New City - Dodoma, the Capital

Violet is working on a project in Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania, and she invited me to travel with her to her bi-weekly meeting, so of course I said yes!  Liz decided to hang back at the hotel, as she was understandably “architectured out”. We headed to the train station for a 6am departure, but the train was a little bit delayed. The train station was so nice! Escalators, air conditioning, glass face, very modern.  Violet said that it was built by a Turkish infrastructure company only 2 years ago but it cuts the travel time to Dodoma in half. So it was only 4 hours for us and we arrived at 10am. 




The project Violet is supervising is a large complex called The National Prayer Conversional Center. It is led by the famous Tanzanian preacher Christopher Mwakasge and will accommodate 15,000 people from around the world for one week in August when complete.  The structure for the campus is currently in progress but the main auditorium structure is complete, by an Egyptian steel subcontractor. The sheer size of the auditorium is impressive. They anticipate being complete with all of it in about 2030. The site meeting was Violet and the structural engineer along with the Owner’s rep and 2 of the Contractors. They call each other by their title, so Violet was Architect, the GC was Contractor, etc. I was impressed that this project was being built with a local contractor which is different than the last project I had seen of Violets (which is coincidentally on hold and doesn’t look much different than it did in 2017). There were about 20 people working on site at this job, and if this was in the US there would her been hundreds. In Tanzania, there are not as many subcontractors, the GC hires out day laborers.  Also, projects go on hold often here because the financing for the whole project is usually not secured when projects start. Lastly, there were a lot more decisions made by Ownership on site that would have wreaked havoc on American job sites. The GC was open to making changes in realtime, and I mean big changes, like adding a mezzanine to a double height space. The drawings seemed to be more sparse than our drawings in the US as well.  I believe most architects here use ArchiCAD instead of Revit, but it is a BIM software nonetheless. 


Our site meeting was brief and followed by a site walk to look at the structures and see what design items needed sketches.  We started the meeting with a prayer, and being in this large assembly space that would be dedicated to religion seemed appropriate for a prayer. Violet also shared another prayer with me before the meeting - Proverbs 3. She shared that she feels that this gives her wisdom to advise the team wisely during this time when big decisions are being made. After the site walk I got the opportunity to chat with the Owner’s rep who is the Owner’s good friend.  We chatted a little bit about the differences in the industry in Tanzania versus the US, and I shared some of the work that I do. Urns out here went to Ardhi University for Construction Management and I told him that I had guest lectured there on Monday. After our chat we said a final pray and called our Bolt.







Violet wanted me to see all of the government buildings in Dodoma. The capital city was changed to Dodoma a while back but the intent was to locate the capital in a place that is more central to the country. The parliament is located here as well as the office of the president and a lot of other buildings, most are built in a sort of civic center called Magifuli City, named after the president that commissioned the buildings. Some were very interesting, and there was a lot of glass facades, which maybe seems a bit impractical. We followed our drive with lunch at a stop that is frequented by government officials. I had the most amazing sweet and sour pork ribs per Violets recommendation and we headed back to the train station after that in my first bajaji ride. It was fun and I fit surprisingly well!  After a long ride we were heading back to the Mediterraneo to say our goodbyes and head to our early am flight to Instanbul. Man, I will really miss this place.  I just love it so much whenever I am here.  The people, the energy, the warmth, I always leave with a full heart.  Definitely on my list of retirement location options! 






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