Long Office | Selim Senin

The project is located in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, one of the East African countries. The project land is a long land and the customer wants to use a very small part of this land and leave the remaining part empty for other projects in the future. For this reason, the building was designed as a long block instead of masses spreading on the land. The project, which is an office building, was designed along a long plot of land. Long buildings are designed as a repetition of 4-5 meter facades or as a repetition of the ground floor on the upper floors without changing, and this causes monotony. While making sketches on how we could break this monotony in the structure, we realized that we could do this at the least cost by moving different masses at different points. An architectural language has been developed with the movement of different masses back and forth from place to place. Sometimes the upper 2 floors and sometimes the lower 2 floors project forward and the differentiation of the facade of this forward mass enabled us to obtain a richer façade architecture by removing the monotony of the structure. The entrance section is defined and emphasized by an arch to differentiate it from the long structure. By defining different functions (meeting room, executive office) in these prominent parts, we ensured that the facade was in harmony with the function. We designed a roof that is separated from the structure to reduce direct sunlight in the structure and reduce air conditioning usage costs during extremely hot periods in Uganda. The roof, which was detached from this structure, cut off the direct contact of hot energy to the structure and became a major factor in sustainable electricity use.