My father’s practice, OSAC, in Khartoum is where I worked over university holidays and after my graduation in 1988 and were I picked up my experience on design, construction and architecture in general.
My father has kindly shared with me scans from his office, the culmination of many years of work. It has been an absolute labour of love to go through the images and make a selection to upload here. Some of the buildings I remember, some I don’t. Many of the drawings are by people that worked for long or short periods of time for my father. Some are by myself, some are signed and some are not. I will be uploading the full archive online soon.
It has been a walk down memory lane, a time in my late teens and early twenties, when i absolutely absorbed whatever I saw and whatever I heard at the office; it is a nostalgia for rotring pens and the smell of ammonia as the blueprints were being made.
The above examples show the distinctive style of drawing that I was trained in. The work of OSAC most certainly had a clear identity and approach rooted in rationalism and efficiency. For many years the company built prolifically in Khartoum and beyond. The range of building types was also very wide.
The below images are selected from a much wider repository – and cover many years of work, and many young architects’ work, as they transitioned through OSAC. I will be requesting from my father that he writes up a brief history of his experiences in practice. His memory is much better than mine and it will be a wonderful opportunity for younger Sudanese architects to honour the wealth of experience that we have, the heritage of design and building that we can link with and take the profession forward.
I will be working further on this archive to categorise it into SINGLE FAMILY DWELLINGS; MULTI FAMILY DWELLINGS; NON RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE; FACADES; INTERNAL PLANNING; DETAILING; SERVICING; DRAWING STYLES; CLIMATIC RESPONSE; CULTURAL RESPONSE;
Till then, enjoy the image documentation.
