Nine petals on the banks of the congo
HKA | Hermann Kamté & Associates, based in Yaoundé, Cameroon, was shortlisted as a finalist in a restricted competition for the National Bahá’í House of Worship of the Democratic Republic of Congo, sited on a plateau overlooking the Congo River in Kinshasa. The program is complete: a nine-petal prayer hall at the centre, enclosed by sacred gardens, a protected community zone, residential accommodation, offices, and landscaped gardens extending to the valley floor. Not a single building but a full campus, conceived as a living institution, rooted in one of Africa’s most densely inhabited territories.

Copper, Timber, glass and the valley kept alive
The geometry begins with a flower. Nine petals unfold from a central axis, faithful to the Bahá’í tradition of ninefold symmetry, reread through the botanical density of the Congo basin. The temple shell combines a natural copper roof, waterproof, lightweight, sustainable with a wooden skeleton that mirrors the structural logic of architecture, and glass walls that pull equatorial light deep into the worship space. For the secondary campus buildings, HKA specified earthwork, brickwork, and timber construction: local techniques, local craftsmen, local know-how activated rather than bypassed. The master plan relocates existing trees rather than felling them. The valley, connected to the Congo River, is proposed as a horticulture garden. The temple is a flower. The sacred area is a flower. The landscape is a flower too.

Teke geometry, Baha’i faith, one building
The conceptual anchor is the Bateke universe. The Teke people, Humbu, Bawoumbou, historically rooted in Bakongo culture, developed one of the most rigorous geometric vocabularies in Central African art: diamond grids, compressed striations, masks reduced to pure abstraction. HKA reads this grammar not as ornament but as structural logic: the angular tension of Teke form held in dialogue with the softness of the flowering plan. Three forces hold the design together: Bahá’í faith, community life, local culture. The design process itself was conceived as participatory: workshops with the Kinshasa Bahá’í community to shape not just the program but the form, the materials, and the meaning of the place. Kinshasa, a city of fifteen million, is nearly absent from the international architectural press. This project insists on its presence. Not as an exception. As evidence.