Project Details
- Project Name
- Thread Artist Residency & Cultural Centre
- Client/Owner
- Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
- Project Types
- Cultural
- Project Scope
- New Construction
- Size
- 11,285 sq. feet
- Year Completed
- 2014
- Shared by
- Hanley Wood
- Project Status
- Built
- Cost
- $227,715
2017 AIA Institute Honor Award Winner in Architecture
A Japanese architect, a Senegalese doctor, and a long-dead German-American painter: These three unlikely figures are the driving force behind Thread, a remarkable new initiative in the small rural town of Sinthian in eastern Senegal. The architect, Toshiko Mori, FAIA, is a longtime professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; in 2004, she designed an exhibition for the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the nonprofit organization created by the 20th-century artist. Learning of the foundation’s work in Sinthian in support of local doctor Magueye Ba, Mori was so intrigued that she traveled to the village to lead a series of community workshops—an experience that in turn gave rise to a much larger venture.
Doing triple duty as a social center, healthcare facility, and infrastructural tool, Thread gives artists a place to practice their craft, for schoolchildren to learn, and for villagers to gather. The building itself helps provide water for the town through a novel design and structural solution: A thatched roof of dried grass and bamboo shaped into a sequence of sloping V’s directs rainfall into water troughs strategically positioned in and around the structure that, in turn, flow into two adjacent cisterns where the water is stored for later use. All this Mori was able to carry out remotely from her New York studio, working up the digital design and then sending it off to local craftsman who executed it with astonishing precision. Adding still another level of functionality, Thread also serves as home base for an international artist residency, bringing the world to Sinthian and Sinthian to the world.
Project Credits
Project: Thread: Artist’s Residency and Cultural Center, Sinthian, Senegal
Client: Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
Architect: Toshiko Mori Architect, New York . Toshiko Mori, FAIA, Jordan MacTavish
Structural Engineer: Schlaich Bergermann & Partner
General Contractor: Dr. Magueye Ba
Size: 11,285 square feet
Cost: $227,715
To see the rest of ARCHITECT's coverage of the 2017 AIA Institute Honor Awards, click here.
Project Description
FROM THE AGA KHAN AWARD FOR ARCHITECTURE:
Thread is a socio-cultural centre that houses two artists’ dwellings and studio space for local and international artists. Nicolas Weber, of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, had been supporting the efforts of a Senegalese doctor, Magueye Ba, in running a medical centre and elementary school programme serving an isolated network of rural villages in the Tambacounda region. When Ba and Weber wanted to add elements of cultural exchange and support for the arts to the work in Tambacounda, the project of creating an artist residency and cultural centre formally began under the pro-bono stewardship of Toshiko Mori, who had previously held workshops in the area. It is a hub for Sinthian and surrounding villages, providing agricultural training on the area’s fertile land and a meeting place for social organisation which is, in rural Senegal, the crucial mechanism for sustainable development. A parametric transformation of the traditional pitched roof achieved through a process of inversion collects rainwater, creating a viable source for new agricultural projects during the eight-month dry season. Thread exists at a crossroads between (inter)national artist residency, agricultural hub, community farm, water source, exhibition and performance venue, cultural centre, local library, children’s play gym and village cell phone charger. The success of its atypical plurality proves why art and architecture should be the right of all people.
