Towards an architecture of appropriateness

The term “sustainability” is used inflationarily, and not just in the world of architecture. Whether we're talking about a citizen's project to build low-cost housing from local materials, or a large corporation that practices greenwashing, both will happily refer to this generally unprotected and infinitely extensible term that the global climate crisis has propelled to the top of humanity's list of concerns. Working as an architect in Uganda and trying to find regionally significant and ecological ways of designing and building, I developed a growing distrust of the term “sustainability” and fell, instead, in love with the concept of appropriateness. It goes without saying that my interpretation of the term “sustainability” would have been generic, elemental and qualitative - not based on high-tech optimization, a race to the bottom and carbon offsetting - but it was the imprecision of the concept that drove me to seek something more basic, more methodical.

Photo: Localworks

Gahinga Batwa local community center

The starting point is an approach to design based on 'creative observation': context is everything, and design is something you discover, not invent. The simple question of “What is relevant?” can be asked of the vast majority of design decisions, and has a certain sobriety that the sustainability bubble sometimes lacks. The answers will almost always be progressive, relative, practical and rarely uniform and incontrovertible. Relevance is about finding balance rather than radical answers.

One of the many questions an architect must answer in the early stages of a project is the choice of materials. An architect concerned with relevance would approach this question by exploring the surroundings of the building site, researching locally available materials and looking at what the locals use for their buildings and why - it's as simple as that. So is accepting the need for low embodied energy materials. A product that takes a lot of energy to manufacture, or that comes from far away, will rarely be a more appropriate choice than a stone from the surrounding area, or from the earth dug on the building site.

No cooling technique will be more judicious than orienting a building correctly according to the sun and wind. Human beings have created an infinite number of intelligent technologies - air conditioning, insulation, solar glazing - but the most consistent approach will be to orientate a building correctly and design facades that are adapted to the sun, wind and rain. In this context, it would make sense to determine the right priorities at the very beginning of the design process, rather than having to solve an avoidable problem after the fact. Certainly, in an African context, where operational budgets tend to be low or non-existent, so-called 'passive' and 'low-tech' solutions will almost always be preferable to those based on complex technologies or imported

Photo: Localworks

Construction of a prototype school building using eco-friendly prefabricated materials

But the desire to find relevant answers is not limited to building technologies and engineering. Every place, every user, every function and every social or cultural context can be approached with a similar mindset. A design philosophy based on contextualism opens the designer's mind to a locality or issue, and encourages spatial organisms to develop rather than carve out objects, and spaces to emerge rather than install sculptures.

It seems almost self-evident that this approach is not limited to 'sustainable architecture in Africa', and that it applies just as much to design projects for refugees in Uganda as to those for stockbrokers in Frankfurt. A contextual design philosophy will work anywhere in the world - poor or rich, hot or cold, rural or urban - but successful projects require an approach tailored to the local economy. So it's important to find a type of supply that's also relevant, in harmony with the design, the locality and the economy.

In East Africa, this issue is particularly linked to the lack of qualified builders and service providers. In the formal sector, the most common procurement system in Uganda is a classic general contractor contract with an architect and consultants acting as client representatives during the design and execution phase of the project. This system deliberately separates designers and builders on the basis that each party controls and regulates the other, thus protecting the interests of a non-technical client. It's a system fundamentally based on adversity, with financial profit as its common goal. Seen in this light, it's a pretty poor starting point for any creative process, and having spent most of my career working on sites with this procurement system, I feel that good projects emerge in spite of the system rather than because of it.

Over the years, our team has deployed many strategies to improve the way we work, with varying degrees of success and frustration. While our desire to design and experiment never waned, we eventually came to the realization that we were just 'squeezing like a lemon', and that if things weren't taken in hand, we risked losing our joy of building. In 2019, this led to the creation of Localworks, a collaborative multidisciplinary design and construction organization. In what has become known as the “project management” approach, designers and builders are now part of the same team, delivering turnkey projects from A to Z.

Localworks was born out of the realization that the 'How?' is just as important as the 'What?'; that the process of designing and constructing a building is a work of art in itself; and that art tends not to spring from a profit-driven adversarial relationship, but from a genuine desire to create, collaborate and produce something of real value. We were convinced that if we were more concerned with the “How?”, if we put all our energy and imagination into developing a productive creative process, there would be an intrinsic chance that the result - the “What?” - would also be of very high quality. We positioned the designers on the same line as the builders, while inviting the builders to join the design team. Today, 1:1 mock-ups are often drawn up together - in the same workshop where they will be transformed into technical drawings - and architects and engineers execute their own manufacturing plans, helping the workers on site.

Photo: Localworks

Workshop

Although we're still in the early stages, we feel we've found a relevant model for bringing our kind of sustainable architecture to life in this region. But then again, what we do relies above all on an architect's most important resource: the joy of building.