Paper presented at Architecture for Education,
Universidad de Navarra, Spain.
April 11-12, 2024.
Universidad de Navarra, Spain.
April 11-12, 2024.
In July 1970, a string of urgent telegraphs was sent from the upscale Hotel Kilimanjaro in Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania, to Copenhagen, Oslo, London, Washington and New York. The sender—Carl Hammerschmidt, a Danish architect working for the International Development Association (IDA)—was frantically trying to tie loose ends in a global school-building project, a task of Sisyphean proportions at that. The project was conceived in the late 1960s, when IDA, a branch of the World Bank Group, offered a loan to modernise Tanzanian education. In addition to rebuilding 25 existing schools, five new ones were to be constructed. The governments of Denmark and Norway, represented by the respective foreign aid organisations, agreed to match the IDA’s loan and sponsor 75% of construction costs for the new schools. For the Tanzanian state, this was an opportunity to modernise education with foreign investments, bring up a new generation of workers and advance the ambitious plans of future self-reliance. For the Nordic donors, the project was a chance to consolidate their image of “good welfare states” and export and test the most recent domestic innovations with industrial school-building in a new geographical context. What ensued was a complex multi-lateral operation that involved professionals from five different countries and all walks of life, closely followed by an avalanche of documents, notes, drawings, telexes and telegrams sent across three continents and thousands of kilometres. And although the technical architectural solutions of the project were not complex, the many international actors involved in the process made each design decision a site of heated contestation. This particular case study offers insight into how educational spaces were endowed with a wide range of meanings in different cultural and socio-economic contexts.
The paper explores these symbolic constellations by untangling complex international negotiations through original archival documents. The study is particularly interested in how the Nordic experience with national school-building at home was mediated through international organisations and adapted to the educational and construction realities of the Tanzanian state. The mediation process required intense osmosis of knowledge, which led to curious spatial hybrids. The architecture of Nordic schools in Tanzania amalgamated the interests of the many stakeholders and served as a site where national identities were constructed, tested and contested. This case then offers an insight into how any school construction today is often a symbolic act which amalgamates different interests and identities.