Dominikus Stark Architekten: Rwanda Education Centre

Bricks. They’re probably my favourite. Bricks skillfully dispersed around a beautiful courtyard – ding dong!

We’re journeying into the heart of darkness today, to Nyanza, Rwanda, where stands this remarkable Education Centre designed by Dominikus Stark Architekten. The photographs are from the architect’s website.

To my eye, the low, bricky forms of this building immediately recall the Fredensborg houses by Jorn Utzon. This is an education centre, combining classrooms with community spaces for hire, so it’s less like an African Fredensborg and more like an African Säynätsalo. With something of an Athenian agora thrown in.

The architect’s statement explains that the architecture draws on the local vernacular of inward-looking courtyard dwellings. Either way around it, this building is beautiful.

It’s hard to go past a good clay brick. Able to be held in the hands, their scale is human. Laid out wholesale across walls, steps, cappings and floors like this, their unitized nature makes a big building an agglomeration of little pieces pulling together. Made from local clay, they settle comfortably into the landscape which bore them. I think the detailing, spacing, and texture of the bricks here bears witness to the skill, time, and diligence of both the architects and the builders. My hat’s off.

So much for bricks. The architect has given this building a Grecian elegance at once warm and austere, rigid and permeable. The requirements of a public building – classrooms, an internet and copy room, a kitchen, kitchen garden, and dining room – are looped around the courtyard. Measured colonnades and beautiful steel-framed wicker-lined doors filter the indoor/outdoor relationship inside the building. Simple galvanised roof sheeting and guttering is given a utilitarian dignity.

There’s a lot to like here; to me above all is the realisation of the brief with a building of such classical beauty.

Text by Luke Moloney for Yellowtrace.