2013
Photographs, Diagrams, Drawings (Student). Varying Size.
Informal Studio; the teaching learning challenge in East Africa
Killian Doherty, Architectural [Field] Office.
‘Building lots of houses for people and in places one does not know, where money is scarce and statistical information in unreliable, is neither an effi cient nor an equitable way of solving housing problems, nor is it good practice.’
Nabeel Hamdi ‘Housing without Houses’.
An opportunity to reconceptualise the design studio has crystallised within the Faculty of Architecture at KIST by interrogating the cities built environment politics. Strategically engaging with poor communities living in informal settlements, this studio responds with a multidisciplinary approach and reflexivity to query notions of ‘value’ within the city’s redevelopment of itself and the interrelation of elements that compose Kigali’s urban mosaic. The series of photographs and drawings show a series of Community Participatory Design Studio Workshops which ran for 2 semesters at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology in Rwanda that was taught by Killian Doherty. Through this participatory process students have become the mediators who creatively reconcile the needs of the socially disadvantaged through a people oriented analysis and design output.