I’m designing a small multifunction building to house both a nursery school and offices for a community-based AIDS services organization in Golomoti. The building will also function as a community center when the school is not in session.

MANET+ (Malawi Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS) is coordinating the project, and it will be built next fall by a group of engineering students from Canada (www.gcius.ca).

GOLOMOTI

Golomoti is a small village in Dedza district, close to the southern tip of the lake. It used to be an stop for the railway, back when Malawi used its rail lines for passenger transport. The center of Golomoti has now shifted to the main road that connects Salima to Monkey Bay. The old center has the feeling of an inhabited ghost town.

NURSERY SCHOOL

The nursery school is run by volunteer teachers (above). They teach about 260 kids between 2 and 5 years old. The school is open Monday to Friday, from 8 am to 11 am. Classes are currently held under a large tree. Students are sometimes taught all together as one group and sometimes split into smaller groups.

The typical weekly curriculum is as follows:

Monday: Calendar (days of the week), Gospel songs

Tuesday: Sculpting with clay, Hygiene

Wednesday: Alphabet

Thursday: Poems (English and Chichewa), English words, Counting

Friday: Songs

Prayers are taught everyday

GASO

GASO (Golomati Active AIDS Support Organization) coordinates 200 volunteers in Golomoti to provide services and support to HIV-positive individuals and their children. They currently rent two small rooms (3 meters by 2 meters each) in the building shown here.

PLAYING IN GOLOMOTI

The site will also have a playground. The nursery school teachers gave us a list of ways that kids play in Golomoti:

• Fish-fish (jumprope)

• Bao (a Malawian board game)

• Draft (Checkers)

• Fly (Cross between monkey-in-the-middle and dodgeball)

They also said that the kids would really enjoy having seesaws and swings. I haven’t seen to many jungle gyms around Malawi, but it would be easy to make a fun jungle gym out of blue gum branches.

THE SITE

The traditional authority in the village has donated a large empty plot of land for the building.

There are two structures on the building right now.

The first one is a run-down building without a roof. It would certainly need quite a bit of restoration and repair, but the walls are solidly built. It could house the offices of GASO. It might be a good idea to separate the GASO offices from the nursery school, which will get quite loud (with 260 kids singing, running, and playing).

OTHER FUNCTIONS

When the school is not in session, the building will also be a meeting space for different groups, such as:

• PLHIV (Persons Living with HIV) support group (40 people)

• Traditional authority meetings (30 people)

• GASO volunteer meetings (up to 200 people)

• Adult education classes in literacy and accounting (variable number of participants)

It wasn’t an easy week in Malawi.

First, my trip to Mulanje got canceled, and along with it, I lost the driver to take me to different factories around Blantyre.

Then, the map office was closed because the owner was sick. When I went, there were four employees hanging outside the office, but they told me that the owner was the only one who could open the office. So I couldn’t get a proper map of Blantyre to locate the different factories.

So I decided to go to Blantyre on my own, to jump on a bus and make my way around town. How hard could it be to find a few factories?

Turns out, it can be quite hard, especially when the phonebook doesn’t have any actual addresses for places, only P.O Boxes; especially when factories don’t answer the phone; and especially when most roads aren’t named.

My first stop was supposed to be Terrastone, a factory that makes pre-cast concrete parts. Some locals, eager to help, gave me quite detailed directions, and others along the way confirmed the directions.

“Terrastone is this way?”

“Yes, it’s that way.”

After about an hour of walking, I pull up to the location: the Bridgestone/Firestone office. And even that has moved to a different location.

The worst part was that my phone betrayed me today. (Yes, this is the same phone I recently referred to as the best phone in the world.) It seems my line got crossed with somebody else’s, because a couple times when I tried to call customer service, I only got an old man screaming, “HELLO? HELLO?”

So I couldn’t call Ismail, the Lilongwe architect with whom I’m collaborating, for help. I couldn’t call the factories or my local contacts for help.

But I did make it to the Blantyre map office right before it closed, and got great maps of both Lilongwe and Blantyre. Also, the view from my hotel room is amazing (below). So, all was not lost in Blantyre… only the things I came to accomplish.

I’m looking for waste, extra material, and factory byproducts, to use simply and beautifully as architectural materials. 

(It would be so easy: I’d get published, everyone would celebrate me, and I’d be well on my way to becoming a famous architect. “Have you heard about that kid who made beautiful bricks out of those extra plastic tubs from the dairy plants in Malawi?”)

Only… there doesn’t seem to be any such waste in any of the factories that I’ve visited so far. I can’t even seem to locate a junkyard. This place is maddeningly efficient; with not much new material coming in, many here keep reusing whatever they can get.

There are just those flimsy blue plastic bags that people toss on the side of the road. I wonder if we can do something with them.

The search continues…

My first stop was the tobacco auction floors here in Lilongwe, as Malawi’s economy largely relies on the export of tobacco, which is responsible for more than half of the country’s export earnings. 

My final project at Columbia looked at how the tobacco-based economy has contributed to the joint crises of AIDS orphans, malaria, and deforestation. The Tobacco Association of Malawi (TAMA) was instrumental in preventing the use of DDT to kill mosquitoes, as this plan would have compromised the quality and purity of the tobacco leaf. 

Additionally, the tobacco growth and curing industry has led to Malawi’s massive deforestation; it takes 8 kilograms of wood fuel to cure 1 kilogram of flue-cured tobacco leaves. At the current rate of deforestation, Malawi will no longer have trees for lumber or fuel by 2015. The effect on the tobacco-based economy is imaginably disastrous.

The tobacco auction building is simultaneously sophisticated and low-tech, finely tuned to the spatial and environmental needs of the program. The roof is designed to keep all direct sunlight out and let indirect natural light in.

There is also a complex network of conveyor belts that brings the bales of tobacco in, distributes them underground to different outdoor sheds after the different buyers select their bales, and ultimately carries them through enclosed above-ground bridges directly to the buyers’ processing plants. Throughout this whole process, direct sunlight doesn’t touch a single bale.

The auction floors just closed for the rainy season; this was great because I wasn’t restricted to the public viewing area and I was allowed to walk everywhere, but I’ll have to go back to see the system in operation.

Lilongwe feels like a new frontier town, an outpost in the wild wild South, one edge of our global civilization.

All over the city, there are empty billboards, which seem like an appropriate metaphor for Lilongwe. The infrastructure is increasingly in place to accept new investments, new corporations, new populations; those things just aren’t here yet. Lilongwe is waiting to be filled.

It has everything you might expect of a city—cell phone carriers, supermarkets, banks—but it has only one or two of each, with names not often found outside of southern Africa. Instead of T-Mobile, McDonald’s, and HSBC, there’s Zain, Nando’s, and Stanbic Bank. Globalization has brought the technologies and the ideas, but it hasn’t yet brought all the brands. 

Then there are curious places like this modern petrol station, which has no brand or name at all.

So this is my first blog post.

Radecology is a professional blog, a research firm, an architecture firm, and a travel journal.

My name is Avik Maitra, and I recently completed a Master of Architecture degree at Columbia University. I’ll be in Lilongwe, Malawi from October 2008 through May 2009 as part of a post-graduate traveling research fellowship. This is the first year of the Percival and Naomi Goodman Fellowship at Columbia, which was generously endowed by Professor Ray Lifchez from UC Berkeley. I am truly grateful for his support.

There are three parts to my work in Malawi.

1.) Researching the architecture and design of orphanages in Malawi, and how the architecture is or isn’t addressing the needs of the occupants. I’ll also be developing small-scale architectural interventions to alleviate the orphanages’ burdens.

2.) Experimenting with natural methods and design ideas for preventing malaria.

3.) Working on the design and construction of a girls’ academy.

I’ll present my research here on the site, both work in Malawi, as well as other radical/ecological architecture projects around the world. I’ll also write about the particular challenges of doing architecture work with under-served populations in developing countries.

I’ll be inviting others doing exciting work in developing countries to write guest columns for the site. If you’d like to contribute, please let me know.

Activist architecture is nothing new, but architects’ involvement in international development is an increasingly emerging field. Such work requires innovative and ecological solutions, both for affordability and for long-term sustainability; starting from scratch allows architects to leapfrog over traditional building practices and systems.