations that strive to restore the once lush region and protect the livelihoods of local communities.

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PEACE PAVILION In memory of the innocent victims of war in Africa

“Peace is a dream, it can become a reality… but to build it we must be capable of dreaming.” (Nelson Mandela)

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Intercultural hostility and the exploitation of resources on the African continent have triggered a succession of armed conflicts resulting in millions of innocent lives lost and refugees seeking hope in a better life elsewhere. Communities annihilated. Villages and cities torn to the ground. Nations in chaos.

The Pavilion of Morocco at the 14th Venice Biennale, Fundamentals, focused on territorial speculations in the Sahara: Inhabiting the Uninhabitable. For the exhibition, which was the country's first representation at the Biennale, Paris-based practice OUALALOU+CHOI proposed an urban structure for this desert territory – "a means of putting down roots, implanting urbanity and civilization. The Sahara, with its extreme geography and climatic conditions, remains unexplored territory for architectural speculation."

Photo of the Day: Ghadames, Libya http://t.co/MpRCAemGuy #pod #photography

— National Geographic (@NatGeo) March 27, 2013

Since time immemorial, and more recently, humans have wondered what the world looks like from above. This fascination has historically manifested in the plan drawing and aerial photography. In this vein, and using a motorized paraglider, National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz has captured a stunning bird’s-eye view of the ancient city of Ghadames, in Libya.