Terracyren’s Asante-inspired design wins KNUST contest

A team of fourth-year architecture students at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has won the EARTH Studio Student Design Competition with a proposal for a Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) regional office that adapts the traditional Asante house.

The Department of Architecture announced Team Terracyren as the winner after final presentations to an assessment panel. The brief asked students to design the proposed GMMB Regional Office in Kumasi using earth and other local resources to create a contemporary building rooted in Ghana’s architectural heritage.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Nana Kwadwo Agyei-Bi Asante, former president of the KNUST chapter of the Architecture Students’ Association of Ghana (ASAG) and a member of the team, explained the concept began with an Asante custom. When an elder or head of a family nears death, he said, valued property is entrusted to a chosen person. The team saw the GMMB in that role, as keeper of treasures such as Ghana’s castles and traditional buildings, which he said survive because of its work.

The design borrows the courtyard house. From outside, he said, “you don’t really see what’s going on”; through the entrance, the building opens onto a small courtyard with workspaces around it. Modern buildings, he said, often signal their function from the street, unlike Asante homes. The courtyard also cools the building and admits air and daylight, he said.

Earth construction was a requirement of the competition, he said, but the team also had a precedent: Asante houses were built of wattle and daub, a method he said has “stood the test of time”, including through the colonial era.

Almost withdrawing

Agyei-Bi Asante said more than 15 teams began the competition and 11 finished. His team considered withdrawing to protect its studio coursework, but kept going by discussing the project between lectures before drawing began.

The final presentations drew students, faculty, representatives of the French earthen-architecture centre CRAterre and the GMMB, and invited heritage and architectural professionals, according to the department.

A “treasure box”

Ms Nartey Christabel Nakuor, the VICE President of ASAG, told *The Chronicle *in an interview the group tested several concepts before settling on a “treasure box”. She said this was not a Western chest but a pot hidden during an elder’s lifetime, often near a recognisable tree or plant, and passed to a younger generation. She said the GMMB’s role is the same: to preserve heritage and hand it on.

The central skylight was chosen to evoke a courtyard with a tree, she said. The team later replaced the tree with a feature meant to embody the heritage materials the GMMB safeguards. The facade’s breeze blocks combine two symbols, she said, one for holding the wisdom of the past and one for protecting it. She did not name the symbols in the interview.

She said the entrance, modelled on Asante houses whose exteriors give little away, is meant to invite visitors in while signalling a protected place.

Built for the climate

Christabel said the design was also meant to cut reliance on air conditioning and artificial light. The north and south sides, which carry the breeze blocks and most openings, allow cross-ventilation, which she said earth buildings need to avoid mould. The east and west walls, which take the harshest sun, have no windows.

The earth walls are thicker than standard sandcrete walls and keep heat out, she said. Long roof overhangs shield them from rain and sun, and they sit on a stone or concrete base so floodwater does not reach the earth. The skylight lights the deep plan. “We wanted to rely a lot on natural lighting,” she said.

Her research, she said, showed that earth building extends well beyond rammed earth, to multistorey structures reinforced with timber or bamboo, and to lime finishes described as “breathable”.

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