Each edition of +Impact will showcase an international green building and celebrate sustainable leadership around the world. In this edition, we feature the Mansa Floating Hub in Cape Verde, West Africa.
The Mansa Floating Hub is a cultural and creative platform located in the beautiful bay of Mindelo, in the island of São Vicente, Cape Verde. The platform is based on international design practice, NLÉ’s innovative floating building solution called Makoko Floating System – a simple way to build on water-using lightweight, prefabricated, modular timber elements that can be assembled and disassembled easily.
The Mansa Floating Hub is conceived as a vessel of return, to promote music, dance, art, fashion and other creative industries in Africa and the African diaspora. The three floating vessels, consisting of a multipurpose live performance hall (in the large vessel), a state-of-the-art recording studio (in the medium vessel) as well as a food and beverage bar (in the small vessel), form a communal cluster around an isolated triangular floating plaza, creating an open space for small-to-medium sized gatherings.
The significance of music in Cape Verde, its rich cultural history and its diverse natural environment inspire this socio-economic development strategy for Cape Verde, by ADS Group-Africa Development Solutions in partnership with NLÉ/Water Cities Development.