Architecture

Nasser Branch Campus

Brief

This international university will be home to twelve thousand students from countries throughout the African continent and beyond.  Sugh el Ahad is a small town around forty kilometres south of Tripoli.  The small education facility currently on the site will be expanded into a prestigious international seat of learning.  Design work began late 2007 and completed in Spring 2009.  The anticipated completion date for the Nasser campus is 2012.  The capital cost of the project is sixty million pounds sterling.

Response

The proposals seek to build on concepts that are evident in ancient settlements in Libya, setting down a sense of order and hierarchy through robust geometries imposed on the landscape.  Evolutionary and organic growth is structured by super-imposing an organisational grid onto the landscape to determine the layout and geometry of the new buildings and the new landscape design.  The ‘streets’ are orientated to the cardinal points in the same way as ancient Roman settlements with their cardo (north-south) and decumanus (east-west) main axes, providing a sense of unity for the campus as a whole and a community hub at the confluence of the axis.

Outcome

The faculty portion of the campus is designed as a series of linear building blocks organised in a rotational geometry around a central public square.  This serves as the campus' social focus and gathering place, emphasised by the location here of shared facilities.  The surrounding 'wings' contain and define separate faculties, each with its own distinct architectural expression.  This is derived from a combination of internal functional requirements and the unique opportunities and challenges offered by the local microclimate and views out of the site.  A new bridge across the adjacent Wadi connects the campus to the principal route into Tripoli.  The Nasser campus is one of eight university campus projects Keppie has been designing in Libya since the commission started in Summer 2007.


Team