Architecture's ability to alter narratives with Mariam Kamara

[Music] hello everyone as I said I'm Miriam Kamara I'm an architect from Nisha um where my practice is based and I was going to tell you all about the fact that I was a software developer and everything like that but now I don't have to because it was just talk to you um I spend my time and kind of pilot my firm between the US the East Coast and Yuja for multiple reasons part of the reason being that because I used to have a previous career I was already living there and so now I spend half the year in one place and half the year in the other place um one thing that's significant about nature is its climate it is a desert country and as such the implications are very profound from an economic point of view because it's a landlocked country from a cultural point of view it's a Muslim country as such actually has more in common I would say with a country like Algeria or Libya then it would a country like Ghana for example and it also has profound impact from an architectural point of view again because it's a landlocked country even things like importing materials for example is a big deal the kind of materials that you have at your disposal are very scarce essentially won't work on projects really we only have access to three materials if we want to work locally right without importing anything and so these these things become very profound very quickly and so when we work on our first project in Yemi the capital all of these challenges became evident very quickly this was a housing project in which we wanted to do many many things maybe too many things essentially it's a context that is fraught with challenge not just the climate but it's one of the poorest countries in the world it's a capital city that is flat as you can see and that's spreading but the infrastructure cannot really follow there isn't really upgrade and enough capacity for electricity to reach the far-flung areas of the city for example or even access to water sometimes in the newer neighborhoods and so it quickly became evident that also we need to think about density how do we start densifying in areas such as this one but without necessarily resorting to apartment towers or apartment buildings because this is a place where there are no apartments actually and culturally it will probably be cultural suicide in a way considering how isolating apartments can be and considering how communal know the local society is and so this was really coming from this introspection to begin with as you can see the growth of the city how rapid it has been and how much it's actually growing exponentially at this point because of things like climate change because of people actually fleeing villages and nearby towns to come into the city because they can no longer farm because there are so many droughts etc etc and so it became kind of this exercise to look at how we use land right now which because actually we have a lot of it we kind of waste it and so we just spread it around but like I said just the infrastructure doesn't really follow that's not really the best thing that we could do and so we started thinking about how do we take you know your typical plot of land where someone might maybe you know be able to split it and have to build two houses and how many can we compact in that and through different manipulations trying to figure out how to go up in Heights maybe one level maybe two levels in a country where everything is built on one level that actually mean on ground floor that actually means that you double it triple density right that's probably good enough as a beginning but at the same time because it's a Muslim country and things like privacy are really important how do you also accommodate that go up in Heights now half apartment but protect people's privacy and so it ended up becoming this interlocking system where we have homes that are pretty much the same they use up as much space as possible but at the same time organizing such a way as to allow you to be near each other to be really neighborly but at the same time to now have views inside it sort of houses which is really important and so the idea is to just very modestly you know there was a fighter slightly and just enough to be able to actually slow down this rapid spread and the result was this project called me I made two thousand named after the the neighborhood diets built in and essentially aside from looking at the issues of density were also looking at cultural behaviors and cultural habits how is it that we live inside of our own homes how is it that you know we socialize and one of the things that's really important in Asia is that we have this thing called father and a father is essentially the equivalent of what you would do on your porch in you know what the front porch is about but that space had vanished from more contemporary houses that are more modeled after european star houses and it was really important for us to start carving out you know the front and blurring that that limit between private and public but what was really important as well was think about climate control because again this is a country where it's 45 degrees so the materials we use were really important everything was built with compressed earth earth brakes which kind of worked like adobe bricks meaning that the inside temperature drops down dramatically compared to the outside and again what we're doing right now is more building with cement blocks and concrete which actually is famous for imprisoning heat so again in a country where it's 45 degrees outside that's not necessarily the best move and we also put in place a lot of different you know very simple techniques for cooling the interiors for really you know creating courtyards that would allow you not only to breathe to socialize but also bring it light filtering it because the light is really really harsh a really strong things of that nature and so at the end you know ended up being a space where the community this is one of the things that we noticed too when the project was was done we went to get a ready for a first open house and we came and found our front porch completely invaded by the young people from the neighborhood because they recognized what it was immediately so we kind of carried this kind of approach in all of our projects not that long ago we had the opportunity to design a market for example in Asia and it was a more it was a rural market and in rural areas in Asia markets are weekly but what that means is that there is no local economy in those markets because people actually move from village to village every day and take their wares with them but each individual village doesn't necessarily have you know its own economy that it develops and so we were approached to design a market that would have the capacity of actually the possibility to become daily because there was this motivation to make to build an economy in the village and going from there what we started looking at was how do we create a space that still stays on the same site because it's a site actually that's been used for pretty much a century in that area in terms of the market it was really a marker for the community but then how do we make it something that would be so desirable that it would bring in you know that kind of will to stay there on a daily basis instead of thinking oh well maybe I could get more if I go elsewhere or in the next you know village its its market week or market market day or something like that but and also bring people from elsewhere so that you just have really a strong a strong customer base I guess in a way and so what we found really you know interesting was to explore ways to really create a space that would be alluring that would be you know just make you feel that you're in someplace special just because it's a market just because it's meant for commerce and just because it's in the village doesn't mean that it doesn't get to be beautiful and so how how do we you know keep things as simple as possible use those three materials I was talking about which are metal recycled metal is actually something that we use heavily pretty much all of our is recycled and I think a few talks have addressed that in the sense that in Africa we use everything so we just melted down transformer turn it into metal tubes metal sheets etc compressed earth the bricks and some cement and in the beginning we were supposed to create just 30 different boutique shops because it was really a small market and we thought well you know if we if we give them more like 50 50 to 60 then that way the market has the time to grow but little do we know during construction actually the place became so famous because of those structures that people were seeing coming up and wondering what it was that the market acquired this new rarity that on opening day when we arrived it was completely full there was actually no space and so now we're already thinking about who are already talking about an extension and the market open to Munford or something like that so that was really gratifying from that point of view and I ended up being really anchoring it even more so maybe than it used to be as really an important amenity in the whole for the whole region not just for that particular village and so the same thing you know again when we talk about architecture you know in our parts of the world we had the privilege of working on this particular project the image that you see is this mosque made by a Master Mason who won an addict and Prize for architecture for a similar mosque in 1986 in Asia and we found that that this was there was there were plans to tear down this mosque and to make a replica and cement in its place because as you can see the mosque was pretty much melting it was made out of Adobe and we have kind of lost the ability to maintain structures such as these and on top of that it had become too small the place hadn't really you know the population has really increased so what did we do and so the a whole brainstorming you know started when we were trying to think about what what could we turn this into what kind of space could this be so that we can save this essentially and the answer ended up actually coming almost by mistake through a few conversations and an idea was floated around that it would be turned into the library which I thought was so radical oh my god yes totally but at the same time we had to build a mosque on the site nearby and so the result was this where we actually refurbished the original mosque made sure that we brought it back to its original splendor basically instead of trying to transform it we just really wanted to respect that for the jewel that it was and for the architectural legacy that it was really you know keeping in the area and then we made a mosque nearby what kind of other program like classrooms and workshop spaces and things of that nature and it became kind of this complex because we were responding to certain local realities one of which being that Nisha has one of the youngest populations in the world posted seventy five percent of the population is below twenty five but the education level is incredibly low what that means is that it's actually the kind of situation where the youth doesn't really have any outlets there have very little access to education they have a lot of access to religion and we are surrounded by countries like northern Nigeria with Boko Haram we have Mali to the west we have Algeria we have Libya and so this is a very intense situation and this is also a situation where young people get radicalized very easily and so we started thinking about the way to put together a project or put together the project in such a way that it would address some of these issues initially we were supposed to have two separate projects a library and a mosque but what we ended up doing was lobbying actually have a whole complex where the tool could talk to each other what we could have actually some young people being in the library studying you know for an exam or something like that and then when it was prayer time walking over to go to the mosque for example and then all of a sudden then the relationship between the two which nowadays all over the world really you have this confrontation between secular knowledge and religion it's not something that's unique to Islam or anything like that it's something that you can pretty much see worldwide at this point and so for us that was also an opportunity to address that and to help deescalate that tension in just a very benign very simple way and so we were very lucky to bring all that you know diffusion to have access to the original masons who built the initial structure which helps bring it back to life but inward which would homo could also experiment in terms of materials and additives that we can add to the mud or to the different I guess soils that we were using in order also to bring in new ways of doing this kind of architecture that is more durable that doesn't need maintenance for 10-15 years as opposed to needing to be rendered every year and at the same time we were able to introduce new forms I guess or new ways of doing the same forms that they were they were already doing in in that area domes for example are not necessarily made with bricks like this they're more made with wood packed with mud so almost like a reinforced concrete type of approach and so it was really interesting for us in the new mosque that we were doing to explore what was happening in the previous one and kind of present a new interpretation of that and the results were spaces like these for example this is the ceiling of the new mosque where we were able to use concrete and and bricks and kind of recapture some of that magical feeling that used to be in the old mosque which is now a library and so now you know all of a sudden it became this again just like the market we made this something of a magical space I guess in according to the students where they could take refuge in a way and that's something that we did not expect and that they were thinking about it as this place to which feet in so throughout the project we quickly started realizing that it was starting to feel as though we were becoming repair men and women or something where every time there was a project because of the context all of sudden there were all these opportunities for fixing something or for making a contribution towards making something better or making something unless you know that's problematic etc etc whether it was through housing or you know economically with the market project or with this most project and so it was really natural you know for this next project that I wanted I want to show you that extremely excited about sharing that came our way actually because design and dava triggered it and because designing that I was interested in doing projects in other African I mean in different African cities and we started talking about possibilities you know with the city and with design and devorah and about what would be really useful in terms of a project and we landed on this amazing situation this amazing amazing goldmine coming from the fact that the cities right the city right now is being really reengineering redeveloped and there there's a lot of investment being put in cultural projects in infrastructure projects things of that nature but understand the project that I'm going to talk to you about afterwards in to tell you about the story of the city of Miami so it's a city that was masterplan by the French during colonization and it was made it used to be just a fishing fishing village miss a riverfront city and it had this valley running through it and so what difference did when they did the master plan is that they split the city into alongside the valley where on one side was the European quarters and on the other side was the indigenous quarters as they call it and that separation actually persisted after colonization we're now what used to be European and indigenous became how's and have-nots where the political and economic elites you know took residence in what used to be there was the European quarters and then the middle mid income and low income part of the population ended up in the other side and the valley also divides the city even religiously where again the kind of more conservative parts of the city tend to be in what is the lower-income parts and then the less the less conservative ones tend to be on the other side it even affected how vegetation works in the city where again the the richer parts are much greener than the poorer parts of the city and so after colonization this amazing thing happened this men that you seeing called bubu Hama was distinct her writer author read order something philosopher who aware of this history of this valley that runs through the city proposed that it be turned into what he called the valley of Culture his idea was to obliterate this divide by creating by placing different cultural programs or along it that would be a way for people to come together from either side and so at the bottom of the valley right before Kansai right before the end of colonization a museum had been erected which is our main National Museum named after mr. DiPalma and so the idea was to just have this inner airy in a way that would bring you all the way down to the museum and through an along which you would actually encounter other cultural program but at this point then all the planets aligned before when he talked about the idea no one really listened it was kind of forgotten we have written traces of it but nothing was ever made of it a couple years ago the current mayor of the city decided on earth all of this got really excited about this notion of recruiting this value of culture because also there was a redevelopment of the waterfront of the city that was being thought about but not redevelopment in terms of putting hotels or anything like that but it was about public space because there are no there's no public space and they're borderline no cultural institutions aside from the National Museum in the entire city and so they saw this great opportunity to make this promenade that would bring people from way further up in the city all the way down to the water this is not very visible but this area over here is kind of step one of this project where it was so difficult to figure out where to start the valley is so long all of a sudden it was well okay what do we do first what kind of program should it be what kind of you know and that's we're actually designing that I came in because then they're interested in developing a primal project I think kind of forced the city to think more critically and quickly about something that we could do as a pilot project for that area and what they came up with was a valley of sub valley of artisans because craftsmanship is really developed in the country and we have everything from weavers to metal workers Jewelers you know Potter's you name it and a lot of them are actually closed away in the National Museum meaning that you actually have to pay to have access to them you have to get inside of the museum others are only in places that only tourists go so the population itself really doesn't have access to them so the idea was to pepper them all along this itinerary and when we started thinking about it I was really interested in a space that would be something like an installation I don't know if it's the design and above I've I think it is it just felt that it needed something that would be me a little bit maybe magical and I had been obsessed with these round structures that you can see these are granaries in northwestern Asia and they are hand molded and they're basically these beautiful thin shells where every year the harvest is stored and I've been dreaming to do something up with that and as you can see they really mold them by hand and it's just crumbs of clay that is just shaped and they make these perfectly round perfect shapes so looking at the side that we had it was actually a bit daunting to try to figure out how to inject this in this site considering that we had buildings all or all around it's actually one of the most the highest that it's the section of the city that has the tallest the taller buildings meaning just twelve levels really but what we came up with was something that looked more like this where we were thinking about ways to maintain this shell approach this delicate almost you know yeah sure like fragile as though it was going to you know blow over at any given moment and the idea is that there were several sites along which the the artisans would be and the shell would just basically be peppered all over but at the same time they were supposed to have program have public program because the vision of the city was that it wasn't necessarily just a commercial space for these artisans or a display space for what they were doing but it was also to be turned into a public space that would be alive at night because the value right now is actually a really dangerous space because it's not lit there's a lot of crime that happened there and so there's strong motivation to really turn down it's on its head to programs like these and so we just came up with something very simple just kind of this shell that then can contain different kind of program whether it's an MV theater whether it's shops whether it's spaces socializing plague you name it and they could vary in size in shape etc and so for the first stage it will look something kind of like this where we have you know the valley on one side with the water stream that runs through it and that goes to the river that is kind of kept you know in its eco climate you know kind of way and then these structures peppered around as this basically large-scale installation essentially over 200 meters and the idea is that again you know as they were desiring that night it could be someplace that really brought in the population particularly because of the heat I cannot say it enough times going out and I walking around at night it's something that's very desirable but there are actually no places where you can really do that there's no real infrastructure um it's a company on that reality and so what I find interesting about this project is that it's really exploring local craftsmanship through the project through the spaces that it's using in a very very simple just very dumb as we say in architecture a very dumb system very simple way that allows us flexibility and that can even maybe create something of a dream world when you're weaving in and outside of it it seems kind of surreal but I think it's a great step towards changing the narrative of a place that has been deeply negative and that actually today both historically and today in terms of the danger that it has with it and so I'm so grateful that actually thanks to the design and lava or it looks like we'll be able to make this happen very very soon thank you you

Channel: Design Indaba

Views: 3,790

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Keywords: Design Indaba, design, creativity, mariam kamara, niamey, niger, design indaba conference, atelier masomi, dandaji, hikma, artisans valley, design indaba conference 2019, architecture

Id: cMluHvtuEIg

Length: 26min 24sec (1584 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2019