Vaissnavi Shukl
Our guest today works with underrepresented communities to create thoughtfully designed projects through research and advocacy. Yotaka Sho is a partner and co-founder of General Architecture Collaborative that has planned, designed and constructed residential, health and educational projects in Rwanda since 2008. With the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we speak to her about working in a context that has a history of genocide and colonization and the challenges of working on ground at the grassroots level.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl, and this is Architecture Off-Centre. A podcast where we highlight contemporary discourses that shape the built environment but do not occupy the center stage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

The first thing that I wanted to lead with and ask you about was if you can share how you began your work in Rwanda back in 2008 and how, or if the work that you started then had anything to do with responding to the aftermath of the genocide in the context that you were going to engage with?

Yutaka Sho
So it was in 2007 a friend of mine went on a Gorilla Trekking trip in Rwanda. They still had this preserved forest, up north, and if you paid an insane amount of money you could go watch them and she came back with a bunch of, I mean like literal, gorillas, living in there in the wild. And, yeah, gorillas are cute and everything. But it was the bunch of photographs that she brought back from the countryside in Rwanda. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any pictures of the countryside there, but it’s extremely hilly. There about 50% erosion prone. And even if it’s not erosion prone, it’s quite hilly, and that became a challenge later on, when we started working there. But imagine a crate going to the horizon just like this, and somebody put a quilt over it, because about 80 to 90% of the Rwandan population is subsistence farmers. So they just farm whatever they eat on their land, and it’s hilly again, so they’re all these different shades of green patches going up and down, and it’s just stunning. And they call their country where the gods go to sleep. Gods would roam around the world and have a good time, but then at night, they would come back and sleep in Rwanda. That’s how beautiful it is. So that was basically the beginning, just like any projects, it’s really nothing. But then I started looking into it and learned about the genocide and how unique it was among all wards, because your house basically was the front line. So Rwanda has three main ethnicities, Tutsis, Hutus and Twas. And Tutsis are about 15%, Hutus, about 85% and Twas only make up 1% so doesn’t really come into our story. But before the Belgians came in to colonize they would intermarry, they would share cultures. They would speak the same language. And if a Hutu woman marries a Tutsi man, she would become a Tutsi and vice versa. So it wasn’t really an ethnicity per se. It was a social separation. Perhaps that was a political separation. But culturally and in terms of blood, they were intermingling all through their history. But when the Belgians came in, they issued an ethnicity identity card. So today, you’re Hutu, and then you’re Hutu for the rest of your life to see the same way. So that basically racialized the identity that day, and that blew up when they became independent and also at the genocide. The genocide was, you know, families killing each other, basically at their homes, teachers killing their pupils, doctors killing their patients. So there was no front line except where you were living. And when I looked at that picture of the landscape, it was impossible to imagine people working together after such a cultural city. But because it’s so hilly, because people were not well off, and you couldn’t buy machines to cultivate the land. And you couldn’t bring in the machines there anyway, because it’s so hilly, even if you could afford it, it meant that they had to work together in order to till that land. But after that genocide, how could you possibly do it? So it was to find out what the social structure was of that country. And then further along, the research realized that 70% of the population was women. After the genocide, because men were either killed or in jail, but before the genocide, women couldn’t own the land or have a business, so all of a sudden they had to come out and rebuild and reconstruct their devastated land. So my focus became so how did they rebuild? And how did women participate in that rebuilding without any prior well, they were working. They were always working. They were always contributing, but not legally or not in the forefront of the efforts. So when we first went there with the funding from the Deborah Norton Fund, which is a travel research travel fund from the Architectural League of New York, they gave us money to go study that. So we looked for female organizations who are investing in the rebuilding of the land, and found a bunch of people and decided to work with one of them.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, this leads beautifully into the next question, because with 70% of women, kind of making up the population, the majority of it, at least, actively in social life, in the workforce, in the society. And since you started working with organizations that were primarily engaged in, you know, working with them, how do you think this, this shift in the labor workforce from men to women shift in the ownership of land from men to women, or at least opening up the idea of ownership to women, influenced how the built environment.

Yutaka Sho
I wouldn’t say, the urban fabric. But if that applies, changed when there was this shift in the demographic Rwanda as a government is really good at tapping into the images that the donor nations want to see in the recipient countries. So 70% more or less of the federal budget is coming from the aid from the foreign countries in Rwanda. So that has a huge impact on the policy making, and of course, how the properties, the land rights, participation and women’s participation in politics and all of that plays out in Rwanda, and something like 60 to 70% of the parliament is woman, and that is, you know, decided it’s, it’s a set number that you have to feel and that’s the largest female population. So it’s reserved. It’s like a quota for, yeah, exactly. So that’s the number one in the world. And whether that is really played out in terms of women’s voice being heard or not, is up for debate, but at least they are represented, and it’s quite different in the rural areas. Still, women are able to own land and get inheritance from their parents when they pass away, which wasn’t possible before 2005 but still, the hierarchy is quite huge between men and women in the rural areas. So we we try to hire as many women as possible in the construction work, engage them in the skills training sessions during the construction so that they’re not just carrying cement bags or, you know, soil or rocks, you know, which is an easy work, which means that you get paid less, but we try to engage them in masonry, or creating the cage for the reinforced concrete, columns and beams, stuff like that welding so that they can get paid more, and they they are skilled laborers, but that’s still a very small portion that we can reach, and majority are still second class citizens. And that’s a crappy thing to say, but in terms of the power hierarchy, it’s still quite the same nature of the article.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Speaking more architecturally, if we were to get into a day in your life, and you’re working on site as an as an architect, engaging with people, engaging with different contractors, and you’ve built a range of different institutions, right from educational institutions to housing from a more research academic perspective, knowing that there’s a certain history of colonization in the region, how do you differentiate between the local and the non local building practices? I speak because I’m from a country that was colonized, and in the city where I’m at, which is India’s first world heritage city. We get to see a range of buildings. So we have your traditional vernacular housing, which is very climate adaptive, which is, in a very simplistic way, a kind of a row housing. And then you have your Mughal period, the Islamic period. So we have our mosques and tombs and everything. We have the Citadel, and then came the period of colonization. So we had the birth of an entire cantonment region, you know, getting military inside the city. And you have all your colonial bungalows and your schools and your public buildings started changing. And then, of course, the era of post-independence modernization. So in a place like Rwanda, how do you see that influence of colonization, quite literally, in buildings? And then my second question after that is, when you’re designing and when you’re building on site, how do you logistically communicate these complex architectural ideas to people on on ground, both in terms of your skilled labor force, your unskilled labor force, and if there are intermediary contractors who kind of facilitate the bridging of the execution and the design part.

Yutaka Sho
As you know, the colonial influence is huge anywhere where it has been colonized. I’m speaking from Tokyo right now. I don’t know if you know that the airspace is owned by the US, so the Japanese planes cannot fly over Tokyo because there’s an American base near Tokyo, which includes the Tokyo air area. And then when you land in Tokyo, you have to go around it. So we are still living under colonial practice. So it’s, it’s not whether you’re colonized and then not colonized. It’s like somewhere in between all the time, it seems, anyway. So before the Belgians came, all the buildings were circular. After the Belgians came, all the buildings were square. That’s the easiest thing to look at architecturally. Belgians thought that Rwanda is living outside because it’s so nice outside. It’s a subtropical climate, and it’s not that hot, really. It gets quite cold in the morning and at night because the elevation is quite high, so you need a sweater, and it’s in the shade. It’s extremely comfortable. So people spend a lot of time outside. But Belgians thought that that was uncivilized, savage and not very modern. So they believe that if they make houses square, you can have a porch. I don’t know why they thought that. So they implemented the square plans everywhere. And we did this survey of rural housing and every single house was square. So that’s the easy thing to look at, but the pressure to modernize or pressure to be westernized has been internalized. It’s not something that is implemented from the outside anymore. It’s something that people strive to become, and that pressure certainly came from the outside, because in order to treat it equally from the Western countries, you have to appear modern. You have to appear as if you are westernized. So the house gets that pressure too. So the government also internalizes that too, and they have banned thatch buildings. You can’t have thatch roof anymore. You have to have corrugated sheet metal for your roof, or you can have tiles. But tiles are really hard to work with. It just leaks no matter what you do so and it’s heavy, so that the structure has to get heavier and more durable. And most of the houses are built with sun dried Adobe blocks, so you can’t really hold that much weight and start to sag. Really the only option material today was to represent communities to create thoughtfully, metal. So that’s something else that you can look at just by walking around. No such and local burned bricks are available, but not that durable, not that, you know, available. And people used to burn their own bricks in the rural areas. They would just, you know, pile up and then put soil over it and then burn it. But that has been banned as well. So you can tell that it’s coming from the top. Development has been implemented in terms of policies, not in terms of market, not in terms of bottom up efforts. It’s more that policy, besides, you can build with this, or you cannot build this. And then it just trickles down, and you get these policies on your phone because the government has your phone number, and you get a text message saying, from today on, you have to wear shoes from today on, dry your dishes on the table, not on the grass, stuff like that. So your behavior, your household chores, your outlook and the way you build everything is regulated by the government, and it comes through your technology, cell phone. So it’s not just the architecture. It seeps into your psyche, your identity becomes part of that, the modernization machine. One thing that did change though recently so the Adobe blocks were all also banned, and that’s really the only material that’s realistic to build with in rural areas, because Rwanda doesn’t have what does have a little bit but not really reliable. They don’t have much building materials locally, cement, steel, glass, plastic, petroleum, tiles, all of them are imported, and that adds Paris on top of it. And like I said, it’s extremely hilly, and then there’s no ocean, so everything has to go through the land, through these like really hilly terrain, and that adds to the transportation cost. So the cost of construction is said to be about 30 to 40% more than Kenya, and that makes it really hard. The hills, the cost, the lack of materials, all of that makes it really hard to build. So in the rural areas, the Adobe blocks are really the only choice that you have to build with. And that was banned because it doesn’t look developed. And of course, by what it is the government. So in the city center, it was banned, and it was expected to be expanded to the other areas, in the rural areas as well. And of course, the reason on the surface was that it’s not structurally sound, it’s not sustainable. But really they don’t like it because it doesn’t look developed. So that was, I think 2016 or something, and then it was reversed, because the architectural and construction sector got together, there were five companies or institutions or offices that got together and revamped the building code for the blocks. They made the shape of it regular, and they made the manufacturing process more regularized, so that you can counter the policy, and you can make an argument that this could be viable building material for the rural areas, and they overturned the policy. And that was like the first time, one of the first times that I saw that architecture actually making a difference at the policy level, siding with the poor and siding with the people who can afford to access cement and steel that are imported. So that was really encouraging. So yeah, that’s something that we are trying to also build with. And, you know, trains we don’t really train with, to run a workshop with the builders in the rural areas so that they have access to that knowledge.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s interesting, you mentioned something about the circular tubular houses, because we have an equivalent here as well. In Gujarat, where I’m from, we had a massive earthquake, 7.6 Richter scale in 2001 and the more arid desert part of the region where it originated. Original building type was called bungas. But these are circular huts made with mud, Adobe, with thatch roofs, and those were the only ones that survived. Everything else that was in a rectilinear, orthogonal format actually did not but these huts then, of course, there’s a lot of research done, lot of academic papers done a lot of structure analysis done, which eventually proved that because of the form of these huts, because of the thatch roof, because of lighter roofs and and the circular form of it, they were inherently seismic resistant. And that eventually, then, of course, tourism comes in. And now you know, if you go to that region, if you want to stay in a particular resort, or there’s a desert festival that happens, you would see a lot of these herds and small developments coming up, which are now starting to monetize on the circular form, because, you know, you you learn either by doing or by by experience. And experience said that, well, these have a lot of scientific backing to why they existed in this region, and why they were built out of Marlin, why the roofs were lighter but similar in terms of how the colonization, or I think just modernization broadly, and the development of concrete, changed how buildings were built. And all these vernacular farms then take a different life as just being tokens of a distant memory, and they just exist as relics.

Yutaka Sho
But the same in Rwanda, you can have that roof if it’s in the tourist context. So I don’t know if you have seen Hotel Rwanda, the movie that is based on Hotel Demilico Lane and this touristy, big hotel, and if you go to the pool, the poolside cabana is that, but you cannot use that for real, you know, residential housing. So, yeah, that’s, that’s a token for sure. Then your second question was the communication. How do you communicate with the skilled, unskilled government people? I think that has become more of the focus of at least my interest in the work that we do. I taught at the National University in 2011 and so at the time of the genocide, they were five or six my students at the time, so they had to leave the country. There were refugees in other countries, so they spoke at least King Rwanda, which is a Rwanda language, and English, French, and whatever the country’s language was where they were being a refugee. So four languages, they’re extremely smart. If you spoke that many languages in the States, you would have plenty of jobs, job offers. But over there, it’s normal. But then there is no architectural text in Kenya, Rwanda, about Africa that I could find back then, so I asked my students to so I bought a bunch of small cameras and gave it to them, and asked them to go out and take pictures of their spaces where they live and write poems about them, because they didn’t have a theory book about Rwandan spaces, and I wanted them to start their own theory, architectural theory, in their language. I needed to be able to read it, so I asked them to write in English. But they did an amazing job. And I thought their images would be better, because you just had to click and take a picture. But then the images weren’t that interesting. They are wonky and they had fingers in front of them and all that stuff, but their poems were breathtaking. So we made videos and we made a book, and that kicked off the thing, this needs to be communicated how they are thinking about spaces, how they’re wanted to develop, but at the same time, they’re not allowed to speak about the genocide. They’re not allowed to speak about their struggle by policy. So it has to come out in poetic or artistic or architectural ways, not through direct language or through direct policies. So that kicked off the thinking about how we could use architecture as a process and also to provide a space and time to communicate among the people who are not allowed to talk about certain things. So we definitely use the site and time of the construction to bring people together and work together and learn skills, but also communicate with each other how they wish the houses were this way, or they wished the neighborhood was run this way because they’re not allowed to speak up against the government. In 2015 we organize the conversations between the people who were the genocide survivors and also the general we if they wanted forgiveness the perpetrators, they could have just given money to just help the survivors farm or something, but they decided that. And so they communicated with each other, and our job was to just set up that stage or the platform to discuss the process of reconciliation through the lens of architecture and, yeah, the other projects that we’ve done. But for me, it’s it’s architecture is more the means to the end in order to have that kind of conversation, so that people who can’t be in the same room can be in the same room after that process, because without participating in the process, they won’t sit in the same space because they’re just so hurt and mad. So that has become a big part of our projects. Actually, I want to take a little bit of a step back and go back to what you said in the beginning of the conversation. You said

Vaissnavi Shukl
Rwanda is an aid-focused country, aid-focused region, and assuming the projects that you’re doing are also aid focused and supported by organizations which have a certain corpus to fund activity overseas, otherwise to do some kind of socially responsible work. Can you talk about the role of this funding in your practice, and since you worked with the Kate Spade organization for so many years with so many projects, what is the role of that benefactor in enabling what happens on the ground, and how do you navigate that aspect of practice?

Yutaka Sho
My sense of it, understanding of it, has changed over the failures. In the beginning, they were just somebody we needed, and they brought money and they had their own aims. You know, we had to negotiate. So Kate Spade, CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility unit built a handbag factory in Massoro, which is the village that we have been working in since 2008 and we that was the first project that we did together in 2015, and they hire about 200 women to make handbags that are sold in Europe and the US and Japan after that, and they decided that they wanted to contribute to not just the workers in the factory, but also their families, and realized that they needed a hospital because the old one was struck by the lightning, and they hired us again to rebuild and expand the existing health center. And then they continued, and we worked with them, with the school buildings and the community center. And I think the example, the community center, is the most telling, and allows me to talk about how my understanding of their role has changed from the beginning to to now. So this is a big, big in terms of, you know, Rwandan context Community Center with five or six new buildings and basketball court and outdoor learning space and all of that. And it’s unheard of in the rural areas. You can see them in the cities, but not in the rural areas. And they, from the beginning, wanted to build a sports center. So it used to be called Masoro Sport and Learning Center. In the beginning, I was like, why sports? They don’t have water, they don’t have a sewer system, they don’t have food. Like, who’s going to come play basketball, who’s going to come play soccer, if they don’t have all that necessity, and realize that, you know, maybe I’m the one who is stereotyping the poor, they don’t get to enjoy themselves. If they can’t get the necessities first. They have to develop first in order to have leisure time. So so I started to see where they’re coming from once the project was done, and then all these people were just ecstatic about, you know, using the facilities and playing sports with babies on the backs and, like, running around, and it was really great, but that that was still nagging in my head. Why do you build something that you don’t need? And certainly Kade Spade and any kind of CSR, they have pressure from their donors and also their buyers, any one of us who may be buying their back, you know, bags and jewelry and all that stuff. They want to see something public. They want to see something big and beautiful and modern they don’t get to invest in, like little houses that I may want to build because I worked there. But the handbag consumers, they don’t really know what the needs are, and they want to see something big and beautiful. So that’s where Kate Spade is coming from as well. They have to satisfy both sizes so that was a pressure to build these large things. And then it really backfired. We couldn’t find anyone to own the facility once it was built, because it was too big and too expensive to run it, and the government didn’t want it. They loved the project, but they didn’t want to own it. They didn’t want to pay for it. We were talking with a large local NGO. They didn’t. They agreed in the beginning that we would pay them to start running and build up the program. And then they backed out. They didn’t want to run it either. They were overwhelmed by the scale of it. Then the case page started so we ended up running it for a year after we completed the construction. And at the same time, we helped K spade to hire the director and managers and people who can teach literacy in the library that we built, people who can teach yoga and basketball, all that. And they became ISUCO, which is a local nonprofit organization that is the owner now. So they had to go all the way from the construction, the planning and management and maintenance. So now Kate Spade is committed to pay for the maintenance of it indifferently. So that’s one thing that sets them apart from the rest of the CSRS. I don’t think too many other companies would do that. They don’t commit to one tiny village in one tiny country in Africa to see all the way through and commit to stay there and but that one thing about, you know, why the sports? Why do you care so much about these, like unnecessary programs, just because your handbag buyers want to see it? So that was still nagging in my head. But when we talked to one of the female basketball players, she said something that was really interesting. She said she didn’t know anything about basketball before Kate Spade came and we built that structure. She probably didn’t care much about it, but she said this was the first time that I spent time for myself, because before she was working and she was trying to get money, she was trying to care for her children, she was always pressured by the modernization, you know, regime, to appear to be productive, because that’s what we have to do when we are poor, like you have to constantly work, and you have to show the images to the donors. Fine, really hard, so you should give me money. So she is really working hard, but at the same time, we require them to show us that image. So she’s like sharing herself from the internally, but she’s also being pressured from above to to look like she is productive, but then, for the first time, because of the basketball court, appearing she can be unproductive, right, like she she doesn’t have to look like she’s working hard. She’s just playing basketball. And that was possible because basketball is from the west, and if you’re becoming westernized, you are being modern, and that’s productive. So somehow this strange circle was complete and allowed her to spend time for herself and be caring for her well being. And that was like, Whoa, that’s what this basketball is all about. It’s not really for Kate Spade or for me or for our company. It’s to allow these ladies to be productive. And I want to do that. I want to do more of that. So I think, hey, spade knows it now. Maybe they didn’t know it before, but I think they they know it now, and

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think they would fund it as my last question to you, Yukata. I was wondering if you could talk about the Rwanda housing project, and what’s next for the practice and for you?

Yutaka Sho
Rwanda housing project is a survey and it has multi phases. We built earthbag houses, two of them back in 2013 and 15. And like I said, Rwanda doesn’t have too much local material, certainly not cement, and we wanted to cut the use of the cement and use soil as much as possible. Soil and labor is what they got. So we wanted to maximize that. And we learned about these Earth Bags, which are made up of polypropylene. And it’s basically a pillow bag of local soil after digging up the foundation, and then you stack them so it’s cheap and it’s extremely easy to build. Anyone can do it. We built one house, and, you know, the basic structure was done in one month, and the rest was like the roof and the stucco and stuff like that. Women can participate easily. And then the polypropylene is, you know, petrochemical waste. So we saw being really clever about taking the Western waste and then making something really durable in the global south. But in the end, because Rwanda doesn’t have petroleum, they don’t have petrochemical waste either, and we ended up importing and paying tariffs and, you know, transport and it ended up more expensive. So that was a mistake that, speaking, led us to realize that you didn’t really know anything about self builders in Rwanda practice, what kind of materials they had, what kind of houses they wanted, what kind of skills they had, what kind of properties they had, what was the soil type? None of that we knew. So we went back to square one in 2019 and went around the massorah areas to survey about 370 homes, and asked the residents about the building practice, as well as measuring the houses, surveying the materials, asking about how much money they had per month, at the same time, asking about who built the house. So it was both about the demographic survey as well as the architectural survey. In the beginning, we thought we were doing this so that we knew we could find out what kind of small fixes we could do. Is it the roof that they had a problem with? Is it the windows that they had a problem? So that we didn’t have to do this like sweeping, you know, revamping of the housing policy, which Rwanda is doing. They have this policy called immediate could do, or villagization, and moving every single citizen from their villages into planned housing. And they have, they claim that they have moved 50% of the population already, and by 2050 they’re gonna move 100% but what happens is that you lose, you know, family contact. You lose a sense of community. You’re far away from the farmland because you’re like, you know, tight, like an American, you know, suburban type housing now. So it’s, it’s, it’s far away from the job site, it’s far away from schools and all of that. So we thought we would find out what kind of small fixes we could do instead of going to a big development. But it turned out, after doing the survey, we couldn’t do that either. The issues were more fundamental. None of the houses had foundations. They were soil, and then they started building mud brick walls, and they didn’t have a gutter that we could fix, but the concept of a gutter, what it does in order to protect the ground so that the water doesn’t just go into under the wall. “Why do you need a foundation? Why do you need the lintels?”, all of that more serious understanding of contraction was not really there. They probably couldn’t afford to pay for it. But there are other ways to achieve this, for example, building far away from the slope would protect the wall, stuff like that. So we realized that the issues were more fundamental. It wasn’t about small fixes. So we ran a workshop about more theoretical thinking of how you make the improved Adobe blocks. This is how you test and rafters and all that stuff. And they got the certificates and all that stuff. At the same time, we were drawing them, all the houses. It was measured by the architecture students in Rwanda. They went to, you know, all the houses, 370, of them, and talked to the residents. And then those drawings for the sketches were brought to Syracuse University, where I was working. At the time, my students there architecture students, put it into Rhino and illustrator and InDesign and made it into digital and in that process of translating the sketches into a digital drawing, my students are learning about what the materials are available, what kind of forms, what kind of size, how many rooms go to living with people in this particular house. Latrines are always outside. The shapes are always great, stuff like that. So that became their learning about what happens in Rwanda and they couldn’t CAD only allows you to make precise right angles. But none of the houses were at a right angle. None of the lines were straight because they were all self built and hand built. So my students had to make straight lines first and then make it intentionally squiggly and make right angles and intentionally not right angles. So all that process was extremely interesting, and we were able to show the work last April in Syracuse in the exhibition, in the panel discussion. Again, that’s one of the communications that you were asking about earlier. How do we use architecture to communicate with the rest of the world what’s happening, like what Rwandan people are doing already in order to control their own built environment and use our projects, like the run housing project, to show that you know their agencies and their powers and Their thinking behind building. So yeah, that would be something that we would definitely want to push next as well. I don’t really know what we would do next, but it’s less about making you know, nice buildings, but more about how to be at the same table.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your work. And we wish you all the best.

Yutaka Sho
Thank you so much.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.