On Lake Kivu, Rwanda's distinctive fishing trimaran is vanishing, and with it, the craft of building and repairing these boats. The Trimaran Centre on the Nkombo Island is a hub for that craft: a place to repair, restock and build trimarans, and to train a new generation in a district where one in five has no work.

The architecture is in dialogue with the boats it serves. Round wood canopies bend like a trimaran's arms; mosquito nets, hung against malaria, echo fishing nets left to dry; pulleys lift canoes from the water to be mended. Built by the island's own boatbuilders from fast-grown eucalyptus, the structure that can be renewed piece by piece, like the boats themselves, flexing in earthquakes and cyclones rather than resisting them. Its workshops need no mechanical cooling: walls are little more than insect netting, opening to the lake breeze.

Off-grid and self-sufficient, the centre runs on rooftop solar, with surplus enough to help electrify the island. The form is never decoration: every curve is structure, shade, and moving air made visible in the integrated design of minimum operational and embodied carbon.