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October 17, 2008, 08:38 AM ET
2 New Campuses in Libya Are Being Designed by American Architects
American architects at work on the master plan for two new university campuses in Libya are the first major American architects to work in the North African country since the United States lifted sanctions, in 2004, Architectural Record reports.
An arm of the Libyan government partly responsible for increasing the country’s capacity to produce university graduates contracted with RMJM‘s Global Education Studio, in Princeton, N.J., to build two new satellite campuses.
The first project is a new campus for the 7th October University, in the semidesert city of Bani Walid. The 123-acre campus at Bani Walid will serve about 3,200 students.
Gordon Hood, director of the Global Education Studio, told Architectural Record that inspiration for the design had come from “the ancient oasis town of Ghadames, Libya, whose enclosed courtyards and tightly clustered buildings are ‘all about how to deal with sun, shade, and wind’; and the crystalline form of the desert rose, which is common in the area.”
“We blended these two ideas together to organize a highly functional program,” Mr. Hood told the magazine.
Design work is just beginning on the second project, a 222-acre satellite campus of Al Asmariya University that will accommodate about 2,200 students near the coastal Mediterranean town of Zlitan.
The Global Education Studio is the American branch of the Scottish-based architectural firm of RMJM. The studio focuses exclusively on higher-education projects and has produced designs for Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale. —Andrew Mills
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