The Bagamoyo Museum of Ornamental Minerals was my final year thesis project for the B.Arch undergraduate program at the University of Nairobi. The project was a continuation of my final year written thesis on Natural Lighting in Gemstone Processing Spaces that studied the use of natural light in small scale gemstone processing spaces in Arusha, Tanzania and the large scale diamond processing building in Gabororne, Botswana.

The thesis project site was a 10 acre beach front property on the Northern parts of the historical Bagamoyo Town that is about 75km to the North of Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania's commercial capital.

 

Bagamoyo is famous for being the terminus of the inland route of the horrific East African slave trade. It's name is said to stem from the Swahili words "bwaga moyo" which mean "lay down your heart", an embodiment of the despair felt by the slaves as they saw their homeland for the last time before being shipped off to Zanzibar and other slave markets around the world.

 

Bagamoyo was also the first seat of the German colonial government in Tanzania during the late 1800's colonization of Africa.

 

Locating the Museum in this rich historical setting would symbolize the doing away with oppressive economic regimes (slavery and colonisation) and ushering in of a new era of a prestigious resource based economic system that Tanzania's mineral trade is a part of.

While most of the Southern coastline in Bagamoyo town is dominated by public activities, the Northern beaches have been taken over private tourist hotels and resorts. This has led to the death of a once vibrant public beachfront on these parts.

 

Locating the Museum at this part of the beach rejuvenates its public life. A 24 hour restaurant and bar facing the ocean, fronted by a public square with outdoor furniture ensures this. A boardwalk that stretches past mangrove vegetation onto a platform that offers a closer, more refined view of wildlife in the Indian ocean further encourages the public realm.

Also fronting the beach is an events auditorium that is accessed through the museum's main entrance to exhibition spaces. This facility is mainly meant for auction and ornament fashion events hosted by the museum for commercial purposes. The backstage activities that are usually located behind the stage have been pushed to the side, allowing the ocean to be used as a backdrop to the activities taking place within the  auditorium, and using specialized laminated glass to sound proof the windows.

The research conducted for the written thesis showed that natural lighting was used in the gemstone prcessing environment mainly for general lighting and ambient lighting. However, the processing activities sometimes required highly demanding specialized visual tasks such as searching for defects within an unprocessed gemstone. Such activities required artificial task lighting. it therefore followed that artificial lighting woud be unavoidable in a museum of ornamental minerals where, apart from the demanding visual tasks, different colours of light could be used to enhance the visual characteristics of gemstones and their resulting ornamental objects. Sustainable energy sources were required.

 

The thesis project incorporated the use of off-shore wind turbines, on-site biogas generation using waste from the washrooms, eateries and maintenance of the landscape's vegetation, and the generation of solar energy from photovoltaic panels fixed onto the roof of the island parking's vehicle covers.

For sustainability purposes, the thesis projet also sought to use locally available building materials. Of these, the most widely used were the coral rock and the coconut palm tree wood. Coral rock is generated in the ocean by the formation of coral reefs. It was used for infill masonry walls and zero-jointed cladding of all external concrete surfaces such as the security walls for the storage areas. Coconut palm tree wood was used externally for the mashrabiya tha covered most of the project'swindow openings and as floor, wall and ceiling finishes. Other building materials used were polished marble(an ornamental minerals in it's own right) and precast cementitious structural insulated panels with internal steel structural supports for the modular natural lighting roof systems.

The ground floor level of the museum's exhibition block was dominated by open spaces and had two temporary exhibitions galleries, the open-access storage gallery and the auction and fashion events auditorium. These spaces were connected through a system of walkways and courtyards.

The permanent exhibition galleries were located on the first to fourth floor levels and were accessed through a 5m wide ramp that was used for statue displays and gave views of the Indian ocean and Stone Town Bagamoyo as one rose to the next level. the galleries were arranged upward in terms of mineral types and origins.

Natural lighting and ventilation was a major design consideration for this project. This was achieved for all spaces. In the permanent exhibition spaces where fixed side lighting windows were a necessity, a 4mX4m cubic skylight opening naturally heated the air in the uppper parts and alloewed it to escape through ventillation windows. This caused a lower pressure within the exhibition space which then led to sucking in of air that had been cooled by evaporation by wet river rock located underneath the building. A combination of stack effect and evaporative thermal control.