nomdeplumedifa

Beachside Surf Club

A social and recreational building on the waterfront — a surf club that combines the informality of beach culture with a bold contemporary architecture, creating a landmark for both the community and the coastline.

Project Overview

The brief calls for a surf club that is extraverted, social, and open to the public: a building where the line between interior and exterior is deliberately blurred, where the beach comes inside and the music reaches the water. This is architecture for pleasure, and it takes that brief as seriously as any civic commission. The building must work at multiple speeds — the slow time of a morning coffee watching the dawn surf, and the fast time of a Saturday evening when the DJ is playing and the terrace is full.

Design Philosophy

The building is conceived as a threshold: a covered zone between land and sea, between the city behind and the beach in front, between public life and the private ritual of the surf. It is not a wall that separates these conditions but a device that mediates between them — a building you pass through rather than arrive at.

The formal strategy is a deep covered deck elevated above the beach on slender steel columns, with the full programme of the club — bar, kitchen, changing rooms, surf hire, DJ booth, and administration — arranged along its inland edge, leaving the entire seaward face open to the sea breeze, the sound of the waves, and the view of the surf. The deck is the primary public space: 50 m long and 10 m deep, it accommodates standing crowds, cafe tables, sunbeds, and dancing simultaneously.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Hot-dip galvanized steel frame throughout, designed for a coastal salt-spray environment. Primary columns are circular hollow sections (219 mm diameter) at 5 m centres, driven directly into the beach at low tide. The deck structure is a steel grillage of I-beams at 1.5 m centres, topped with iroko hardwood decking (25 mm boards with 5 mm open joints for drainage and sand clearance).

Roof: A folded steel plate roof (3 mm corten, pre-weathered) shelters the inland zone while leaving the seaward third of the deck open to the sky. The fold of the roof creates a high clerestory on the inland face that illuminates the interior of the service zone with indirect north light, while the low edge of the roof at the seaward side frames the horizon in a wide panoramic slot.

Enclosure: The service zone (bar, kitchen, changing rooms) is enclosed in a skin of perforated corten steel panels that allow air circulation while providing privacy for the changing facilities. Openings in the corten skin are generous where the programme demands visibility (bar frontage, surf hire window) and minimal where it demands privacy (showers, toilets).

Sound: The DJ booth is positioned at the east end of the deck, elevated 600 mm above deck level on a low platform, with direct sightlines the full length of the building. A distributed speaker system of weatherproof marine-grade drivers is integrated into the roof structure, providing even sound coverage across the deck without the need for large speaker stacks that would interrupt the view.

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The plan is linear: 50 m along the beach frontage, 14 m deep (10 m deck + 4 m service zone). Reading from west to east: surf hire and equipment store (ground level, beneath the deck) → main changing rooms and showers → kitchen and servery → bar with full-length counter facing the deck → DJ booth and event space at the east end. The administration office and first aid room are on a mezzanine above the kitchen, accessible by an external steel stair.

A second stair at the west end of the deck descends to the beach, wide enough for people carrying boards and wetsuits. The underside of the deck (between the columns) is a sheltered zone used for board racks, outdoor showers, and informal seating in wet weather — a continuation of the building’s programme into the beach itself.

The section reveals the key spatial relationship: the high ceiling of the deck (5.4 m clear) contrasted with the compressed service zone (2.7 m), the transition between them marked by the fold of the corten roof. The deck is 1.2 m above beach level, accessed by three wide steps along its full seaward edge — steps that double as informal seating for watching the surf.

Capitol City — Architectural Vision

A speculative urban vision of a capitol city of the future — a dense, formal, and deeply civic architecture that imagines what a seat of government and culture could look like if designed with ambition, permanence, and public life at its core.

Project Overview

This is speculative urbanism at its most ambitious: a vision for a capitol city — not the renovation of an existing one, but the conception of a new one from first principles. The project asks what it would mean to design a seat of government and culture today with the same conviction, formal ambition, and civic seriousness that drove the great capital cities of history — Haussmann’s Paris, L’Enfant’s Washington, Lutyens’ New Delhi. It is a question that cuts to the heart of what we believe architecture can and should do in a democratic society.

Design Philosophy

The vision rejects the twin failures of contemporary civic design: the timid historicism that produces facsimiles of past grandeur, and the corporate modernism that produces civic buildings indistinguishable from office parks. Instead, it draws on both the formal traditions of the great capitol cities and the spatial innovations of contemporary urbanism to produce something genuinely new.

The central organizing device is the grand axis — a device as old as the avenue de l’Opéra and as contemporary as the Champs-Élysées re-imagined as a pedestrian boulevard. The axis is not merely ceremonial; it is the spine of a mixed-use city that integrates government, culture, commerce, and residence in a continuous urban fabric. The capitol building itself sits at one end of the axis, not as a terminus but as a hinge between the formal city and the natural landscape beyond.

Technical Specifications

Urban Structure: The city is organized on a modified Baroque grid, with a primary axis 60 m wide (carriageway, cycle paths, and planted median) flanked by secondary streets at 30 m width. City blocks are 120 m × 80 m, large enough for interior courtyards but small enough for pedestrian permeability.

Building Heights: A strict height control limits all buildings except designated civic monuments to 30 m (approximately 8 storeys). This creates a consistent urban cornice line across the city, broken only by the domes, spires, and towers of major public buildings, which can rise to 80–120 m.

Capitol Building: The central government building is a massive civic structure occupying an entire city block (120 m × 120 m) on a raised podium. Its architecture combines a stone base (granite and travertine), a mid-section of expressed concrete structure and glass, and a crown of oxidized copper that reads from across the city as a luminous green beacon. The building is entered through a colonnade of 20 m-high stone columns that encircles the podium on all four sides.

Public Realm: The design allocates 40% of the city’s surface area to public space: boulevards, parks, piazzas, and arcaded streets. No building is more than 100 m from a significant public open space.

Blueprint & Urban Plan Notes

The master plan drawing shows the primary axis running north–south for 3 km from the capitol to a great public park at the southern edge of the city. Along its length, six major civic buildings — the national library, the supreme court, the national theatre, the museum of history, the gallery of contemporary art, and the central market hall — are set on axis or flanking the boulevard in symmetrical pairs.

The residential quarters occupy the city blocks to the east and west of the civic axis, organized as perimeter blocks with active ground-floor uses and private or semi-public courtyards above. The street network within the residential quarters is deliberately irregular, creating a contrast between the formal civic spine and the more human-scaled grain of daily urban life.

12×30 Curved House Plan

A compact residential plan within a 12-foot by 30-foot footprint, organized around a curved interior geometry that challenges the rectilinear conventions of small-house design.

Project Overview

The brief is precise and challenging in equal measure: a complete dwelling within a footprint of 12 feet by 30 feet (approximately 3.65 m × 9.15 m), organized around a curved plan geometry. The constraint of the footprint is not unusual for urban infill or rural micro-housing; what is unusual here is the decision to work with curves in a context where straight lines and right angles dominate. The result is a spatial experience that feels expansive despite its compact dimensions.

Design Philosophy

The curve is not ornamental. It is deployed strategically to resolve three problems simultaneously. First, it eliminates the dead corners that are the enemy of small-plan efficiency: a curved wall has no corners to accumulate clutter or interrupt the flow of space. Second, the curve creates directionality within the long, narrow plan — as you move through the house from entry to the far end, the curving walls subtly guide you, creating a sense of journey and discovery that a straight corridor cannot. Third, the curves allow each zone of the plan to have a distinct character — expansive where the curve opens outward, intimate where it closes inward — without the need for walls or doors to separate them.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Light-gauge steel framing throughout, curved to the plan geometry using CNC-cut steel studs with pre-bent flanges. The curved walls are sheathed in double-layered gypsum board, wet-bent to the required radius. The floor structure is a steel joist system spanning the 12-foot width, seated on a continuous perimeter foundation beam.

Exterior: The exterior expression of the curved plan is a continuous shell of pre-finished fibre cement panels, applied to a thermally broken metal subframe. The panels are cut to follow the plan curves, creating a smooth, seamless exterior surface. The roofline follows a simple gable form, providing volume for a loft or storage level above the main floor.

Dimensions: 12 ft (3.66 m) wide × 30 ft (9.14 m) long. Main floor approximately 33 m²; loft level (partial) approximately 12 m²; total habitable area approximately 45 m².

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

Entry at the short end of the plan opens into a combined living and dining space. The south wall curves outward here, maximizing the perceived width of the room and creating a south-facing bay for seating or a small dining table. Moving deeper into the plan, a kitchen occupies the mid-section, with curved cabinetry that mirrors the wall geometry. A bathroom is tucked into the narrowest point of the plan, where the north wall curves inward to create a sheltered recess.

The far end of the plan is the bedroom: a private zone separated from the kitchen by a curved sliding screen rather than a fixed partition. The bedroom benefits from windows on both the end wall and the long east elevation, giving it a cross-ventilated, corner-room quality despite being entirely within the linear envelope.

The loft above is accessed by a ship’s-ladder stair tucked against the north wall between the kitchen and bathroom. It provides 12 m² of sleeping or storage space under the gable, with a small fixed window at the ridge for light and ventilation.

L-Shaped House on a Southern Slope

An L-shaped residence on a sloping south-facing site — a plan form that resolves the tension between solar orientation, privacy, shelter from wind, and the desire to frame a protected outdoor space.

Project Overview

The L-shaped plan is one of architecture’s most versatile and underexplored spatial moves. At its best, the L creates two things simultaneously: a sheltered outdoor room in the interior angle, protected from wind and open to the sky; and a building form that can navigate a sloping site without the awkward compromises of a rectangular box placed on changing ground. This project places an L-shaped house on a south-facing slope, using the form to its full advantage.

Design Philosophy

The two arms of the L are treated as distinct but related buildings. The longer arm, running east–west along the contours, contains the social spaces of the house — living room, dining room, kitchen — with a continuous south-facing glazed wall that captures the full panorama of the slope below. The shorter arm, perpendicular to the first and stepping down with the hillside, contains the bedrooms and service spaces. The junction of the two arms is the entry threshold: a compressed, sheltered point from which the full spatial sequence of the house opens out.

The interior angle of the L faces south and slightly west, creating a sheltered terrace that is the primary outdoor living space. It is protected from the north and east winds by the body of the building itself, and it receives sun from mid-morning to evening. A low stone retaining wall at its southern edge defines the terrace from the slope below, and a shallow water feature in the angle of the L marks the meeting point of the two volumes.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Reinforced concrete retaining walls at the uphill edges of both arms, with timber post-and-beam construction for the downhill elevations. The contrast between the solid, heavy uphill wall and the light, glazed downhill facade is the primary spatial and tectonic idea of the house.

Facade: Uphill (north/east) elevations: board-formed concrete, minimally glazed, functioning as a retaining and thermal mass wall. Downhill (south/west) elevations: full-height glazing in a timber curtain wall system, with deep overhanging eaves to control solar gain.

Roofing: Low mono-pitch roof on each arm, draining outward to the south and west. Green roof on the bedroom wing, planted with low sedum and grasses that blend with the natural vegetation of the slope.

Floor Area: Social wing approximately 110 m²; bedroom wing approximately 95 m²; total approximately 205 m² plus 40 m² of covered terrace.

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The plan is single-storey throughout but occupies three distinct levels as it steps down the hillside. The entry level contains the social wing (kitchen, dining, living) at the highest point of the site, with direct access to the terrace. Two steps down: the master bedroom suite, occupying the upper end of the bedroom wing, with its own terrace facing south. A further three steps down: two additional bedrooms, a bathroom, and a utility room at the lowest level of the house, where a secondary entrance connects to the driveway and parking area below.

The section is the key drawing for this project. It reveals the stepped relationship between floor levels, the changing ceiling heights (from 3.2 m in the living room to 2.4 m in the bedrooms), and the way the retaining walls tie the building to the hillside. The structural engineer’s drawings show the concrete retaining walls acting simultaneously as foundations, thermal mass, and retaining structures for the soil behind them.

Regional Criticalism — Apartment Block

A multi-storey apartment block designed under the theoretical framework of Regional Criticalism — an architecture that resists global homogeneity by rooting itself in the specific material, climatic, and cultural conditions of its place.

Project Overview

This project is a direct application of Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical Regionalism — the idea that contemporary architecture must resist the placeless universalism of late capitalism by anchoring itself in the particularities of topography, climate, light, and tectonic tradition. The building is an apartment block: a typology that has, in its worst manifestations, become the emblem of architectural indifference. This project insists that the apartment block can be otherwise — that density and specificity are not in conflict.

Design Philosophy

Frampton identifies several strategies through which Critical Regionalism operates: the use of topography to anchor the building; the mediation of natural light as a primary design element; the tactile and haptic quality of materials; and the use of local building tradition as a resource rather than a costume. This project engages all four. The building is set into its site rather than placed upon it; its orientation and section are calibrated to the specific sun path and prevailing winds of its location; its surfaces reward close inspection — textured brick, board-formed concrete, and hand-laid tile; and its structural logic derives from a regional tradition of load-bearing masonry.

The result is a building that could not have been built anywhere else. That is the measure of its success.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Cross-laminated timber (CLT) floor plates spanning between load-bearing brick shear walls. The CLT is left exposed on the soffit in all apartments, providing a warm, textured ceiling surface and eliminating the need for a suspended ceiling system. The brick shear walls are expressed on the exterior as the primary organizational element of the façade.

Facade: Handmade brick, laid in a Flemish bond pattern with slightly recessed joints to emphasize the texture of the individual units. Brick colour varies subtly across the facade, from warm ochre at the base to a cooler buff at the upper levels, responding to the way natural light changes with height. Balconies are formed as cantilevered CLT slabs with no visible steel supports, maintaining the purity of the brick facade.

Windows: Deep-set timber-framed windows with external timber shutters. The depth of the reveal — minimum 300 mm — creates strong shadow lines that give the facade its three-dimensional quality and provide solar shading without mechanical systems.

Building Height: Six storeys over ground-floor commercial, total height approximately 22 m. Gross floor area approximately 3,600 m² across 28 apartments (mix of 1, 2, and 3 bedroom units).

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The plan is a double-loaded corridor type, with apartments on both sides of a central access corridor. The corridor is not treated as a residual space — it is generously wide (2.4 m), naturally lit by end windows at each level, and lined with communal niches that encourage incidental social interaction. Every apartment has a dual aspect: windows on both the street side and the courtyard side ensure cross-ventilation and prevent any unit from being entirely inward-facing.

The ground floor is set back from the street line to create a covered arcade that protects the commercial frontages from sun and rain. The arcade columns are load-bearing brick piers that continue the structural logic of the upper floors to the ground. A central vehicular and pedestrian passage through the building connects the street to the communal courtyard at the rear.

The courtyard is the social heart of the scheme: 18 m × 12 m, south-facing, with shared garden space, cycle storage, and a communal laundry and workshop at ground level. Section drawings show the courtyard receiving sunlight to the ground level for at least four hours per day throughout the year — a minimum standard that fundamentally shapes the section of the building.

Modern Building by Wilkin Architecture — Western Pennsylvania

A bold contemporary civic or commercial building in the western Pennsylvania tradition of architectural ambition — drawing on the legacy of Wilkin Architecture to produce a structure that is at once regionally grounded and formally innovative.

Project Overview

Western Pennsylvania has a complex and underappreciated architectural heritage. From the industrial grandeur of Pittsburgh’s early skyscrapers to the residential work of Tasso Katselas and the civic projects of the mid-century modernists, the region has always produced architecture of ambition and material seriousness. This project, developed in the spirit of Wilkin Architecture — a practice whose work engages with the specific material and cultural context of the Pittsburgh region — is a contemporary building that takes that heritage seriously.

Design Philosophy

The building is uncompromisingly of its time: its lines are clean, its geometry is precise, and it does not reach for historical ornament or nostalgic reference. But it is not without roots. The material palette — cor-ten steel, exposed concrete, and regionally sourced brick — connects the building to the industrial landscape of western Pennsylvania with directness and honesty. The cor-ten weathers over time to a rich amber-brown that echoes the rust-belt aesthetic of the region’s great industrial heritage, transforming what could be melancholy into something vibrant and alive.

The massing is monumental but not heavy. Voids are cut into the building volume to create covered public spaces at ground level — loggia, passages, and outdoor rooms that invite the city in. The building refuses the fortress typology of so many contemporary commercial structures and instead opens itself to the street.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Structural steel frame with composite concrete floor slabs. The primary facade is a rain-screen system of cor-ten steel panels (3 mm thick, 600 mm × 1200 mm format) mounted on a thermally broken subframe. Panel joints are expressed as 20 mm open reveals, allowing the facade to breathe and drain while maintaining its precision appearance.

Glazing: Triple-glazed curtain wall on the primary and secondary elevations, with an external solar shading system of horizontal cor-ten fins at 400 mm centres. The fins are angled at 15° from the horizontal to maximize shade on the south and west elevations while admitting north light unobstructed.

Ground Floor: A public arcade runs through the ground floor at grade, creating a covered pedestrian route that activates the street frontage. The arcade ceiling is formed in exposed poured concrete, board-marked with a pattern derived from the structural grid above.

Sustainability: The building targets LEED Gold certification. A green roof on the upper level manages stormwater and reduces the urban heat island effect; photovoltaic panels are integrated into the roof parapet; and the building’s thermal mass reduces peak heating and cooling loads.

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The building is organized on a 7.5 m structural grid, with a typical floor plate of approximately 1,800 m². The ground floor is divided between the public arcade (free to the street), a lobby and reception zone, and a retail or food-service unit at the corner. Upper floors are open-plan office space with a 4.5 m floor-to-ceiling height that allows for mezzanine levels where required by tenants.

Section drawings show the building stepping back at the upper two floors to create a terrace accessible from the top-floor tenant. This setback is not merely aesthetic — it responds to a right-of-light constraint on the adjacent low-rise residential block, maintaining solar access to those properties while allowing the building to reach its full permitted height.

The structural strategy is a perimeter tube: the primary columns are concentrated at the edges of the plan and the central core, leaving the interior floor plate entirely column-free. This maximizes tenant flexibility and allows the building to be sub-divided or opened up without structural intervention.

Acadian Forest Cabin — Nova Scotia

A long, low cabin nestled in the Acadian mixed forest of Nova Scotia — a minimal retreat that dissolves into its woodland setting through careful material choices and a rigorously horizontal composition.

Project Overview

Deep in the Acadian mixed forest that covers much of Nova Scotia’s interior — a forest of yellow birch, sugar maple, beech, and red spruce that turns extraordinary colours in October — this small cabin sits as a quiet presence in the landscape. It is long and low: a single-storey structure that stretches along a gentle ridge, its horizontal profile mirroring the forest floor and the layered canopy above. The cabin is a retreat, a writing studio, a hunting camp, or simply a place to be alone in the woods.

Design Philosophy

The governing idea is disappearance. The cabin should not announce itself; it should be found. This is achieved through a combination of low profile, dark materials, and the deliberate use of the existing tree line to break up the roofline when seen from a distance. The long plan — a single room deep, stretched to accommodate all the program in a linear sequence — allows the building to be experienced from inside as a continuous panoramic view of the forest, with glazing on both the north and south elevations that brings light in from two directions at all times of day.

The cabin borrows from the Acadian tradition of utilitarian building: nothing is ornamental, everything earns its place. The structural system is exposed; the mechanical systems are simple and robust; the palette of materials is limited to three — black-stained spruce timber, steel, and glass.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Post-and-beam construction using locally milled spruce. Six bays of approximately 3.6 m each give the cabin its total length of approximately 21.6 m. The structural bays are expressed on the exterior as evenly spaced timber posts, creating a rhythmic colonnade along the south elevation.

Cladding: Rough-sawn spruce board-and-batten, stained with a black iron-oxide finish that will weather to a dark silver-grey over time, blending with the bark of the surrounding birch and spruce. The roof is a simple shed pitch (3:12) clad in corrugated weathering steel.

Glazing: Large fixed panes of triple-glazed glass on the south elevation, framed in black-painted steel. The north elevation has smaller, operable casements for cross-ventilation. An overhanging roof soffit on the south prevents direct summer sun from penetrating while admitting low winter sun.

Foundation: Helical steel piles at each post location — a minimal footprint approach that avoids excavation and allows the cabin to be removed without trace if necessary.

Floor Area: Approximately 78 m² gross, arranged as a single linear sequence of spaces.

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

The plan reads left to right as a progression from private to social: sleeping (two bunks and a single bed in the first two bays) → bathroom (third bay, with a composting toilet and outdoor shower) → multi-purpose studio/living space (bays four and five, the heart of the cabin, with a wood stove and a large worktable) → kitchen and entry (sixth bay, at the east end, with covered wood storage on the exterior).

The plan is only 3.6 m deep — just wide enough for a single functional zone in each bay. This constraint is the source of the cabin’s spatial quality: every room is defined by its long dimension, framed by forest on both sides, and lit from above by a continuous skylight that runs along the ridge of the shed roof.

The section shows the shed roof rising from 2.4 m at the north wall to 3.2 m at the south, giving the cabin a subtle sense of aspiration toward the light. The structural posts and beams are fully exposed in the interior, and the floor is polished concrete over underfloor heating pipes fed by a small propane boiler.

Saltbox House — Southwest Nova Scotia

A contemporary reinterpretation of the iconic saltbox house form on the Atlantic coast of southwest Nova Scotia — honouring a centuries-old Maritime vernacular while embracing modern materials and spatial sensibility.

Project Overview

The saltbox is one of the most enduring and recognizable forms in the domestic architecture of Atlantic Canada. Its asymmetrical roofline — long at the rear, short at the front, pitched steeply to shed the snow and rain of the Maritime climate — has defined the landscape of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island for over three centuries. This project sets a new saltbox house on a rural site in the southwest of the province, between the Atlantic shoreline and the mixed Acadian forest, and asks: what does this form mean today?

Design Philosophy

The answer pursued here is one of disciplined continuity. The project does not camp in nostalgia, nor does it attempt a fashionable “barn” aesthetic. Instead, it takes the saltbox silhouette seriously as a functional and expressive form: the long rear slope creates a protected low-eave at the back of the house where the prevailing southwest wind arrives; the tall front wall faces south and east, maximizing passive solar gain through carefully proportioned windows; and the asymmetry of the roofline creates two distinct interior ceiling conditions — tall and airy at the front, intimate and compressed at the rear — that correspond naturally to the program.

Materials are drawn from the Nova Scotia palette: dark-stained Eastern white cedar shingles on the walls, standing-seam zinc on the roof, local fieldstone at the base and chimney, and Douglas fir timber in the interior structure. Nothing is imported that can be sourced within a hundred kilometres.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Timber frame construction — a hybrid of traditional mortise-and-tenon joinery at the primary frame and engineered lumber for secondary framing. The exposed timber frame is visible in the main living space, connecting the contemporary interior to the craft tradition of Maritime carpentry.

Envelope: Highly insulated wall assembly (R-40 effective, using dense-pack cellulose in 2×6 stud walls with a 3” rigid mineral wool outboard layer) to meet the demands of the Nova Scotia climate — cold winters, damp springs, and hurricane-season wind loads. Triple-glazed windows throughout; south and east elevations have larger openings for solar gain, north and west are minimally glazed.

Roofing: 10:12 pitch on the front slope, 4:12 pitch on the long rear slope. Standing-seam zinc cladding, with a fully adhered membrane underlayment. Snow guards at eaves on all elevations.

Mechanical: Air-source heat pump for heating and cooling, supplemented by a wood-burning fireplace in the main living space. Heat recovery ventilator (HRV) for continuous fresh air supply.

Floor Area: Approximately 160 m² (gross), including the main floor and a loft level under the front slope.

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

Main floor: open-plan living, dining, and kitchen occupying the full front width of the house under the tall ceiling, with a wood stove at the centre of the plan. To the rear, under the long low slope: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a mudroom/entry, and a utility room. The transition from high to low space is marked by a change in floor level of three steps — a spatial threshold that separates the social and private zones of the house.

Loft level: accessed by a ship’s ladder from the living room, a single sleeping loft with a dormer window looking south toward the sea. The loft has a floor area of approximately 20 m² and a maximum ceiling height of 2.2 m at the ridge.

Site plan shows the house oriented with its long axis running east–west, with the main entry on the sheltered east gable end. A covered woodshed and storage lean-to is attached to the north elevation. The septic field and well are located to the north and west of the house, away from the primary views to the south.

Modern Brick Two-Story House — Bafang, Cameroon

A contemporary two-storey residence in Bafang, in the West Region of Cameroon, that interprets the local brick-building tradition through a modern spatial and formal language.

Project Overview

Located in Bafang — a market town in Cameroon’s West Region set amid the highlands of the Bamileke plateau — this two-storey family residence negotiates between the region’s rich tradition of compressed-earth and fired-brick construction and the aspirations of a modernizing middle class. The house is compact, efficient, and architecturally assured: a building that looks as at home in its highland setting as it would in a curated architectural publication.

Design Philosophy

The Bamileke region has one of the most distinctive architectural traditions in sub-Saharan Africa — the tall, thatched chefferie of the Bamileke chiefs, with their elaborate carved facades and towering conical roofs, remain among the most sophisticated vernacular buildings on the continent. This project does not attempt to replicate that tradition but to honour its underlying principles: the elevation of the primary living space above the ground, the use of locally sourced materials, and the calibration of interior space to communal family life.

The two-storey format responds to the topography of Bafang’s hillside plots, which are narrow and steep. By stacking the programme vertically, the house preserves garden area and allows each floor to have its own relationship to the landscape — the ground floor engages the street and the garden, while the upper floor commands views across the surrounding hills.

Technical Specifications

Structure: Reinforced concrete frame with infill brick masonry. The frame — columns, beams, and slabs — provides structural stability on the sloping site, while the brick infill provides thermal mass and the characteristic textured facade. Concrete is locally batched; brick is sourced from kilns in the Bafoussam region.

Facade: Exposed brick on all four elevations, with varying bond patterns used to differentiate the ground and upper floors. The primary elevation features a projecting upper-floor volume cantilevered over the entrance, creating a covered porch and a strong horizontal shadow line that anchors the composition. Window openings are generous — larger than the Cameroonian vernacular norm — to maximize natural light in the cooler highland climate.

Roofing: Low-pitched metal sheet roof (0.5 mm pre-painted galvanised steel) with wide overhangs to protect the brick facade from the heavy seasonal rainfall of the West Region. Gutters and downpipes are integrated into the facade composition rather than treated as afterthoughts.

Floor Area: Ground floor approximately 90 m², upper floor approximately 85 m², total gross area approximately 175 m².

Blueprint & Floor Plan Notes

Ground floor: covered entrance porch → central hallway → living room (front) and dining/kitchen (rear), with a single guest bedroom and bathroom at the rear of the plan. A straight-run staircase on the internal side wall connects to the upper floor. The kitchen opens directly onto a rear terrace and garden.

Upper floor: landing gallery → master bedroom with en-suite bathroom (front, with balcony over the entrance porch) → two additional bedrooms and a shared family bathroom (rear). A small study or prayer room occupies a corner of the upper floor, lit by a high window on the side elevation.

The section reveals a generous ceiling height of 2.8 m on both floors — above the Cameroonian minimum standard — which contributes significantly to the sense of space and the building’s elevated quality. Structural drawings show the cantilever of the upper-floor front projection is achieved with a pair of pre-cast concrete beams extending 1.2 m beyond the ground-floor wall line.

Nighttime Dakar — Design Brandscape

A nocturnal architectural vision of Dakar, Senegal — where branded environments, luminous facades, and urban density converge into a vivid portrait of the contemporary African city at night.

Project Overview

This series of renders captures Dakar after dark — a city that transforms under artificial light into something altogether different from its daytime self. The project is less a conventional architectural commission and more a speculative urban study: an investigation of how brand identity, commercial signage, and contemporary architectural facades combine to produce a distinctly West African urban aesthetic. The Dakar brandscape is energetic, layered, and deeply human in scale.

Design Philosophy

The project takes its conceptual cue from the theory of the brandscape — the idea that the built environment of a commercial city is inseparable from the visual language of the brands that inhabit it. In Dakar, this manifests in a particular way: international luxury brands and local artisan identities coexist on the same streetscape, their signage competing and collaborating in equal measure. At night, the hierarchy of the daytime city dissolves, and what remains is a field of light, colour, and text.

Architecturally, the project explores how building facades in this context function as media surfaces — not merely as shelter, but as carriers of identity, aspiration, and civic meaning. The renders show buildings whose facades are simultaneously structural and communicative, their material texture amplified by artificial lighting to produce depth, shadow, and warmth that disappears in flat daylight photography.

Technical Specifications

Urban Scale: The renders depict street-level urban blocks with building heights ranging from 2 to 6 storeys, consistent with the mixed-use commercial fabric of central Dakar. Ground floors are activated with retail frontages, open arcades, and informal market stalls.

Facade Materials: A mix of painted concrete, ceramic tile cladding, and metal panel systems are depicted. Many surfaces are treated with light-reflective coatings or finished in high-gloss paint to maximize the luminosity of uplighting and signage glow.

Lighting Strategy: Three tiers of artificial lighting are at work: ambient street lighting (high-pressure sodium and LED column fixtures), commercial signage (backlit acrylic panels, LED channel lettering, neon tube lighting), and architectural accent lighting (recessed ground-level uplights and concealed linear LED strips on cornices and canopies).

Signage: Brand identities shown include a mix of local Senegalese commercial brands and global luxury references, printed on fabric banners, applied as vinyl lettering, and formed as three-dimensional metal fabrications mounted to facade supports.

Blueprint & Urban Plan Notes

The urban plan underlying these renders follows a modified grid characteristic of Dakar’s colonial-era street network, overlaid with informal densification. Street widths range from 6 m (pedestrian lanes) to 20 m (primary commercial boulevards). Building setbacks are minimal to zero, creating a continuous street wall that is essential to the nighttime enclosure effect.

Ground-floor plans show open-front retail bays of approximately 4–6 m width and 8–10 m depth. Upper floors are planned as flexible live-work units accessible from shared stair cores at the rear of each building plot. Rooftop terraces serve as informal community spaces, visible in the renders as illuminated silhouettes against the night sky.