I’m tired of people seeing uniqueness as something done in the West. It makes our world poor if we are only Eurocentric in our focus. If you just wait for the West to inspire, create and do well in technology, what is your added value to the world?
Your designs often use natural, soft lighting. How did you come to appreciate its value?
Something that was negative for me was sitting in classrooms where it was dark when there was a lot of sunlight outside. I didn’t like it, and I saw a way to make it better. Another thing that inspired me a lot was listening to stories from grandpa or grandma. Her voice was almost married to the light. The voice and the flickering light of the stove together make the story mysterious. If it’s a dramatic story, you just feel it, and the voice was stronger with the support of the light.
It is unifying, as if we are one under this voice. After these experiences I started looking at how light enters a room. Done right, it can calm you down or energize you even more than a coffee.
You mentioned the importance of giving people a sense of ownership over buildings. Why?
If people feel that the building belongs to them, they will take care of the building. That’s why I say it’s important to let people own a building. It’s not just about taking care of the building, but about being proud to own something.
What type of building makes you feel like you don’t own it?
Train stations sometimes – everyone does what they want because it’s a public space and nobody cares. You can see it. In public buildings in Africa, it is often the case that no one feels responsible for the building. Things are broken and no one cares to fix it. You feel like it belongs to the government, but who is the government? It changes when people feel that it is their building. If they build it themselves – like the school in Gando – and feel they own it, they will take care of it.
When you built that school, the locals helped to press the bricks on site from local clay mixed with concrete. How does your approach to materials and community involvement in Burkina Faso differ from, say, Germany?
Participatory processes exist in Burkina Faso. Whenever there are not enough resources and people have to do a big project, they come together to deal with the problem.
When, in a rich country like Germany, the difficulty is compounded by rules that make participation a thorny, tricky business, you can get people to participate in building a private structure, but we can’t say it’s participatory, because in a In a highly rationalized world where everyone has work to do, insurance in the West makes it difficult to participate if no one wants to take responsibility.
It sounds like you believe that a community-based approach can still work in places like the US or Europe, but things need to be different.
