* 'Apata' is an Akan-language word that alludes to "shed" or "shelter" or "hut". It speaks to a space (communal or home) whose meaning is deepened by the relations inherent within it. It could also be a space intended for rest.
When [A]FA was invited to work on a master plan for the Haduwa Arts and Culture Institute in Apam on the Atlantic coast of southern Ghana, the first critical question was: How a could future institution for performing arts stay alive and best promote itself in its first phase? It was assumed that, due to Haduwa's remote location, the conception, design and construction of a stage as attractor there would be the answer to a first, innocent, and at the same time, fully prominent gesture.
[A]FA was interested in starting the project on the scale of the (performing) body, as opposed to an architectural scale. This was appealing on a programmatic level, and because the Haduwa board consists of performing artists and cultural workers. Against this backdrop, an [A]FA team of students of architecture, landscaping and social design collaborated with artists and performing arts students who had formed the Lab DC at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. The idea was that intensely experiencing the site and its context through one's own body and through all one’s senses – in a transdisciplinary manner – would allow for a deeper understanding of its ecology: a set of environmental and cultural parameters could be cataloged based on body space and framing interventions. The challenge became the generation of a culturally, ecologically and economically new typological model of an open institutional space that mingles the diverse temporalities of architecture, art and the everyday.
The design process evolved from the insights gained through the body space experiences and started with a diagrammatic series of potential spatial organizations of staging(s) that encompasses different relationships between the performing artists and their audiences. A multifunctional staging ground was designed in which each performance and gathering can be positioned in a unique way. The resulting project is a floorscape and roofscape located at the seafront borderline of the Haduwa site. In dialogue with the floorscape, the roofscape also adapts to the given topography, rather than being cut off from its surroundings. The Haduwa Apata is a giant bamboo dome with three open arches each facing different directions—a grid shell composed solely of bamboo. A series of intensive workshops were conducted in order to get an understanding for and work with the material properties of bamboo, and to invent details for the bamboo construction and roofing skin. The project was realized over a period of several months by the project team itself, in collaboration with local sources of labor.
The type of reactive space that was created epitomizes an alternative to on that is subject to total social and aesthetic control: an unfamiliar piece of bamboo architecture, which is difficult to categorize, as it is neither a ‘proper’ building, nor just a secondary landscape. The evolutionary process from body space, to bamboo building to the textile arts has been the subject of navigation between artistic fields and scales.
