Savannah Circle

Designed by The Landscape Studio

Location: Kenya — Type: Hospitality — Built: 2014 —

Existing within the Northern Kenya Savannah Grassland Ecosystem is The Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, a UNESCO Heritage Site that works as a model and catalyst for conservation. Located in the Laikipia district, Lewa is encompassed by large swaths of Northern Kenyan savannah and an acacia forest, providing an ideal environment for learning about unique local fauna and observing wildlife.

As part of Lewa’s educational model, we designed a simple intervention in the landscape: a circular lawn with a stone edging placed in the heart of the protected and unique grasslands. This clearing provides a still area from which to observe the complex and delicate Savannah Grassland Ecosystem, a grounded vantage point accessible to both adults and children.

Our intervention, which is for human use, needed to be simple enough as not to compete with the wider landscape, and to be at a human scale. The circle is nine metres in diameter, which allows for a small group of people to have enough space to lie and observe the grasslands at ground level, in a safe way. Our design considered how we can keep our human hand on the wider landscape as simple and humble as possible. We wanted to provide just enough to meet the brief but not include materials with negative environmental concerns, locally or for a wider context. The materials required of the project – top soil, locally hand quarried stone and grass – were sourced with sensitivity. No concrete was used in the construction – instead, hand cut stone bricks were placed into a compacted hardcore base and the murram hand compacted around the stone to ensure stability.

The Conservancy was a direct collaborator throughout the design process – it was imperative that we understand the delicate nature of the ecosystem and meet their concerns with sensitive solutions. Additionally, the project would be incomplete without the local people from which we sourced stone and worked to build the project with – their knowledge and contribution were essential in creating a space for both reflection and observation in this vast landscape.