CEM KAMANAR-DAW OFFICE- PHOTO Noemí de la Peña 14

CEM Kamanar winner of the Aga Khan Architecture Award 2022

We are very proud to announce that our CEM Kamanar school has received one of the most prestigious and well-endowed international architecture awards: the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the 2020-2022 cycle.

A recognition of the work of dawoffice and of all the workers, collaborators, private donors and companies and volunteers of Foundawtion, as well as, of course, the community of Thionck Essyl, indispensable collaborator.

As you know, CEM Kamanar is a secondary school for 480 students that opened in October 2019. It was designed to solve the saturation of the only school that existed in the rural town of Thionck Essyl, in the Ziguinchor region, south of Senegal.

The jury for this award, which will be presented on Saturday, October 29th in Muscat, in the sultanate of Oman, has awarded CEM Kamanar architecture among more than 463 projects from around the world for “addressing the multiple scales of urbanism, landscape, architecture and construction technologies with equal commitment and virtuosity”.

In the words of David García, founding architect of dawoffice and head of the project, it is “a unique project for the community of Thionck Essyl, which highlights the traditional construction with a result adapted to the climatic characteristics of the area, integrated into the landscape and that uses basic but effective solutions.” The school is built using local materials, such as compressed clay on site, to form an original geometry of vaults.

This prestigious award is promoted by The Aga Khan Development Network, dedicated to improving the quality of life of people, mainly in Asia and Africa, through a multifaceted approach to help communities become self-sufficient. The ultimate goal of these awards is to encourage architectural projects that address social aspirations and to have a comprehensive archive of referent projects – archnet.org.

In addition to the recent Aga Khan Award, the work was a finalist in the 2022 International FAD awards granted by the ArquinFAD association -Promotion of Arts and Design (FAD)- and deserved the opinion award.

From Foundawtion we want to congratulate the dawoffice team for their amazing work.

Thanks also to the invaluable support of our generous patron TEKNIA, essential for the construction of our projects.

Thanks to the Echebano Foundation and all the anonymous and altruistic donors of the Foundation, we can continue working, to the best of our ability, to have a better future.

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CEM Kamanar, International FAD Award 2022 finalist

CEM Kamanar Secondary School in Senegal is one of the finalist projects at International FAD Awards 2022.

dawoffice project has been chosen because of its “sensitivity to local culture and available resources. It also takes into account the structure of the whole, permeable and integrated into the landscape, and the adaptation to climatic characteristics from the construction section, both basic and effective, with a project that stands out for the permeability of the spaces, the relationship with the exterior, and the formation of comfort zones from the ventilation and the form “, in words of the jury.

Pictures: Claudia Mauriño.

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Foundawtion at Dakar Biennale

Foundawtion is somehow present in the Dakar Biennale off, thanks to this installation by industrial designer Marc Morro. The installation revolves around the furniture collection created exclusively for CEM KAMANAR, a school in Thionck Essyl built by the foundation.

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Professional Training Centre. Bajankusoor

The project with which we want to help activate the local economy is the Bajankusoor Vocational Training Center. A trade school that helps families in the area to set up new businesses and become self-sufficient. The work has already begun, in charge of the dawoffice architecture studio and the patronage of Teknia.

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Namaqua Kalahari Children’s Home

We want to build a building so that 50 boys and girls have a home where they can eat, sleep, play and study, away from the mistreatment, humiliation and even rape to which they are habitually subjected.

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CEM School Kamanar

The CEM Kamanar project began in Barcelona in 2014, when David García and Aina Tugores, architects from the dawoffice studio, met with the authorities of Thionck Essyl and made the decision to build a new secondary school. The aim was to solve the overcrowding in the only secondary school existing in Thionck Essyl at that time.