Location: Moanda, Gabon.
Architect: Maissa architectures – Jean Pierre Maissa.
In the sixties, the COMILOG (Compagnie Minière de l’Ogooué) was set up to shape the newly independent nation by creating cities and boroughs from scratch. Moanda in the southeast has become a vibrant and attractive point due to the discovery of one of the world’s most profitable manganese mines in the late fifties. Comilog, now owned by France’s ERAMET Group, has since settled a partnership with the Nancy Mining School to build a college for specializing engineers in the mining field. The campus spans a thirty hectares wide area and consists of thirteen buildings including facilities and equipment such as a power generator station, supply of fire water storage, housing for personnel, students, a restaurant and foyer and a sports area.
The project explored the concept of a place to contemplate the surrounding forest environment, with a vision of an inhabited open-air mine and a series of H-shaped buildings featuring triangulated pitched and cut-out roofs with high slopes. The symbolism was to echo the pristine aspect of multiangular diamonds, which were extracted from the wild nature and exposed right in its extraction site. The goal was to expose the cycle of the extraction of raw manganese minerals that contributes to the making of high-tech manufactured products. This conceptual approach has helped shape the main building realized through its H-shaped form and its pitched multi-angled roof. The horizontal setting of the building allows for a promenade-like connection through its parts all along the H, and the continuous glazed façade allows a panoramic view of the forest.
The façade curtain walls have large mullions acting as brise-soleils shadings against the scorching equatorial sun, and the building’s architecture formal process is designed to propel its inhabitants in a unique visual connection with the immediate forestal environment. From a social standpoint, the construction was carried out by local workers with a pic of 350 workers being riched at a certain point during the most intensive part of the process.
