Ian Volner writing in the WSJ:
Sinthian is a small village in rural Senegal, a seven-hour drive due east across 325 miles of bumpy road from the coastal capital of Dakar. “It’s very remote, incredibly poor and impossible to transport materials to,” says architect Toshiko Mori. The town’s population comprises “about 705 residents and 2,800 animals,” she says, with most of the villagers engaged in subsistence farming and a few artisanal trades. Notably, these trades do not include modern construction with modern means and materials—and yet it is here, in the West African interior near the border with the troubled Republic of Mali, that Mori and a team of partners have created a pioneering new structure.
After 30-plus years in practice, Mori is no stranger to the multiform process of interpretation that makes 21st-century design possible. As top-tier architecture has become a hot commodity on the world marketplace, designers are working at a greater distance from their projects than ever before, and the space between pristine studio and dusty job site is measured not just in miles but in the number of collaborators who bring architects’ ideas to life. As the head of her self-titled firm, as well as a longtime professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Mori has realized projects from China to Rhode Island, talking with clients via Skype and sharing sketches online. But in Senegal, the barriers to communication, as well as the risk that something might be lost in translation, were unusually high.
Thread, as the project is called, is a new cultural initiative launched and operated by the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the Connecticut-based nonprofit established by the late painter and his designer wife to carry forward their idiosyncratic, humanist vision of artistic and social progress. “Something I learned from the Alberses is that you can go anywhere from anywhere,” says Nicholas Fox Weber, the foundation’s executive director for over 35 years...[continue reading]
