This is from 2002. Arguably at the
peak of my powers as an all round architect and my last completed project in
Africa. I really enjoyed this one along with the visits to Blantyre, staying at
the Mount Soche hotel and sitting in with the resident jazz trio to sing and
play a couple of blues numbers in the dining room.
Seems like several lifetimes ago in some ways. I was
working in Autocad with a bit of Sketchup here and there. Those were the early
days before Google bought it out. Not sure Revit had been released yet but I
had played around with early versions of Archicad. Very interesting, but you
still had to flatten everything out to produce working drawings. Proto BIM, I
guess.
Malawi was fascinating. Desperately poor people, full
of good humour. A thinner but less racially divided layer of elites, compared
to Zimbabwe. They were enjoying the freedom of a post Banda era, just as we
were descending into Mugabe’s tyrannical phase. So bizarre to see the Zim
dollar falling…