Client: First World Communities, Lagos

Overview

A façade design for four courtyard walls of a new female students' hostel building. Each wall has a dimension of 8 meters wide and 12 meters high spanning a height of 3 floor levels.

Goals

The hostel is one of the first few buildings on the University Campus. With 2 long sides each with with 2 courtyards on each side. One side facing the Campus which is about 800 meters away while the other faces the hostel entrance driveway. The design creates a visual communication between the hostel building and the university campus. The required 'near transparency' of the courtyards was achieved with mesh like steel façades with opaque steel plates installed at the ground level. The campus facing façades depict why the students are on campus: Graduation and a Professional life afterwards while the Hostel entrance facing side depicts what the students would be doing on campus: Learning and Student life. The campus facing façades had the school logo installed at first but were later removed at the request of the university.

Process

The first physical representation of the façade was a laser cut model presented to the client. Scaling up from model size to life size was an interesting procedure especially because the graphic representations which had an average height of 3.5 meters per figure were achieved using standard Aluminium panels of 1220mm x 2440mm. CAD was instrumental in transcribing the manufacturing information into segments on individual panels matching the actual figure upon assembly. One interesting part was the installation, an observer positioned about 200 meters away from the installation scaffolding communicated the positioning instructions using hand signals like an aircraft ramp marshal.