Tag: Innovation Center

Innovation Center — Dakar, Senegal

A contemporary innovation center in Dakar, Senegal, where a patterned brick facade and a central reflecting pool create an institution designed as much for inspiration as for work.

The Innovation Center in Dakar, Senegal is built on the conviction that the physical environment shapes the quality of the ideas produced within it. The design brings together research, collaboration, and public engagement in a building that is open, generous, and rooted in its West African context.

The ground floor layout is organised around a central reflecting pool and courtyard — a calm, contemplative space that gives every part of the building a view of water and sky. Around this core, the plan unfolds into a lobby and reception area, meeting rooms, office and lab spaces, and flexible common areas suited to the varied rhythms of innovation work. The relationship between indoor and outdoor is seamless throughout, with covered walkways and shaded thresholds ensuring the courtyard is usable across all seasons.

The facade uses an enlarged brick module in a patterned arrangement that references local craft traditions while performing a genuine environmental function — filtering direct sunlight, encouraging cross-ventilation, and giving the building a texture that changes through the day as the light moves across it. This is a building that invests in its setting and expects its setting to invest back.

Architectural Renders

Innovation Center — Schematic Design

A large-scale innovation center designed to bring together open offices, research labs, meeting spaces, and a recital auditorium under one dynamic roof — built to US code with a striking multi-volume facade.

This schematic design for an innovation center represents a significant civic and institutional ambition: a building that can house the full range of activities that drive collaborative, creative work — from focused individual research to large-group performance and public engagement.

The ground floor plan is carefully zoned into distinct but connected areas: a welcoming lobby and reception, open office zones, enclosed meeting rooms, laboratory spaces, lab office suites, and a standout auditorium with an inclined floor, designed for lectures, presentations, or recitals. A central courtyard threads through the plan, bringing natural light deep into the building and providing an outdoor gathering space at the heart of the complex.

The facade is composed of four distinct volumes, each clad in a different material — concrete panels, glass curtain wall, triangular interior elements, and metal roofing — giving the building a varied, expressive profile. Inside, perforated acoustic panels line the auditorium and key circulation zones, ensuring that the building sounds as good as it looks. A truss roof system spans the larger spaces, keeping the interiors column-free and flexible. US building code compliant throughout.

Architectural Renders