Share

Aberdeen Architecture Students Take Part in International Workshop

A group of seven students at the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture and Built Environment (SSS), Aberdeen, have been selected to take part in a two-day workshop in Milan to design a facility for women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Taking place on Monday 30 and Tuesday 31 May at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, the workshop will bring together small student groups from four European universities to work collaboratively on producing architectural solutions for a troubled corner of the DRC.

Participating universities joining the Aberdeen group are the architecture schools of Barcelona, Reus and the Milanese host university. The seven SSS students will be joined by their lecturer Silvia Bassenese and three members of the University’s humanitarian architecture society, Tesseract, who have worked together to coordinate the event.

The intensive workshop represents the second part of the ‘Taifa letu Tujenge’ project - meaning `Build our Nation` in Swahili - which aims to design and build a multipurpose centre for women. It is hoped such a centre will help improve the socioeconomic conditions of women and girls in the city of Bukavu in the province of South Kivu in eastern in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The first event in the series took place on 1 April and saw 80 students from years one to five within SSS work together in teams to design their own solutions to a similar area of the DRC. At the same time students from the partner architecture schools Spain and Italy took part in the workshop – making it 235 student participants in total. All participants updated their progress throughout the day via the web by posting regular blogs, photographs and films.

This month’s workshop continues the work of April’s event. The seven students taking part in the Milan event were selected from a cross section of those who participated in the previous event.

The brief for the workshop has been devised in reaction to the real-world situation in the DRC. David Fleck, co-founder of the Tesseract collective explains: “Despite the country being recently released from a 32 year dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko, justice and human rights remain major issues within the state of South Kivu. Many women and children continue to suffer from sexual violence and live in constant fear and isolation. They are often forced to socialise in households and small inconspicuous gatherings, if at all.”

The Tesseract students have helped coordinate the workshop series with the input of their tutor, Silvia Bassanese. She devised the initial idea following a series of exchanges with Pascal Nshombo Kataraka (who now works in the Universite Catholique de Bukavu, DRC) when both were studying and working in Rome in 2007.

She said: “It’s fantastic to see this project continue. As with April’s event, the final presentations produced as a result of the student workshop are intended to act as starting points from which to build towards a workable solution. The understanding of issues in developing countries are also highlighted by RIBA the Royal Institute of British Architects as one of the expectation to be addressed in the future within the curriculum.”

Members of the public will be able to experience the Milan ‘Build Our Nation’ workshop on Monday 30 and Tuesday 31 May, and chart its progress in the weeks that follow, by visiting the blog on www.buildournation.org<http://www.buildournation.org> and clicking the ‘Stage 2’ tab.

130 views