Kick the wildebeest out of the campuses

By Muchiri Waititu

Winston Churchill once said that “we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us”. A very apt statement when you consider the architecture of many public education Institutions in the country today.

By their very definition as repositories of knowledge and teaching centres, they require nay, demand, and an architecture that is inspiring and exciting. The purpose of the campus is to bring together diverse people and their ideas in an environment that creates potential for intellectual and social exchange. Great campuses around the world even draw up very elaborate design guidelines for their design.

The design guidelines cover the height of structures, material usage, building orientation, accessibility, architectural style and environmental responsiveness. There are many more but I will dwell on these for now with a bias on the architectural responsiveness/ aesthetic consideration.

Aesthetic, in architecture, is often linked with order and balance. Rhythm, for instance, is frequently desired within striking architectural compositions. Architecture is nothing more than the manipulation of space to follow certain rules of beauty and it can break or challenge such rules that are directly connected to the human senses.

Beauty propelled

When the human nervous system experiences beauty, certain parts of the brain consistently light up and it seems that, to some extent, humans can be taught what beauty means. Culture and experience may have a significant role, yet there are certain qualities that are constantly found regardless of culture or experience in the reaction of most human beings.

This brings me to my issue today. A local university has been in the local dailies highlighting its various ‘ultra modern’ (this is usually a term that only laymen use) facilities each not older than two years. The facilities are very ambitious in scale and definitely had large budgets to fund their construction. So why, oh why, did we end up with buildings that do not inspire?

All architecture must be looked at from the prism of its context. A school with say one hundred years of history and a colonial background will ultimately, in the instance that it wants to expand, try and introduce new buildings that even though it uses modern materials and building technology, the end result are in harmony. They look and feel the same though they are definitely not alike. Father and son.

A good example is what was achieved at the All Saints Cathedral; the new meeting halls still look like their father, the Cathedral, but they don’t compete with him. In fact they complete the whole look.

The institutions of higher learning in Kenya instead take on what is known as the committee approach to architecture. Every building is being put up in accordance to a brief prepared by a committee. This means that it has the committee character with everyone having a role. It is said that a wildebeest was the only animal that arose from decisions made by committees. The head was made from a goat, the body from a horse and the rear from a hyena; and the parts were then mashed together to make the committee happy.

Inherited looks

Unfortunately, this is what is happening to our universities as most of them inherited old buildings, which were used as technical colleges and had to quickly convert them to institutions of higher learning overnight. Instead of undertaking a master-planning exercise to guide future expansion, they quickly put up buildings which were built by committees. In doing so, they completely ignored the basic syntax which had been set by the original buildings. In areas where every building was a goat, they put up wildebeests; where everyone was speaking English; they came and started speaking in tongues.

The buildings had no relation to each other in terms of form, scale and proportion.

The exception

The only public university which seems to have escaped this ad hoc approach to physical development is the University of Nairobi. I will give it some credit because this university has an easily recognisable façade. It has also endeavoured to publicly run competitions with credible and transparent juries, the most recent being the proposed administration block facing the Norfolk Hotel.

The other universities,however, seem to have refused to take up the baton and have instead decided to go ‘Committee’. They have bandied around words like ‘ultra modern’ and ‘ground breaking’ to describe their features but this only goes to highlight their shortcomings.

When you enter a place where you want to study, you would wish to listen to ambient sounds or no sound at all; to concentrate on your book; to write without interruption. It goes without saying then, that the building housing this particular function should inspire serenity. Why then did the university decide to play loud metallic music in the library?

I leave you to give your responses to what you think a good university should look like. Should it not inspire the young mind to soar by inspiration or should it use the environs of Githurai and Kayole as inspiration?

Should a university look like a big secondary school or a place for the attainment of higher things?

My hypothesis is that you only need to visit the Strathmore Business School and the United States International University  to answer this question. It will also answer why our local public universities are still doing woefully in the university rankings.

Let’s kick the wildebeest out of the campus.

The writer is a director at AIA and Vice Chair of the Architectural Association of Kenya’s Chapter of Construction Project Management.