summer 2018
The crowd funding campaign for the Most Mira Peace Centre project has arrived! Congratulations to the whole team who has worked tirelessly to get this campaign off the ground.
We have been working on this project, which is located in Kevljani, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), with the Charity Most Mira (Bridge of Peace) for over three years. The design has been developed as part of a regular educational architecture program ‘Building Democracy Through Architecture’, in which we have led a series of informal participatory design workshops and public consultations embedded in the local community, involving architecture students from the UK and politically divided parts of BiH, and local residents and young people from the Prijedor region.
Recently we have been working with internationally renowned rammed earth building experts Martin Rauch, Honorary UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, and Lehm Ton Erde from Austria to develop the design of the rammed earth walls, which will be a key feature of the Centre that mix earth from local villages, quarries and mines from divided communities.
In the last year we achieved an incredible feat of a 5 day rammed-earth building residency on the site with Lehm Ton Erde, architecture students and young architects from BiH and the UK, during which we made prototypes for testing, some of which have remained on the site as the first phase of construction.
We plan to integrate a series of regular residencies with Most Mira during the construction process, which we envisage as live ‘real-time’ performances for building peace in a divided community that present architecture as a vehicle for social change.
You can learn more about the project, watch the fundraising film or donate on this link to the crowdfunding page! And the associated supporter pack!