Employee engagement in physical activities has proven to help employees develop socialization and integration skills. Sport is a physical activity that aims to maintain and improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants.

Given this, Blackrock Developers collaborated with Bricklane Development Group, Saka Homes, Multi-Build Limited, and Taylor Crabbe Barristers and Solicitors to organize its first-ever intercompany game competition at the Athletic Oval on the University of Ghana Campus on Saturday, April 23, 2022.

Before the event, participating companies eagerly anticipated and anxiously looked forward to the event day and the company who gets to win the trophy.

After several weeks of suspense, the event date finally came; it was a beautiful sunny Saturday morning, and participants beautifully clothed in their elegant jerseys arrived on time and with full enthusiasm. The games for the day were; Football (knockout), Ludo, Volley Ball, Lime and spoon, Sack racing, Biting the Apple, Tug of War, and Mixed medley race. The competition started at 8:00 am with an opening prayer, an introduction of companies and their members, and an aerobic session to warm participants up and to set the atmosphere for the games.

The first game on the event sheet was football; captains from each side balloted to know their opponents; Blackrock faced Multi-build, while Saka homes faced TaylorCrabbe. Being a knockout tournament, Bricklane faced Blackrock after their win over Multi-build, and Saka Homes also won and waited to face Blackrock after their victory over Bricklane. In the end, Blackrock emerged first in the football game.

Ludo, Mixed medley race, and Lime and spoon then followed. All companies supported, cheered, and encouraged their members to accumulate more points towards winning the trophy. Bricklane, with consistent preparation on three(3) conservative Fridays before the event day,  emerged first in these three (3) games; the only lady (Matilda) on Bricklane’s mixed medley race team set an incredible pace for her team members, leading to our victory.

The second round of the Biting the Apple game got people over the moon; unlike the first round, where contestants ate apples in a bowl full of water, in the second round, contestants ate apples hung in the air with no hand support. The teasing and cracking of jokes over the losing teams intensified, and you could hear lots of noise and cheers from the Bricklane stand. Bricklane turned out 1st place again, and this elevated their support. Blackrock was Bricklane’s fierce competitor for the day, they wanted to do everything possible to win the next and final game, the tug of war, and they eventually succeeded.

There were breaks for relaxation, eating, dancing, and socialization. It was heartening seeing new friendships forged and teams cheering their team members. Everyone present, including directors, participated in one game or the other.

At the end of the games, Blackrock emerged 1st, Bricklane 2nd, TaylorCrabbe 3rd, Multi-build Limited 4th, and Saka Homes 5th. The overall winner Blackrock Developers was presented with the trophy.

Not only did participants get the opportunity to have a healthy and active lifestyle through the games, but they also got to bond with each other.

It was a fun-filled day; everyone was excited, and even companies who could not win the trophy left the field happy.

Arc. Awurabena Agyeman-Duah and Arc. Abraham Kpelle of Bricklane exhibit a selection of our projects at the 2021 world Architecture Day celebrations hosted by the Ghana Institute of Architects at the Kofi Annan Center of Excellence in ICT, Accra.

AQUA SAFARI AND SAFARI VALLEY RESORTBY: ARCHITECT DANIEL K. TEYE OFBRICKLANE DEVELOPMENT DEVELOPMENT GROUP.Meet the Architect behind the critically acclaimed Aqua Safari Resort in Ada and Safari Valley Resort, the first luxury Eco Park Resort sited in the Okere District in the Eastern Region of Ghana with accommodation and Recreation facilities that provide world class services to its guests.These buildings are designed to fit seemlessly into the natural landscape complimenting the natural environment with a unique rustic architecture. Join us on the 4th of October (WORLD ARCHITECTURE DAY) to hear Architect Daniel K. Teye share his design philosophy behind this creation together with that of several other masterpieces, originating from his studios.

PROGRAMME

Source: Ghana Institute of Architects

The issue of menstrual hygiene is inadequately acknowledged and has received less action in most societies. Menstrual hygiene management is an essential aspect of hygiene for women and adolescent girls between menarche and menopause. Despite being an important issue concerning women and girls in the menstruating age group, menstrual hygiene management is often overlooked in our homes and schools.

Unhygienic menstrual practices and lack of sanitation facilities such as proper toilet facilities with running water and soap, proper pins for the disposal of used sanitary pads in schools makes school girls vulnerable to emotional, physical and health challenges during their menstruation days.

The objective of organizing this year’s Menstrual Hygiene Workshop themed “My Period My Pride” is to educate the school girls on the practice of good menstrual hygiene, how to manage their menstruation with confidence, safety, dignity and comfort using safe hygiene materials, together with adequate water and disposal with privacy.

WASH in Schools (WinS) promotes inclusiveness and individual self-respect by offering an alternative to the stigma and marginalization associated with hygiene issues. In recognition of the positive impact on girls’ school attendance and achievements, Bricklane Development Group a civil infrastructure industry with a corporate policy that focuses on gender parity in the industry embark on Menstrual Hygiene Awareness Program annually.

The Menstrual Hygiene awareness workshop was part of Bricklane’s Corporate Social Responsibility project, which aimed at addressing adolescent girls’ menstrual hygiene management needs, through WASH in Schools (WinS) program and also to ensure absenteeism attributed to menstruation are avoided.   

In collaboration with the Ghana Education Service and Ghana Health Service, the workshop was organized at Oyarifa Presby Primary and Junior High School for more than 500 girls in the La-Nkwantanang Madina Municipality, to empower girls on the importance of good menstrual hygiene.

After educating the girls on proper menstrual hygiene practices, Bricklane distributed sanitary pads to all the girls who took part in the program.

The company has taken upon itself to undertake such programs annually with the fundamental goal of empowering girls in society and bringing to the fore the need for community schools to have access to sanitation and hygiene facilities.

When the French architect Jean-Philippe Vassal was practicing  urban planning in Niger, West Africa, in the mid-1980’s, he observed people with very few resources assembling and inventing architecture with the everyday objects and the materials at their disposal. His partner Anne Lacaton, whom he had met at architecture school in Bordeaux, saw the same when she would visit him. “We understood that everything was important. There was no reason to waste anything,” said Vassal.

An ethos of looking to cities’ existing building stock and readily accessible materials as a place to begin their designs, from social housing, cultural and academic institutions, and urban schemes, is one of the reasons the Paris-based architects have been selected as the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates, the profession’s highest honor.

In its citation, released today, the Pritzker jury wrote: “The modernist hopes and dreams to improve the lives of many are reinvigorated through their work that responds to the climatic and ecological emergencies of our time, as well as social urgencies, particularly in the realm of urban housing. They accomplish this through a powerful sense of space and materials that creates architecture as strong in its forms as in its convictions, as transparent in its aesthetic as in its ethics.”

 In a telephone interview, Lacaton, 65, and Vassal, 67, said that the practice of architecture, which often tethers designers to their offices and computers, can distance them from reality. “There is only one real dimension—where you see and speak with people,” said Vassal. “When you are in that dimension, urban planning and architecture are often very violent. The question of kindness and delicacy is, for us, essential: To take care of people in a very precise way. Architecture exists because life is inside. We try to give more freedom for people to be creative, to dream, because we think that quality of space is something important for each inhabitant.” Lacaton agreed: “It is the point of architecture to make space for life, for living—not representation.”

The idea of creating more space for comfort, even in a dense city, through lush winter gardens, balconies, and retractable facades, has defined Lacaton & Vassal’s projects since they began their practice in 1987. It’s especially striking at La Tour Bois le Pêtre, a 17-story, 96-unit Paris housing project built in the 1960s that the pair transformed in 2011, garnering them international attention. Rather than raze the building, as the government wanted to do with much of its maligned mid-century social housing, the architects put their radical mantra to work: “Never demolish, never replace.” They extended the footprint of the building by removing the facade and adding generous bioclimatic balconies, and each unit now has a flexible indoor-outdoor living space with views of the city.

The architects took a similar approach to the transformation of another city housing block in Bordeaux, in 2017. With architects Frédéric Druot and Christophe Hutin, Vassal and Lacaton expanded all 530 units of Grand Parc without displacing residents and for half of the cost of building new, garnering the team the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture in 2019.

Lacaton and Vassal met in the late 1970s at École Nationale Supêrieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux and were drawn to each other’s sensibilities. “We worked well together and we decided to continue,” said Lacaton. She went on to pursue a Masters in Urban Planning from Bordeaux Montaigne University while Vassal went to Niger. The Moroccan-born Vassal said his childhood in Casablanca must have influenced his chosen profession, with its modernist buildings oriented towards the ocean and its legacy of craftsmanship. His father, a meteorologist, attuned him to the climate, both indoors and out.

Creating a porousness that allows a building’s inhabitants to easily access the outdoors has been a constant in Vassal and Lacaton’s work, beginning with their early private houses. The small budget Latapie House of 1993, in Floriac, France, employs natural ventilation and solar shading. Using wood, polycarbonate sheeting, and opaque fiber cement boards, the architects created operable layers of openness and refuge.

This doubling of usable space can be seen quite literally in the pair’s FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, a contemporary art museum in Dunkerque, France. There, the architects preserved a pre-World War II shipbuilding facility on the waterfront and built a twin structure adjacent to it with transparent, pre-fabricated materials. Visitors can see through the new into the old structure, which now provides space for public programming.

Grouped together, Lacaton & Vassal’s projects might seem to have a similar palette and modest materiality, but Lacaton insists that their designs begin with the “conditions of living, of feeling, of living together,” and that the choice of materials is a direct response to the desire to create a building envelope that is light and responsive to the seasons. “Transparency is important, but transparency that can be nuanced and filtered with glass or polycarbonate,” said Lacaton. “The notion of escape is important.” Lacaton agreed, adding that their goal is to free architecture from its defensive position against the environment, but rather play with it “like clothing.”

When they create new buildings, as they did for an architecture school in Nantes, France, Vassal and Lacaton use this same idea of a skeletal system with “platforms and envelopes” to create adaptable, flexible spaces. Located on the Loire River, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes is a three-story building featuring a concrete and steel frame encased in retractable polycarbonate walls and sliding doors. A wide ramp that runs from the ground to the roof deck is meant for spontaneous gatherings.

Vassal & Lacaton’s office of eight is currently working on the transformation of a former hospital into a 138-unit, mid-rise apartment building in Paris and an 80-unit, mid-rise building in Anderlecht, Belgium, among others. The architects said they were celebrating their win with wine from Bordeaux (of course) and looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues when COVID-19 eased. Vassal said he wanted to use their platform to amplify the voices of young architects. “We have to believe in their dreams and their ability to improve the quality of life for everyone. Most of the time we don’t ask them, and most of the time we should ask them much more.” 

SOURCE: www.architecturalrecord.com

International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. This day marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.

Marked annually on March 8th, International Women’s Day (IWD) is one of the most important days of the year to: celebrate women’s achievements, raise awareness about women’s equality, lobby for accelerated gender parity, and to raise funds for female-focused charities.

This year’s theme, #ChooseToChallenge is a call to action that, a challenged world is an alert world.

The Ghanaian societies in the past, relegated the role of women to the kitchen and mere household chores, unlike their male counterparts who were given formal education. At a point when women were given the opportunity to go to school in Ghana, they were exempted from some courses like Architecture, Engineering, Medicine and so on. This is because, there were preconceptions that women were not physically strong to endure strenuous tasks in those industries. E. A. Baryeh et al. (2010) indicate that “the absence of counselling in secondary schools, difficulties in understanding mathematical concepts, criticism, and discouragement from people and the low number of female lecturers are some of the causes of low female participation in engineering”.

In recent years however, women have been encouraged to go to school and choose professions previously dominated by men. The current educational policies of the government of Ghana also, promote equal educational opportunities in non-traditional women’s programmes.

As Architects and Engineers, Bricklane Development Group as part of its gender parity policy, places high gender equity considerations into all facets of its work .We are proud of our women and their achievements for the company. Although our current gender ratio may not bridge fully gender disparity in our workplace, we however believe that we are in the right direction to bridging gender disparity.

“We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements, we at Bricklane Development Group believe that collectively we can help create an inclusive world.”

We say a happy international women’s day to all women across the globe.

We #ChooseToChallenge

Isozaki was commended by the jury as “one of the most influential figures in contemporary world architecture.”

Arata Isozaki has won the 2019 Pritzker Prize. The eighth Japanese architect to be awarded the honor, Isozaki was commended by the jury as “one of the most influential figures in contemporary world architecture on a constant search, not afraid to change and try new ideas.”

Isozaki worked under Kenzo Tange before establishing his own firm in 1963. His early projects were influenced by European experiences as well as the Brutalist and Metabolist movements. Notable buildings completed early in his career include Oita Medical Hall (1959-1960), the Fujimi Country Club (1973–74) and Kitakyushu Central Library (1973–74). Later he developed a more modernistic style, with buildings such as the Art Tower of Mito (1986–90) and Domus-Casa del Hombre (1991-1995) in Galicia, Spain.

Arata Isozaki; image via ThoughtCo.

In 2005, Arata Isozaki founded the Italian branch of his office, Arata Isozaki & Andrea Maffei Associates. Major projects from this office include the Allianz Tower CityLife office tower, a redevelopment project in the former trade fair area in Milan, and the new Town Library in Maranello, Italy. Designing a wide array of buildings both inside and outside Japan, Isozaki has been described as an architect who refuses to be stuck in one architectural style, highlighting “how each of his designs is a specific solution born out of the project’s context.”

“His architecture rests on profound understanding, not only of architecture but also of philosophy, history, theory and culture,” stated the jury. “He has brought together East and West, not through mimicry or as a collage, but through the forging of new paths. He has set an example of generosity as he supports other architects and encourages them in competitions or through collaborative works.”

Top image: Qatar National Convention Center; image via Gulf News Journal

SOURCE: https://architizer.com

Bricklane Development Group on 23^rd December, 2020, held the annual end of year awards ceremony. The ceremony dubbed “Bricklane Alfresco and Awards 2020” was held at the forecourt of the Head Office and Chaired by Professor Kwaku Boateng while observing all Covid-19 safety protocols. The awards ceremony honoured deserving staff amidst entertainment and speeches by various Heads of Departments and Directors of the Company.

The highly competitive awards scheme involved twelve categories as follows: Most Corporate Person of the Year, Immaculate Person of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Team Leader of the Year, Best Site Supervisor of the Year, Best Team Member of the Year, Business Promoter of the Year, Department of the Year, Project team of the Year, Best Engineering and Architectural Design of the Year. The Star of the Year award, which was the ultimate award of the day, went to MR. SELASE YAO DOGBE (Building Technology Department) for his outstanding performance throughout the year. Directors’ Special Awards were also given to deserving individuals for their service to Bricklane.