Today marks a week since my first visit to Kwa Thema, the place already seems so common and normal to me, Robyn mentioned that we were home, as we drove through the Library gates. We met our volunteers at the beer hall, they were eager to get work done, but we were there on a kind of design feasibility assessment. It has been raining for the past two days, and the build up of rubbish has washed all over the site, and has begun to smell. These kinds of conditions, central to communities, and especially where children play, are completely unacceptable, how the residents can calmly dump their household garbage across a green strip of land so easily is plainly disgusting, and the fact that the council has left it there is even more troublesome. We had a productive morning trying to visualise our design ideas, and budget constraints.
We are designing an intervention which would make the building an extension of the public space around it. A safe facility which could harbour many community functions. A blank canvass for human performance. We see it being activated in a similar way that a park is activated by children, a place where kids play, parents watch. A tourist or educational element will be included where we would like to paint important parts of Kwa Thema’s history on the building’s soffit and columns. The largest intervention will be the balustrade, a preferably light element, resting gently between columns. A basketball, soccer, sports area will be included in the main volume where the patrons of the beer hall once sat, spectators will be able to watch the participants from the upper level. The volunteers seemed very happy with these ideas, now we just need to be meticulous and sort them out.
