Bauhaus East Africa 2020
Machakos - experimental sustainable housing
“Rural exodus” has proven to be a mass phenomenon in East African countries for several decades now. In order to deal with this unsolved problem, the project “Bauhaus Eastafrica 2020”, initialised by Prof. Jörg Joppien, aims to provide a cluster of workshops and cultural buildings as a nucleus for social and economic change in rural areas. A specific test field for such an “Art Village” was chosen in Machakos in the Kenyan countryside between Nairobi and Mombasa. An interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, craftsmen and artists are working on different approaches on ecologically, economically and socially sustainable building techniques to be applied locally. United in a growing transcontinental cooperation, the partners come from Germany, Italy, Kenya and Uganda. One main objective is to develop an adaptable strategy on tackling the issue of countryside to city migration for different east african scenarios.
Collaborations: TU Delft, Università degli Studi di Genova, UoN - University of Nairobi, Makarere University