Christian Benimana and the MASS Design Group are changing lives through design and architecture.
Words: Peta Krost Maunder, Photography: Iwan Baan
Christian Benimana uses his skills not just to make beautiful structures, but to create buildings that benefit the community for whom they are built. “My designs are all human-centred and focused,” he says.
The Rwandan manager of the multi-award-winning Mass Design Group believes that “architecture is not just about building design, but about the implementation of impactful process that creates long-term impact”.
Benimana and Mass have created numerous buildings across Africa, particularly hospitals and schools, that have tangibly improved the quality of people’s lives.
“There are many ways architecture can do this, from creating adequate and inspiring spaces from an artistic point of view, to creating appropriate built-environment while protecting the natural one, to put in place structures that encourage inclusions and healthy communities,” he says.
“However, the ultimate power of architecture is to instill systemic change through an improved design and construction process that creates a long-lasting impact of architecture creations.”
The 33-year-old Benimana hails from Kigali, and has always been fascinated with how things work and are put together. “I watched my father (an electrical engineer) fix things in the house and was proud to tell my friends about the things he had made,” says Benimana. “I always knew I wanted to make buildings, but since architecture wasn’t really a known subject in our country, I thought I would become an engineer.”
Only once he had attained a scholarship to study in China did he discover that he could study something called architecture, which would enable him to conceive the whole building from scratch. It was the fact that he could use his imagination in this field that drew him to study and qualify at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongii University in Shanghai.
Having to learn in Chinese — a language he had hardly heard of before he left — made his tertiary education tough, but learning in a multicultural megacity like Shanghai proved to be a blessing. “Shanghai was going through tremendous change when I was there, and we experienced the whole array of best and worse projects. The amount of transformation I saw through architecture and design was incredible, and at the same time I saw serious displacement of population at the hands of this development,” he says. “It opened my eyes to there being other ways to do things.”
When he returned to Rwanda in 2010, the country was experiencing a major building boom. “I noticed that entire neighbourhoods were being destroyed to make place for this ‘development’, and communities were forced to move to new places that were unsafe and would not withstand the next earthquake.”
Because of this, Benimana was drawn to the Mass Design Group, where architecture was used to improve communities and protect the environment. “I believe each project should have a transcendent idea that instills systemic change to make the world a better place, and that is what sets Mass apart from other companies.”
His first project with Mass was to design the Butaro Hospital in Burera District, Rwanda, which was built to have maximum impact on the population. It employed 4 000 local people to build it using all local material. “It was designed from a patient perspective, where each one had a window and a view to a beautiful landscape. This hospital made people healthy; it was good for the environment and brings dignity to this community,” says Benimana.
He was now sold on this “human-centred” approach, believing it would “save African cities”.
He saw so much potential to be positively exploited in Africa and believed that little was being done about it. “African design and architecture could be so much more than exciting fabrics, colours and patterns, or vernacular African village influences,” he says.
“It could be the benchmark for the rest of the world, to correct mistakes made by the misconception of design and architecture in the past. “
His design style focuses on beauty and elegance, and is African in that it is “created by Africans, situated in Africa, and built by Africans with material sourced as far as possible in Africa.” But while he is proudly African, Benimana says that at Mass they have “proved that the current infrastructure development causes more harm than good, and that design and architecture have the power to change this”.
He is adamant that the age-old trick of “doing the bare minimum” has hidden costs. He says that people need to understand that there is a threshold where the bare minimum is simply exposing people to long-term dangers in not providing adequate infrastructure to support the local communities.
With so much potential for design out there, Benimana warns against putting up buildings in a hurry to make a quick buck. “This is not just a land that needs to be filled with building, but rather we need to use our skills for development, that way changing the way we do things in Africa.” He compares architecture to medicine, where you require a licence, and if you fall foul of the licensing body’s rules, you may lose your right to be a doctor. “The danger in architecture is there is no licence, and the dangers can affect far more people,” he says.
Benimana explains that one of his biggest challenges is “the notion that some lives matter less than others and that certain people don’t deserve architecture.”
He battles with the misconception that architecture is simply a profession that produces buildings with advanced methods and technologies, and what matters is speed and efficiency.”
For Benimana (and Mass), creating a building doesn’t start with drawings, it starts with defining the mission and then becoming immersed in the site, to live and understand the environment and its needs. “Then, from our findings and mission alignment, we go back to the drawing board and look at the opportunities that allow us to leverage technologies and job creation,” he says.
Mass works with partners from an early stage and go through the whole process with the contractors. “We also embed a training component to the job, ensuring someone is there to monitor the quality and teach people.”
They then initiate research to see what impact the construction has on the local community and how the facility can carry out its original intention in the best way possible. For example, if they are creating a hospital for children with polio, they will look at how the design can further the mission to help eradicate the disease. They then disseminate their findings so the lessons learnt can be used to improve not just their own process, but everything they and others do.
“I see design as the solution to providing valuable employment, a key challenge to the continent now and for the foreseeable future,” says Benimana. “Our constant challenge is to find ways to leverage the power of design to provide opportunities to as many people as possible and at the same time to put up buildings that are appropriate for the individual lifestyle as a well as for the communities with which we work.”
He is content that through his career so far he has managed to distinguish himself “as an advocate for this change”.
Benimana is the chairman of the Education Board of the Rwanda Institute of Architects and of the Education Board Council of the East African Institute of Architects. “It is my dream to see young African designers and architects having a broader vision that allows them to come up with these solutions, and be empowered to actually change the status quo,” he says.
His next big step is designing three African design centres to educate the next generation of human-centred designers who will design and build the future cities of Africa. “I want to harness the talent and spirit that is uniquely African to create African cities, not as vast slums, but as the most resilient and socially inclusive,” he says. He told the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September that these centres of learning would be the answer to the Africa’s unprecedented urbanisation. “We have to act now. If we ignore who designs the cities, we are doomed to see the worst environmental degradation, the worst economic inequality and public health disasters. This is the way we can build the creative leadership that will make Africa equitable.”
Benimana was inspired to get involved in education because, he says, “ignorance is far more dangerous than bad intentions”, and he believes that with his experience he can create an environment to inspire the next generation to do better than those who have gone before them. “They need to learn the true power of design and the dangers that can be introduced if the creative power is used in the wrong way,” he says.
“I am curious and stubborn enough to believe if we set our mind to do good, there is no reason we can’t do it.”
The Lo-Fab movement
Mass started an approach to the design and building process called the Lo-Fab (locally fabricated) movement. On their projects, they highlight and scale local innovation and ideas, hire local labour and use local material wherever possible. “The Lo-Fab movement is the ultimate contextually-responsible architectural design-extended process and method,” says Benimana. “While there has been trend of using local materials in the architecture community for a while now, the Lo-Fab movement seeks to tie this to local skills and needs, economic development and valorisation of marketable skills.”
For Benimana, Lo-Fab means the opportunity to provide a whole economy to a group of unskilled labourers in the beginning of a project and create a market place for those skills with one project. And from the starting point, the designers create systemic change to empower a whole young generation of African countries that — without skills to develop their own infrastructure — would be deprived of a good future.
“Lo-Fab is the ultimate innovative use of materials and technologies for all three pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic and social,” says Benimana.
Mass Design Group
Mass Design Group was launched in 2008, by Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks, with a clear mission to “design, build and advocate for better buildings, and empower the people who build them”. The company was created during the design and building of Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, a project of Partners in Health and the Rwandan Ministry of Health.
Since then, Mass has grown to work on three continents and 10 countries. Its work provides infrastructure, building, and the human and physical systems necessary for growth, dignity and well-being. It has won numerous awards, including the World Architecture News Buro Happold Award, the Curry Stone Design Prize, Architecture League New Voices Award, Zumtobel Prize and the Healthcare Design Changemaker Award.
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