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Renzo Piano in Africa

2020-07-15T16:35:57.309Z


Italian architect finalizes in Uganda a pediatric hospital built with rammed earth and photovoltaic panels“The desire is not just to build a hospital. It is about creating a model architecture: rational, modern, tangible, beautiful and rooted in tradition and place ”. This is the ambition of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop architecture studio, which is the ambition of the Pediatric Surgery Center which has concluded in Entebbe, 35 kilometers from Kampala, the capital of Uganda. It is a building that...


“The desire is not just to build a hospital. It is about creating a model architecture: rational, modern, tangible, beautiful and rooted in tradition and place ”. This is the ambition of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop architecture studio, which is the ambition of the Pediatric Surgery Center which has concluded in Entebbe, 35 kilometers from Kampala, the capital of Uganda. It is a building that bets on the future with both eagerness and realism. However, the architects point out that the objective was not to build at any price, with this hospital the study hopes to cement a change supported by logic, tradition and the available means.

Although the opening has been delayed to September due to the coronavirus crisis, the hospital - which has three operating rooms and 78 beds - has been completed after almost seven years of work and negotiations. It was the Italian NGO Emergency that sought the help of Piano and her studio, architects accustomed to changing priorities to find answers to the specific needs of each commission. On this occasion, and this is key, Piano worked hand in hand with TAM Associati, a studio based in Venice since 1996 with extensive experience in Africa and, precisely but not only, in the construction of medical architecture that in 2013 won the Prize Aga Khan.

enlarge photo General view of the Entebbe Pediatric Surgery Center designed by RPBW and TAM Associati. RPBW

In Uganda, lack of means and ambition for the future dictated a paradoxical combination: traditional and futuristic at the same time. Thus, raised with rammed earth ramparts - "capable of maintaining a constant temperature and humidity" explained in TAM Associati-, "the building forms a unit without distinction with the lake, the park, the interior of the enclosure and the place," he points out. the piano studio.

Rammed earth is one of the most basic materials in the world, a construction technique that is used to raise the homes of many of the planet's inhabitants. Piano points out that, in Africa, this technique is associated with poverty and that it is essential to turn this prejudice around and restore dignity to a logical and sustainable system that only requires land, gravel and water and does not require specialized labor.

enlarge photo Detail of the rammed earth wall. RPBW

The study by the author of the Pompidou also explains that this hospital, “born from the earth”, gets its energy from the sun. And in the union of these two elements lies the future that Piano envisions: the energy self-sufficiency that makes possible the constant humidity of the rammed earth walls and the energy captured by the 2,600 photovoltaic panels, the equivalent of a soccer field. Those raised panels above the deck crown the building. So they capture energy and also shade the property and the porches that surround it to ensure the ventilated circulation of doctors, nurses and patients.

In Piano's study they announce the Hospital for Pediatric Surgery as "the first architectural work in Africa designed by someone who, for decades, has written the history of architecture." There is no doubt that Piano and his team have contributed, and continue to do so, to building the history of architecture today. Nor is there any doubt about their good intentions, especially when both the Building Workshop and TAM Associati have worked pro bono in this commission from the NGO Emergencia. However, it remains to be seen what Piano and his study will learn or relearn by working with few means and having to resort to ingenuity to recover a logical relationship between place, materials, cost and maintenance. In this field, the Ugandan construction tradition is a bet for the future.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-07-15

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