Sustainability in building is rapidly gaining significance in the Middle East Africa region – particularly among female professionals and young graduates in architecture and engineering. This was clearly seen at the prize-handover ceremony for the regional Holcim Awards in Nairobi, Kenya. The majority of the 11 prize-winning projects dealt with education and the contemporary promotion of traditional manual skills.

The film training center in Kampala aims to empower a new generation of East African filmmakers, enabling them to see and narrate African experiences for a global audience. Maisha – meaning life in Kiswahili – is a non-profit organization dedicated to further the as-of-yet unrecognized East African film industry. Grounded in this mission, the building is designed as a series of open classrooms in a natural setting to foster discussion, learning, and contemplation. The building’s reduced material palette, consisting almost entirely of bricks produced from high-quality local clay, establishes an appropriate cinematic framework for a range of spatial sequences – an architecture with cinematic properties.

The jury found the project an impressive gesture of cultural empowerment that is also contextual, well positioned within the landscape and aesthetically inspiring. The program of a film lab was commended for its aspirational objective, namely, to encourage a next generation of East African filmmakers engaged in promoting the moving image as a regional art form in its own right. Though the stepped building and its pictorial series of views and spaces appeared convincing, the jury argued that the proposed brick technology might need to be partially reconsidered in view of more sustainable alternatives, which would be more compatible with the project’s primary objectives. This said, the design brilliantly foregrounds possible forms of interaction between the art of filmmaking and the art of building.

Ethical standards and social inclusion

Mira Nair created a not-for-profit organization, the Maisha Foundation, in 2004 to address the absence of a globally viable film industry in East Africa. Mira Nair says “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will”, this is the reason why her mission is to empower visionary artists by giving them the tools to tell their stories in a global discourse; and establish the roots of a self-sustaining film industry in East Africa. Currently, all selected participants attend Maisha’s programs free of charge. Maisha Film Lab headquarters is a cultural, environmental and architectural project to see and narrate a new Africa.