Members of the Projects Office and students from the Architecture school at The Cass have been collaborating with Freetown and the Sierra Leonian NGO Community Empowerment Support Organisation (CESO) on a primary school building project since 2008. Projects have received continued support and funding from the Water Trust.
Students and Researchers carried out research in the Lumley Valley investigating and cataloguing local materials, resulting in the production of a Freetown Construction Manual. The process of constructing the Ivor Leigh Memorial and Preparatory school in the Lumley Valley revealed the deep social as well as physical problems encountered by poor Freetown communities. These include a sense of isolation from, and a lack of confidence in, engagement with the city.
The ARCSR team was invited by the British Council to participate in a summer exhibition as part of the International Architecture Showcase and London Architecture Festival 2012. An exhibition entitled “The Architecture of 3 Freetown Neighbourhoods” was held from August to September 2012. The exhibition showed photographs and measured drawings of three Freetown neighbourhoods set within their immediate topographical and historical city context. The presentation of early timber framed Krio Architecture of the downtown Tower Hill District included photographs taken in 2005 by Tim Hetherington and Sullivan Khallon, and measured drawings from a 2012 survey by students from The Cass School of Art Architecture and Design. Also exhibited were surveys of the prefabricated timber colonial bungalows of Hill Station, which are perched high on an escarpment overlooking but not connected to Kaningo in the Lumley Valley where the new school has been constructed.
By highlighting the cultural and environmental context within which these neighbourhoods continue to be formed, the exhibition aimed to give place meaning and a sense of identity to the growing populations of the newer neighbourhoods where the greatest change is currently taking place. By representing together examples of historically and culturally diverse but spatially adjacent architecture the exhibition sought to make explicit the rich architectural capital embodied within the thriving city of Freetown: a cultural resource for everyone.
Project images
