Makerere Innovation HubMakerere Innovation Hub

The Innovation Hub houses the university's engineering prototyping workshops, a fabrication lab, twelve start-up incubation studios and a 200-seat forum, on a tight infill site between two 1960s faculty buildings.

A courtyard, because the campus already knows how

Makerere's older buildings are almost all courtyard plans with deep colonnades — a typology that works so well in this climate that it has survived sixty years of fashion. The Hub follows it. A single covered courtyard, 24 by 16 metres, sits at the centre; every room opens onto it; the roof over it is a lightweight steel and polycarbonate lantern that admits north light and exhausts hot air at the ridge.

Robust, then refined

This is a building that gets used hard. Floors are power-floated concrete. Walls in the workshops are fair-faced block. Services run exposed on cable tray and are colour-coded — partly for maintenance, mostly because the students asked for a building they could read.

• Heavy workshop with 5-tonne gantry and 3-phase distribution
• Fabrication lab with laser, CNC and additive bays, separately extracted
• Twelve incubation studios, each 22 m², daylit from two sides
• 200-seat forum, demountable seating, doubles as exhibition space

The instruction from the Dean was: build something the students will not be afraid to modify. We took that literally.

Opened for the 2024/25 academic year.