MASS Weaves Regenerative Architecture Into Rwanda’s Vibrant Landscape

Regenerative Architecture focuses on the interconnectedness of living systems and aims to create eco-centric designs. The primary consideration is to design buildings that focus on ecological well-being.

Can architecture be regenerative? To become so, we need to understand our reciprocal relationship with nature: to take only what is given and what we need, to acknowledge that we have damaged the earth and that it needs healing. Is RICA regenerative? In some way, it heals.

MASS’s Approach to Regenerative Architecture

Over the past fifteen years, MASS Design Group has developed an approach to design and construction that focuses on minimizing a project’s ecological and carbon footprint whilst maximizing its human handprint.

They are partnering with the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) to design and build their new campus in Bugesera, Rwanda. MASS led the master planning, architecture, landscape, engineering, and construction for the new campus. The project was conceived and funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and supported by the Government of Rwanda.

The conception of the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) is thus grounded in an education of small-farm realities, providing the conditions for its students and researchers to scale innovations that leverage human capital and creativity as the primary means of increasing agricultural yield and economic value.

They discovered that the 1,200-hectare site that had functioned as a Ministry of Agriculture testing site was previously a national park, one of only two in Rwanda’s savannah region. Working with Rwanda’s foremost ecologist, they undertook a detailed ecological survey that identified a series of threatened endemic plants and bird species in the largest remaining intact savannah woodland in southern Rwanda.

The plan for the campus builds around existing biodiversity and seeks to heal the landscape by stitching together habitats and agricultural spaces. The large site also provided the grounds for achieving a climate-positive project. The team of architects and engineers worked to reduce the upfront embodied impacts of the
project to 40 percent of a business-as-usual case by harvesting much of the project’s materials from the site itself and by reducing the use of carbon-intensive materials like cement and steel as much as possible.

To reduce operational emissions, they worked with Transsolar and Arup to optimize RICA for daylighting, natural ventilation, and water efficiency to reduce demands, thus reducing the size of the solar farm and water treatment facilities that support the off-grid campus. This results in a dramatically reduced life cycle carbon footprint — one that can be offset on-site through twenty years of afforestation and silviculture — which will result in Africa’s first climate-positive campus.

Sustainable Material Sourcing and Local Handprints

Using local knowledge, forty hectares of previously degraded farmland are being restored to savannah woodland, and through carbon sequestration in the forest, at least the climate change impacts of this project will be compensated for by 2040.

Materials are inherently emissive, but we can reduce our footprint through intimate knowledge of the places we work, and we can maximize our handprint when we cocreate with the people who live there. – MASS Design Group

The project developed a supply chain of materials and finishes that were harvested, sourced, processed, and crafted locally. Ninety-six percent of the materials were sourced within Rwanda, which is slightly smaller than the state of Massachusetts. Of these materials, they chose to present the handprint and footprint of the stone, earth, and wood used in the project.

Stone

So much of a contemporary building’s impact is buried underground, out of sight and out of mind, in the form of reinforced concrete foundations — the building’s footprint in every respect. Traditional stone mortared
foundations are a time-tested, local alternative.

At RICA, the quartzite stone was quarried from within ten miles of the site. Each stone was individually placed in an interlocking pattern and caringly mortared by hand. A reinforced concrete grade beam ties the foundation together and resolves bending forces resulting from seismic activity. This foundation solution reduces embodied carbon by 60 percent compared to fully reinforced concrete solutions

Earth

The feasibility of earth as a building material is demonstrated by the thousands through Rwanda’s vernacular housing. However, construction at the scale of a project like RICA required a rigorous approach to address
durability and strength. During conceptual design, geotechnical and structural engineers dug pits across the site to identify the ideal soil mix for compressed stabilized earth blocks (CSEBs) and rammed
earth. Drawing on their knowledge of the land and support from ecologists, they dug in the least ecologically sensitive areas to minimize impact.

Through this early phased-testing approach, they optimized the soil mix by adding 4.5 percent Portland cement and 2.5 percent pozzolana (volcanic ash). These amendments significantly improved the durability and compressive strength of the blocks and allowed construction to continue during the rainy season without temporary shelters.

Wood

The design of this campus coincided with the first FSC forest management certification in Rwanda. With the idea that architecture is built for and by the place, they worked with the materials that were available through this regional mill, which does not ordinarily produce wood for construction.

The campus design includes landscape, housing, academic space, barn storage, and processing space for the institute. Each academic building across the campus is dedicated to one of the six different agricultural enterprises, both plant- and animal-based, that students will study and engage with throughout their three years at the institute. More mechanized practices are situated on the West end of the campus, and smallholder first-year student farms are placed on the East end. The campus uses pivot irrigation and will be energy-independent, with its own solar farm and water treatment plant. 

The curriculum and campus design at RICA is informed by Conservation Agriculture and One Health Principles, both of which emphasize the interlinking of ecological, animal, and human health. The campus and curriculum seek to reinforce these principles by taking an interdisciplinary, experiential approach to learning with a campus that promotes biodiversity, ecological conservation, and community participation. RICA will soon be a world leader in experiential education, research, and conservation agriculture. 

Project Details

Year: 2023
Status: Complete
Size: 3,400 acres
Program: Agricultural campus and curriculum training Rwanda’s next generation of leaders in agriculture
Clients: Howard G. Buffett Foundation
Partners: Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, Government of Rwanda

About the MASS:

MASS Design Group was founded on the understanding that architecture’s influence reaches beyond individual buildings. Our mission is to research, build, and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and
human dignity. MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) believes that architecture has a critical role to play in supporting communities to confront history, shape new narratives, collectively heal, and project new possibilities for the future. We are a team of over 200 architects, landscape architects, engineers, builders, furniture designers, makers, writers, filmmakers, and researchers representing twenty countries across the globe. We believe in expanding access to design that is purposeful, healing, and hopeful.

The project description is provided by MASS Design Group.

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