Freehaus
Freehaus is an award-winning architecture practice made up of a diverse yet like-minded collective of architects and designers, making accessible, honest, and representative buildings.
The Africa Centre
In 2019, Freehaus was selected to transform The Africa Centre’s Southwark location, featured in this year’s Open House Festival. Our aim was to create a contemporary space that avoided tropes and superficial representation and instead honour the many traditions that bind the continent, its people and the diaspora, while connecting to the centre’s important legacy.
Through extensive research and engagement, a series of core design themes emerged that helped underpin the design, including: a preference for tactile and honest materials, a celebration of craft and thresholds, a focus on the collective and a reverence to ancestry.
Collaboration was key to create layering of design voices to help embody the diversity of the African experience. Our engagement strategy centred on collaborations and helped create commissions for other architects, interior designers, furniture makers, lighting designers and brand designers, as well as many public conversations and artist commissions.
Overall, our goal has been to represent the Africa Centre and its new home as an ambassadorial hub, celebrating and promoting pan-African culture and the diaspora, a home which can foster ideas, creative exchanges underpinned by an optimism for the future of the African continent.