LOUISIANA, NEW ORLEANS - Nationally recognized architecture, design and planning firm Gould Evans is pleased to announce that the Cheick Hamala Diabaté Institute for the Performing Arts is the winner in the Cultural Regeneration category at the MIPIM/Architectural Review Future Project Awards 2020. Its sixth notable award, the project will provide a new music and cultural institute approximately four miles from the center of Kita, a town in sub-Saharan Africa. The project is a collaboration between Gould Evans, Billes Architects, Friends of Mali USA, the Cheick Hamala Diabaté Foundation and Cheick Hamala Diabaté a Malian Griot. In West Africa, a Griot is a storyteller, historian and musician. Griot music is a multi-generational tradition that binds the culture with their ancestry, embedded in the cultural fabric of Mali. The Institute is an extension of the Griot tradition, incorporating space for music performances, recordings, classes and community gathering, while transferring heritage skills from one generation to the next. The facility, a 33,000SF Academic and Performing Arts Building, is inspired by another kind of cultural fabric: the region's rich textile and arts history, as well as the urban streetscape of Kita. The compositional pattern of the building references the striping patterns of traditional woven blankets and the found artwork of West African artist El Anatsui. A layer of transverse paths bisect these bars like the urban streetscape, all focused around the central performance space. The construction will marry traditional Malian building materials like mud bricks and simple corrugated roofs with advanced technologies like PV panels and a state-of-the-art recording studio. Thoughtful design choices like hand-molded masonry walls, strategically placed shade trees, and roofs which collect rainwater for cisterns contribute to the building’s low-energy consumption. The MIPIM/Architectural Review Future projects award celebrates excellence in unbuilt or incomplete projects. The annual award is organized by along with the magazine Architectural Review. The Cultural Regeneration award, which was awarded to the Cheick Hamala Diabaté Institute for the Performing Arts, concerns cultural projects which will improve and enhance their surroundings.
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