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Ashesi’s Earliest Years – Architectural Design

On February 15, 1999, at 12:33 PM pacific time, Patrick Awuah sent the following e-mail message to Evy Ibarra, Dewi Susanti, and Sofia Veniard (partners of the design firm studio213b).

Hi Sofia, Dewi and Evy, I’d like to formally invite your team to the Ashesi University project. Evy, thanks for meeting with me on Friday. I enjoyed our conversation … and I very much look forward to working with someone as intense and committed as you are.  I think this is a great team! Thank you for your interest in this project.

Thus began a collaboration that resulted in the architectural design for Ashesi’s campus. After interviews with three architecture teams, Patrick chose Sofia, Evy and Dewi because of the substantial research they had done on designing for hot climates and the way they complemented each other with a combination of aesthetic design, conceptual metaphoric design, and quantitative skills.

An aerial sketch of Ashesi's future campus (Rendered by Patricia Fontana-Narell)
An aerial sketch of Ashesi’s future campus (Rendered by Patricia Fontana-Narell)

The team produced a community-centered design that accounted for Ghana’s climate, Ghanaian vernacular architecture, and the founding principles of the school. Ashesi’s campus was designed to be accessible to people with disabilities – an approach that we hope will also be adopted by others. The team produced AutoCAD and paper-based drawings, as well as a cardboard model to give prospective donors a better idea of exactly what their donations would help build.

The conceptual design for Ashesi’s campus will be further developed into construction drawings with the help of Ghanaian architects who are familiar with local building materials, thus completing the process and ensuring that Ashesi’s buildings work well in Ghana.

Here are the design team’s reflections on the Ashesi architectural design project experience, in the words of team member Evy Ibarra:

Dewi, Sofia and I met in 1996 when we began the Masters in Architecture program at the University of California at Berkeley. Dewi, originally from Indonesia, had studied architecture at the Boston Art College and had designed and built projects while working with firms in Indonesia. Sofia, who studied electrical engineering at Dartmouth, had lived in various Asian, Latin American and US cities. She had most recently returned from Hong Kong, where she worked for a semiconductor company. I had lived in the US where I studied economics at UC Berkeley, and in England where I attained a master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics. I had just returned to UC Berkeley to begin a joint degree program: Masters in City and Regional Planning/Masters in Architecture.

Although we came from very different cultural, educational and professional backgrounds, the three of us quickly became very close, both as colleagues and as friends. We often collaborated on projects, and relied on each other for critical feedback throughout the program. Our collaborative efforts had a significant impact on each of our approaches to problems, development of ideas and, ultimately, thoughts about architecture. We influenced each other’s work, in both process and product.

It was not until the Ashesi project, however, that we realized how intense and inspiring architecture could be – not only in terms of design, but also in terms of collaboration. The project allowed us to maximize the benefits of our different backgrounds, by working back and forth on each other’s design ideas, both at the urban scale and the level of detail. Significant to this process were research of vernacular Ghanaian architecture and a shared curiosity of local building materials and construction methods. The Ashesi project was a great opportunity because it allowed us to see how fundamental “concept” can be for design, as an analytical tool as well as a generative process.

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