DÉCIMO QUARTO LIVRO
LEARNING MACHINES
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These works are all in one way or another generated by an idea, sometimes a new and strongly felt ideal, sometimes just as an irnprovement of, or the provision of a much needed teaching machine.
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The Convent of St Jose at Lhanguene, is the mother house for noviciate sisters of the Franciscan Order in Mozambique It is an ordered and ideal universe, axial and symmetrical. It was designed with Franciscan finishes in mind but the Mother Superior and the sisters lost their heads and had it finished like a middle class home instead. |
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The College of Our Lady of the Conception at Inhambane, is both a high school and a hostel for girls. It was to stand facing west on the brow of a sand dune overlooking the bay, and be a city of towers. The sisters never managed to raise the funds to make a start — it remains a paper work. |
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Khovolar is a hostel for boys and girls who have completed their primary education in the bush and have to come to the city to attend secondary school and University. |
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The first of the ideal cities was the Chicumbane Agricultural School for the Swiss Mission, a school to teach bush farmers to grow more food, to help them stay on the land. A city for an Ideal, a formal squared complex contained by a road mandala. The design for the Agricultural School at Chicumbane is full of symmetries and courtyards of many sizes. It is cut up by rain water channels which also have a symbolic intention and make sure no cars drive into it. The rain in the channels flows down the very gradual slope to be collected in cisterns which overflow and discharge into the experimental fields during the heavy summer rains. The idea of the school is to teach people how to make the best of what they have, to avoid starving during famines, to remain on their land with the spirits of their ancestors. |
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My third ideal city almost got completed. It is the Railways Training College. It is a city for a temporary prince with a smaller school gesticulating at the entrance. The prince was the Government sort of Minister of Transport but my client was the builder who had won the contract on some atrociously bad designs produced by the Railways' architects and draughtsman. The builder had to produce the working drawings of what he built as part of his contract. He came to see me and asked me to redesign the school and detail it. He had committed himself to start within a week because there was going to be an official celebration on the site and the prince wanted the work to be seen to have started by then. I produced designs for each building as the contractor went along and the college was soon almost completed, except for the auditorium and the train tower. By the time the auditorium's turn came they had run short of money and time. The vertical goods train twenty metres high, which was to be a pivotal tower for the whole town, they had never quite taken seriously.
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The smaller and quite different school at the entrance is the Post Office School This small building plays quite a civic role. It confirms the symmetry of the garden on which the too wide Avenida da Republica terminates. The school itself forms a shallow courtyard facing this garden. The ground floor is high - it is made to take in a future mezzanine.
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Waterford School, Mbabane, Swaziland
Above - axonometric |
Above - site development plan Below - elevations
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