African Design Magazine Africa's Top 10 Projects of 2015 | Page 42

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pened on March 4 this year, THREAD will offer residencies for
visiting international artists, alongside a diverse range of programs
that will provide the people of Sinthian and the surrounding region
with the opportunity to discover new forms of creativity and
cultivate their skills. A venue for markets, education, performances
and meetings, the centre will be a hub for the local community
and a place where the resident artists can have a truly meaningful
experience of Sinthian society.

Visual artists, writers, choreographers, musicians and dancers will
be invited to live and work at THREAD. With this rarely-visited area of the world
as their muse, they can inspire a greater international appreciation for this part of
West Africa. The first steps towards this spirit of cultural exchange were made in
2013, when gifted dancers from Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance ran a series of
workshops in Sinthian.

Acclaimed New York-based architect Toshiko Mori has worked on this project
pro-bono, designing a building that has already won an AIA New York Chapter
award and was selected for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The building is
constructed using local materials and local builders have shared their sophisticated
knowledge of working with bamboo, brick, and thatch. These traditional
techniques are combined with design innovations by Mori. The customary pitched
roof is inverted and will be capable of collecting approximately 40% of the villagers’
domestic water usage in fresh rainfall.
Nicholas Fox Weber, Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation comments
on the ethos of THREAD, “When Josef and Anni Albers created the Foundation that