The Makerere Innovation Hub opened for the 2024/25 academic year. Three thousand eight hundred square metres of workshops, fabrication labs, incubation studios and a 200-seat forum, on an infill site so tight that the crane had to be positioned before the foundations were poured and stayed there until the roof was on.
Learning from the campus
Makerere's 1960s faculty buildings are courtyard plans with deep colonnades. They are, on any hot afternoon, visibly more comfortable than the sealed buildings that came later. We took the typology directly: a single covered courtyard, 24 by 16 metres, with everything opening onto it.
The courtyard roof is a lightweight steel and polycarbonate lantern, north-facing glazing on the high side, continuous louvred vent at the ridge. Warm air leaves at the top; cool air is drawn in through the colonnade at ground level. On a 29°C afternoon the courtyard measures around 25°C, unconditioned.
Designed to be changed
The Dean's instruction was to build something students would not be afraid to modify. In practice that meant:
- Services run exposed on cable tray, colour-coded by system
- Generous spare capacity in the electrical distribution — 40% headroom on every board
- Non-structural partitions, all demountable, on a 1.2m planning grid
- Floor boxes at 3m centres throughout the studio floor
- Power-floated concrete floors and fair-faced block walls that take abuse and can be drilled
Eighteen months in, students have hung a gantry from the workshop roof structure, rewired two studios, and mounted a solar test rig on the courtyard roof. All of which is the building working.
The forum
The 200-seat forum was the part the university nearly cut for cost. It survived, on the argument that an innovation building with nowhere to present is a workshop. It now runs at close to full occupancy — lectures, demo days, exhibitions and, twice, a wedding.
