Background
Upon arrival in Africa, the typical five star safari tourist; adorned in the latest adaptable khaki outfit, mosquito repellent in pocket and anti-malarials on hand, is whisked away in the air conditioned ‘safety’ of a chauffeur driven Land Rover to the fenced in exclusivity of a ‘Safari Lodge.’ Such lodges, often masquerading as environmental ‘buffer zones’, straddle national park boundaries and provide a well rehearsed Disneyfied ‘African experience’ complete with traditional dance, village tours and craft markets, all manufactured for tourist consumption.
Ross Langdon, one of the founding directors of Regional Associates, first came to Uganda in 2009 on the invitation of Volcanoes Safaris, a leading eco-tourism and great ape tourism specialist in Uganda and Rwanda. He came to survey their existing properties with the task of upgrading existing facilities and implementing new and innovative sustainable design solutions. He was also there to begin a new project, Kyambura Gorge Lodge, which was to be a showcase of sustainable development and eco-tourism in Uganda. He didn’t wear khaki and there was no air conditioning to be found anywhere.
The Site
The site for Kyambura Gorge Lodge is far away from the R & B clubs of Kampala, about seven hours drive, along a ridge adjacent to Kyambura Gorge on the edge of Queen Elizabeth National Park in South West Uganda. The site had been in the making for seven years before Ross arrived. Small parcels of land had been bought and assembled with the aim of creating a ‘protected zone’ between the gorge, Queen Elizabeth National Park and local communities, who were continually suffering the effects of wildlife conflicts, mostly crop raiding by large mammals and baboons. Queen Elizabeth National Park is host to over 600 bird species, big cats, elephants, hippopotami, crocodiles, antelope, buffalo and a plethora of other small mammals and reptiles. Kyambura Gorge itself is a secret paradise cut into the savannah, home to an isolated chimpanzee population and lush tropical rainforest.
In a previous era, the lodge site housed a coffee cooperative and processing facility surrounded by coffee plantations and subsistence farmers. Today the coffee processing facility (a large concrete building with a series of smaller outbuildings) has been transformed into the public areas for the lodge. Accommodation is provided by four new banda’s (rooms) that have been carefully nestled into the hillside in order to take advantage of a northerly aspect and panoramic views towards the gorge, the park and the mythical Rwenzori Mountains beyond.
Approach
Whist respectful of the benefits of tourism in the developing world, our research over the past two years has identified the established convention of African Safari Lodges as misrepresentative of 21st century African culture and society. Rather than fostering the colonial myth of the ‘primitive savage’, we have attempted, with Kyambura Lodge, to identify and celebrate contemporary ‘Africa’ which long ago replaced its spears with mobile phones, drums with transistor radios, mud huts with industrialized materials and traditional attire with tailored suits.
Drawing inspiration from the innovation of ‘every day’ Africa, Kyambura Gorge Lodge celebrates the abundance, vibrancy and resourcefulness of ‘up-cycled’ design (the re-use of found/discarded objects in a way not originally intended). We found ‘up-cycling’ all around us. Usually hand made from discarded, salvaged and industrialized materials we found buildings clad in beaten oil barrels, people wearing sandals fashioned from car tyres, shopping bags of woven packing tape, hacksaws made from bent steel rod and footballs of rolled plastic bags bound with electrical tape. In order to implement these techniques in the development of the lodge we needed only to approach locals currently making these objects and have them adapted to suit our needs. Whilst such a strategy does take comfortable shelter under a sustainable umbrella, the genesis of such a strategy has far more to do with availability, resourcefulness and necessity rather than niche industry placement common to eco-tourism PR spin.
‘Up-cycling’ is adopted and articulated across several scales at Kyambura Lodge. At the top end of the scale, existing buildings and infrastructure have been retained, reused and remodelled to incorporate new programming. Closer at hand, standardised plumbing fittings have been adapted for curtain rails and balustrades, rusty iron sheets are used as wall cladding, as well as mortar trays (previously hand beaten from oil barrels) are given a third generation as lamp shades and laced together as a decorative dividing screen.
Architecture
To create architecture in this context, one must build. As the project developed co-director, Campbell Drake, and a number of support staff moved to Uganda to begin one to one experimentation with materials, techniques and skills. Through trial and error we have been able to evolve the architecture through an iterative process. Buildings adopt contemporary adaptations of traditional construction techniques, prescribing a regionally specific architectural language that performs to equatorial climatic conditions and seasonal variation. Rather than fall prey to the phrase ‘bastard mzungu style’ (mzungu being the Swahili term for ‘white man’) where poor imitations of western designs are replicated en masse. Kyambura Gorge Lodge seeks to utilise both the existing ‘western’ buildings and create a new architectural vocabulary, born of the marriage between contemporary (African) and western design sensibilities.
Kyambura is hot. Large overhangs are necessary to shield interior spaces a new brow is added to the existing coffee shed creating a cool and habitable veranda, which forms the main circulation space for the lodge. A large terrace is also added, under the shelter of a large straw hat, coined ‘the sombrero’, to create a large outdoor lounge area with elevated panoramic views. In varied composition, banda’s consist of a covered entrance deck, breezeway, bedroom, balcony and bathroom. The specific configuration of each banda is determined by localised site conditions such as views, existing vegetation, prevailing weather, setbacks and privacy. Drawing on local village typology, the spatial composition of each Banda is articulated through varied materiality and form; roofs are covered with alternate combinations of grass, papyrus and rusty corrugated iron, whilst exterior walls are clad in ship lap timber, reclaimed sheet metal or constructed from locally fired bricks. The varied materiality breaks up and minimises the visual bulk of the banda’s in series ensuring a sympathetic integration with the surrounding landscape. All banda’s are elevated off the ground plane allowing for passive subfloor ventilation, vantage and protection to and from the abundance of surrounding wildlife.
Interiors
Contemporary Ugandan mud huts are often coated in pastel coloured paints or mud washes mixed with natural ochre’s, internally they are left bare, free from ornament, a utilitarian space for sleeping. The banda interiors at Kyambura Gorge Lodge invert this condition. Internally, rooms are given spatial definition and differentiation through contrasting grades of local timber and painted surfaces. Each banda adopts a different pastel colour palette, which flows from the walls onto interior finishes including lighting, fabrics, furnishings and décor, ensuring each room offers guests a rich and varied experience.
Context driven material selection attempts to pay homage to history and site; hessian from second hand coffee sacks is re-introduced as feature lighting and hanging curtains, complemented by an imported English chesterfield patch-worked and reupholstered in east African wax print fabric suggestive of a post colonial realignment. So too decorative elements celebrate African creativity with a collection of ‘Junk Art’ sculptures including birds made from petrol filters, butterfly’s with tattered wings of rusty iron, a toy aeroplane detailed from biscuit tins and a wall piece of spliced jerry cans stitched into a contemporary composition reminiscent of Rosalie Gascgoine’s road sign collages. Such works sit comfortably next to the ingenuity of common place African items, such as a timber ‘Kigali bike’ complete with wooden wheels and suspension fashioned from strips of inner tubes, kerosene lanterns from sardine tins, timber milk jugs with seams of stitched metal and mouse traps of intricately woven wire.
Conclusion
Kyambura Lodge represents both a new, and a very old approach to design, one that mediates the effects of globalised culture by critically reflecting on the peculiarities of its locale, an approach that celebrates contemporary ‘Africa’ as a place of inspiration, innovation and splendour.
