2025 - Mt. Hagen, PNG

Little did ever imagine that I would end up going to Papua New Guinea (PNG) a second time this year. This time is for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) whose mission is to serve remote villages in PNG by aviation. 

In many rural areas in PNG, there are no roads connecting the various villages. So the decision is to fly with MAF or walk 5-6 days. PNG is not only separated by long distances between urban centers it is also a country of 840 different languages

MAF has been at The Kagamuga International Airport for 75 years so the headquarters building has outlived its usefulness.

Our task though Engineering Ministries International (EMI) was to send a team of (3) architects to masterplan for MAF's new airport facilities at Mt. Hagen.

Our initial work was to walk the existing airport facilities, interview MAF staff, leadership and stakeholders. 

From there, we establish who the users are and what their spaces should look like. We do this using colored sticky notes on a white board, and moving the functions around so that they make sense.

As architects, the next step is to create adjacency diagrams which informs us which functions should be next to which others. 

By the end of the work week, we typically come up with a site masterplan considering site circulation and exterior spaces.

One of the more unique aspects of airport design is to understand which functions belong on the air side (inside security) and which functions are on land side (before you pass through security).

And finally, as part of the final presentation, we typically provide a rendering. This one is meant to be more iconic as requested by MAF, but also says both PNG and MAF at the same time.

But the real hard work of Design and layouts happen we we get back to the office in Cambodia, where we refine the Design, circulation and more detailed and refined dimensioning:

Finding the stacking and agencies between the ground and upper floors becomes the layout:

but the final designs will not be published until December 2025, hopefully just in time for the January MAF board meeting!

The EMI and MAF team thanks you for reading all the way to the end! 

It has been a real partnership between EMI and MAF

On the way out of Mt. Hagan, I had a feeling that we will be back here some day...

2025 - Balimo, Papua New Guinea

Dear friends, 

Thank you for taking the time to open up this blog. And welcome to any new readers. Below, I will share a little bit about our project work at the Balimo Hub in Papua New Guinea.  Most villages (hubs) are very rural and are not accessible by roads; only by small aircrafts like the MAF aircraft shown below:

And of course, viewing a large site is sometimes easier from the airplane:

During our February 2025 project trip, we visited (3) villages/hubs: Daru, Balimo, and Morehead to help plan for the restoration of land. This is restoration of the environmental destruction of land due to mining disasters. Our client, The Sustainable Development Program (SDP) is a multifaceted development program established in 2001 to improve the welfare of the people of  PNG, particularly those of Western Province. Balimo is a beautiful area of PNG, but remote and is prone to flood during rainy season:

Our primary focus was at the Balimo Hub where we help master plan how this site can used as the future educational precinct of PNG.

Above is a functional program of all the stakeholders at Balimo which we put together as the EMI team prior to our site visit.

During the site visit, the functional program is tested out in a land use diagram to the client graphically understand the aspirations of an architectural masterplan. This is typically developed by hand while ion site:

And then refined as more of a land use plan, digitally as shown below:

For (3) months after the project trip, there is design work to be completed back at the EMI office in Cambodia. Buildings and other structures are sized according to the amount of people they are meant to serve and then placed on a site plan in a way to show use, circulation (pedestrian and vehicular) as well as the separation of public and private spaces:

In addition to making this site an educational precinct, some of the key goals of the masterplan is to raise the livability of the current residents. To do this, more public parks and public gathering spaces are recommended:

Above is an example of what pocket parks could potentially look like. 

Below is a computer-generated image of one option for a main entry of the College Campus:

While there are approximately 700 people at the Balimo site currently, this number is expected to grow to more than 1300 in the next 3-5 years as Balimo grows to be more of an educational hub.

Another goal is to try and have this site served by solar power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Due to the remoteness of the site, the client currently spends over $40 k a month on diesel fuel to power (2) generators which generate electricity for the site, and of course if they do not transition to solar, this monthly diesel cost will double in the next 3-5 years:

Solar power available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week not only saves on fuel costs, but with less reliance on generators, it also reduces the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. This is one of the environmental sustainability goals we at EMI are helping to promote for all our clients as part of our "Creation Care" initiatives at EMI for 2025. 

Another goal for Creation Care is to try to use more sustainable building materials. From the as-built study below from our EMI Uganda office, you can see that concrete and aluminum release some of the most carbon dioxide into the environment, while wood and village brick release the least:

PNG is a beautiful country, and we would all love to see the restoration of this land in the coming years!

 

2023 - Mukono, Uganda

Dear friends, thank you for taking time to opening up this blog. Welcome to any new viewers and welcome back for those who have been following my blog for a while. Below, I share a bit about the project work in Mukono province, Uganda.

During our visit for ROTOM (Reach one Touch One Ministries), we visited (3) sites for them, a senior citizen center, Primary/Secondary school site, and an outreach village. EMI is helping ROTOM design facilities to empower older persons and their dependents to attain health and well-being through increasing accessibility of water, food, education, healthcare, shelter, and other necessities.

Figure 1: Existing Senior center is running well as part of ROTOM, site 1.
Everyone is waiting for funding for the hospice addition to be built in the future.

Figure 2: Existing (2) primary school buildings on site 2 in Magogo.

Figure 3: EMI uses adjacency diagrams to not only plan building locations, but options for circulation, security and infrastructure.

Figure 4: Proposed site of the primary/secondary school as ROTOM Site 2. The secondary school side is undeveloped currently and is in need of an EMI master-planning for the whole site

Figure 5: Some of the existing kitchen and community buildings on the primary school side of the site 2.

In all (3) sites, it is care for seniors, children and the community which motivates ROTOM to develop these sites as a shared resource center to share the love of Christ to the community.

Figure 6: Outreach center for the community in Nakisunga Village, site 3.

This site 3 will be a prototype village outreach center to include a clinic, dispensary, space for food and income insecurity care, and care for the elderly in the community.

And as will all our projects, it takes 3-4 months after getting back to the office to finally complete the design work at hand.

Figure 7: working back at the office with the EMI Canada team.

Figure 8: EMI master-planning work includes site analysis, water demand and site utilities

The EMI team thanks you for reading until the end!

Grace and Peace!

2023 - Fort Portal, Uganda

Dear friends, thank you for taking time to opening up this blog. Welcome to any new viewers and welcome back for those who have been following my blog for a while. Below, I share a bit about the project work in Fort Portal, Uganda.

Our project is for Maranatha Health, a hospital trying to expand their hospital from a rented facility to a much needed new site. This 7.6 acre site has a beautiful setting facing the Mt. Rwenzori. This blog is about (3) pillars of sustainability - Sustainable design, Sustainable resources, and Sustainable building materials.

In our discussions with the ministry client, the (3) most important project drivers when we did the programming meetings with them them:

1) They wanted medical care and medications accessible to the people around in the neighbourhood; even those who could not afford it.

2) They have a passion to serve people with disabilities. The new hospital needs to be handi-capped accessible to serve all peoples.

3) They desperately need more space. Their rental facilities is no longer meeting their space needs. In 2019, Maranatha health treated 9,700 patients. By 2022, that number rose to 12,340 patients while running 16,000 lab tests.

In other words, they wanted a design of a hospital which could function in a way to be operationally sustainable for their future growth.

One of the unique things about this hospital is that the Operating room (OR) or Theatre as they call it is built using shipping containers; built and furnished from Australia and shipped to Fort Portal Uganda.

Below is an image of the interior of the OR with all the equipment in place before shipping:

To make our drawings accurate, measured drawings of the OR Theatre had to be done on site:

Which later gets transferred to a 3D digital model which we call REVIT design drawings:

The plan is to move the OR from the current rental site to the proposed hospital site sometime during Phase 1. Below is a rendering of the full masterplan, where similar design workflow happens to determine the size, shape and placement of the buildings on the site. This is known as the masterplan:

Secondly, another interesting aspect of the current hospital complex is that it already has a sophisticated solar panel array system (one that can be used when moved over to the new site to run phase 1). Electrical panels in many African hospitals remains a reliable and sustainable energy source especially when it is small in phase 1:

Thirdly, as part of our material supply investigation, we measure the available sizes of building materials available in the local material warehouses. In doing this, we gain a better understanding of what kinds of building materials are available locally. 

Brick is one of the very earliest sustainable building materials. The first bricks were discovered around the ancient city of Jericho, approximately 7000 BC!

Our team thanks you for reading to the end:

2022 - Indonesia

Dear friends, thank you for taking time to opening up this blog. Welcome to any new viewers and welcome back for those who have been following my blog for a while. Below, I share a bit about the architectural work I have been doing for Rainforest Academy in November of 2022 in the town of Palembang, Indonesia. If you saw the recent news about the earthquakes and collapsed buildings in Indonesia, you definitely know that sound architecture and engineering design is needed a country such as Indonesia.[1]

AIi

Additionally, why is education so needed in Indonesia? And especially for girls. According to UNICEF,

"for every 10 children that drop out of school at the secondary level, seven are girls.” [2]  

One of the first things we do is to visit the site to better understand the site constraints, topography, and soil types. Often times, we recommend the client fence in the whole property. Luckily, the neighbor had already started to construct a masonry fence around the perimeter of the site.

Our design work often starts with vetting the functional program to better understand what spaces are needed for a school to function well. Part of our work to graphically represent the functional program is the use of adjacency diagrams called bubble diagrams. Below is an example of bubble diagram of the kindergarten grade:

After that, we move quickly into ideas and a conceptual parti. [3]. The parti is the point of where the design starts, i.e. the point of departure for our design work.

For many schools, the parti revolves around how best to separate the primary school from the secondary school (most administrators prefer to separate the older students from the younger students).

Since warmer countries like Indonesia benefits from the use of outdoor spaces, we proposed that the secondary and primary grades be completely separated into two separate buildings with an outdoor corridor to connect the two. Halfway on the corridor is the administration spaces which allows teachers and administrators to monitor the pedestrian traffic going back and forth between the two classroom buildings.

From that, blocking diagrams are developed showing how much space each programmed space could take up.

And then finally the blocking diagram gets represented both in a 2-dimension plan showing areas of indoor and outdoor space

As well as 3 dimensional illustrations of how big a potential building could look like. 

As a final step to our site visit, we visited other schools in the area (which our client saw as competitors), but we saw as good precedent studies to better understand what works and what does not work in this local context.

Since EMI mostly does conceptual design and programming, the next steps are to hire a local architect in Indonesia to help with the more detailed design drawings.

The team thanks you for making it to the end of this blog!

Grace and Peace,

Dan

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[1] 6.1 magnitude earthquake strikes Indonesia island of Jave (CNN) January 18, 2023

[2]  Top 10 Facts About Girls’ Education in Indonesia - The Borgen Project 

[3] Dictionary English-French point of departure noun (plural: points of departure) point de depart m (often used) (plural: points de departs m)