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Red, yet green: built using local techniques and materials, this centre helps empower Senegalese women

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2002

The women's centre in the Senegalese city of Rufisque has already been shown in these pages (AR July 2002), but the jury was determined to recognize its qualities, even though some members were sceptical of the architects' claims that the building helps form new urban spaces at its perimeter.

The Centre is formed round a court, like many traditional complexes in west Africa. In scale, it locks into the urban block, while its red colour shows it to be a public building. Unlike some buildings created by European agencies in the region, the structure is an in-situ concrete frame, for the local soil is not suitable for the manufacture of stabilized mud-brick. So the frame is filled in with the universal local cement blocks cast and dried on site. Roofs are of galvanized corrugated metal on steel beams with thick locally woven straw matting as inner insulating layers; the ventilated cavities between mats and metal cool the rooms below. Recycled car wheel hubs form vents, and old beer bottle bottoms, placed end to end, are used in p laces as glass bricks (rather to the initial distress of the Muslim general contractor, who later become reconciled to the technique).

Functions, and indeed the whole project, were established after extensive discussion with the local women's community. The young Finnish architects had to face many cultural problems in facilitating communication between the predominantly young female clients and the male contractors -- though many of the site workers were sons of the client community, and relations gradually improved. The building has not just provided a new social facility, but its creation has been influential on the lives of everyone involved, users and builders, Senegalese and Finns alike.