National educational institutions are often designed to respond to the perceived educational and “manpower” needs. Their architecture, on the other hand, mediates between the projected representational values and everyday experience of these buildings, inhabited by students, educators and administrative staff. This duality is complicated further when the designers of these institutions come from different cultural and political contexts. This was the case of the University of East Africa, first established in 1961 as a college of the University of London but, as Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda acquired independence in the early 1960s, divided across campuses in three capitals. These universities played an important role in the processes of building self-reliance and “Africanization” of all aspects of social and political life. For example, a complete Tanzanization of public administration and leadership was envisioned by the 1980s. For that, national educational institutions had to expand to accommodate an increasing number of students and provide not only educational buildings but also shared common spaces: libraries, study rooms, student dormitories and staff housing. These expansions required large investments, which were often sought abroad, and Nordic countries were among the most generous donors furnishing both financial capital and technical expertise. This cross-cultural collaboration revealed not only different approaches to education but also different conceptions of “need”, comfort and shared spaces.
Focusing on the two projects for student dormitories at the University of Dar-es-Salaam and Lusaka, this paper investigates how these ideas of “need” were projected, imagined and negotiated by different local and foreign agents. The question of “need” was complicated further by limited budgets and elaborate funding demands of global lending institutions like the World Bank. Equipped with original archival sources documenting negotiations behind the design and construction of shared university spaces, this paper dissects the many subjectivities embedded into the transnational architecture of collective-use facilities. In doing so, it explores the histories of construction centred around “need” and points to a host of future potentialities regarding the use and management of these spaces.
[paper draft]