Africa: The Latest Architecture and News

African societies' cultures are intrinsically linked to color. From fabrics to clothing, products, sculptures, and architecture, various societies explore rich and vibrant colors that are vivid, expressive, and joyful. Through different shades, hues, contrasts, motifs, and ornamentations, colors are embraced as an unspoken language, a palette for storytelling, and a sense of cultural identity. Although the use of color in African societies may seem decorative on the surface, it is extremely symbolic, with a deep sense of history behind it. Traditional African architecture is a prime example. Ethnic societies have endowed their homes with color through ornaments and motifs, expressed it with religious and cultural patterns, employed it on facades to tell familial stories, and created labyrinths of communal architecture that not only celebrate color but explore its ethnic meaning.

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Matri-Archi(tecture) prepositions an exhibition in Johannesburg, titled ‘Building Africa: The State of Things!. The exhibition asks what it means to restore, preserve, foreground, call upon, remember and project former and future conditions of socio-political identity through the architecture of buildings that were once central figures in the political agenda of South Africa. The exhibition foregrounds research about the Constitutional Court and Union Buildings.

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The institution of slavery shaped landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. And in turn enslaved and free Africans and their descendants created new landscapes in the United States, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. African people had their own intimate relationships with the land, which enabled them to carve out their own agency and culture.

At Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., a symposium — Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora — organized by N. D. B. Connolly, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Oscar de la Torre, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, sought to highlight those forgotten relationships between people and their environment.

The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, and novelist Lesley Lokko – who is also Founder and Director of the African Futures Institute (AFI) based in Accra, Ghana – officially opened to the public on May 20th and is now on view through Nov. 26. Entitled The Laboratory of the Future, this year's Venice Architecture Biennale for the first time highlights the African continent as a leading force in shaping the world to come and Lokko's curatorial mission prompts entries to question traditional notions of what the future can hold and what architecture looks like.

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As Venice Architecture Biennale presents its 18th edition titled "The Laboratory of the Future", it centers on Africa as a place of exploration that will offer a template for solutions to the world. According to its curator Lesley Lokko, the Biennale explores entrenched concepts such as climate, land rights, decolonization, and cultures. It challenges us to question how Africa's history can be a radical tool for imagination and reminds us of Stephen Covey's statement: “Live out of your imagination, not just your history.” The biennale's title is probably the most ambitious question in years. It forces us to revisit all boundaries of the continent's historical societies, explore the influence of imposed colonial borders on them, and examine the dual identities they gave birth to. We must consider how these identities can be instruments of creativity, and, more importantly, recognize that every African society has a unique point of view. This viewpoint yearns for cross-cultural collaboration as a powerful tool for imagination.

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Located in the southern part of Benin-Republic, near the port city of Cotonou, is Ganvie; the largest floating village in Africa. It is situated in the middle of Lake Nokoué and is characterized by colorful wooden stilt houses arranged around artificial islands dating back to the 17th century.

This unique architecture was born from the history of the Tofinu tribe, who built it as a refuge from the slave trade. It has been sustained over time by their communal socio-ecological aquacultural systems and has now become a global tourist attraction for the country. The village was recognized as a world cultural heritage site by UNESCO in 1996, attracting up to 10,000 visitors annually. However, this influx of tourists has impacted the locals and their socio-ecological practices that sustain this water environment. Aquaculture has become increasingly challenging to maintain as the village struggles to retain its economic foundation. Additionally, traditional building practices have given way to modern ones, and the village faces ongoing environmental challenges. Nevertheless, the unique lifestyle of the locals around the water still offers many lessons for the design of prospective floating cities.

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The legacy of the Modernist movement is a complicated one. Spanning a diverse assortment of fiercely debated sub-categories and styles, the Modernist style has established its presence in virtually every continent. Although the movement's origins may be rooted in Europe and the U.S., outside of the Eurocentric canon architects have redefined and re-established the definition of a "Modernist" building. In Sri Lanka, for example, architect Geoffrey Bawa's sensitive, nature-inspired architectural responses gave rise to the "Tropical Modernism" label. Over in the African continent, it is in the East-African country of Tanzania that some highly unique examples of Modernist architecture are found – headed by architects Anthony Almeida and Beda Amuli.

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African cities are expected to experience a significant increase in population over the next 30 years. According to United Nations projections, these cities will welcome an additional 900 million inhabitants by 2050. This demographic shift will create both opportunities and challenges that will reshape the nature and structure of these cities. These challenges include the need for economic growth, increased demand for housing and infrastructure, and the development of supplementary transportation systems. So far, most African cities have responded to this rapid population growth with sprawling horizontal development patterns that expand the fringes of the city, increase social fragmentation, and ultimately lead to greater car dependency.

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The First Islamic Arts Biennale, artistically directed by Sumayya Vally, opened on January 2023 and is still ongoing until May 23, 2023, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The inaugural event was commissioned and produced by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation and was curated by Vally alongside Dr. Julian Raby, Dr. Omniya Abdel Barr, and Dr. Saad Al-Rashid. The biennale re-imagines the Western Hajj Terminal at King Abdulaziz Airport, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and winner of the 1983 Aga Khan Award, as a cultural space to redefine Islamic Arts from "within, in a way, that connects some of these art forms and forms of artistic expression to the experience and rituals" of those that live it.

Sumayya Vally is a South African architect, founder, and director of the Johannesburg-based collaborative architectural studio Counterspace. Designer of the Serpentine Pavilion in 2020/2021, she was the youngest architect to get this commission. Part of Time’s 100 emerging leaders who are shaping the future, in 2021, the only architect to make the list at that time, Sumayya started her career as a curator and teacher, and recently she was appointed as artistic director of the first Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. ArchDaily had the chance to talk with Vally about her contribution to this biennale, her vision of the exhibition, the venue, the scenography, and the participating architects. Sumayya also shared some exclusive info about her entry for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, starting on May 20th, in Venice, Italy.

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The 18th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by Lesley Lokko, is set to open in just one month's time with a focus on "The Laboratory of the Future", casting the African continent as a leading force in shaping the world to come, and challenging conventional notions of what the future can hold and what a laboratory can be. Featuring 63 National Pavilions, 89 Participants, and 9 collateral events in the city, the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale invites practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds to explore new possibilities.

Founder and Director of the African Futures Institute (AFI) based in Accra, Ghana, Lesley Lokko, is a Ghanaian-Scottish architect, educator, and novelist. With a career that spans Johannesburg, London, Accra, and Edinburgh, she has held several teaching positions and is widely recognized in her field. Professor Lokko was appointed as the curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in December 2021, after serving as a jury member for the Golden Lions Awards for the previous edition of the Venice Biennale. In her first interview with ArchDaily, after she was appointed curator of the 2023 Architecture Biennale, Lesley Lokko shares insights about the preparations, the theme, and this 18th edition.

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Atelier Masōmī has just revealed its design for The Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development (EJS Center). President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf chose an all-female team to work on the project with lead architect Mariam Issoufou Kamara of Atelier Masōmī, exhibition's architect Sumayya Vally of Counterspace, and the local architect Liberian architect Karen Richards Barnes. The EJS Center, located in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, will provide digital access to former President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s personal and professional archives.

Light — how we perceive the world around us — is an integral, emotive architectural element. Access to light is enhanced and limited in an architectural capacity globally, with architects of expensive tropical dwellings celebrating sunny vistas with expansive glazing, while a wide range of art galleries reject light in its natural form, eliminating it in adherence to the sensitive exhibit requirements of art pieces. Light in an architectural and urban sense is also highly symbolic, evident in the many metropolises of our world, but where this symbolism takes on an interesting dimension is in the archipelago of Zanzibar.

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Sometimes sculptural and expressive, sometimes monolithic and monotonous, the Brutalist architectural style is equal parts diverse and divisive. From its origins as a by-product of the Modernism movement in the 1950s to today, Brutalist buildings, in architectural discourse, remain a popular point of discussion. A likely reason for this endurance is — with their raw concrete textures and dramatic shadows, brutalist buildings commonly photograph really well.

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Known as the state house, the presidential palace, and an assortment of other terms — the building that hosts a country’s seat of government is usually quite architecturally striking. Frequently opulent, grand, and sometimes imposing, the state house is intended to function as a visually distinct marker of a nation — an extension of a state’s identity. In the African continent, a landmass that had seen a significant part of it colonized by European nations, this identity of statehood, in an architectural sense, is complex.

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Announced today in a live presentation, the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, titled The Laboratory of the Future, curated by Lesley Lokko, will be open to the public from May 20 to November 26, 2023, in Venice, Italy. This edition will include 63 National Pavilions, 27 of which are at the Giardini, 22 at the Arsenale, and 14 in the city center of Venice. Structured in six parts, the exhibition will include 89 Participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora, with a 50/50 gender balance, and an average age of 43 for participants. Contributors include Adjaye Associates, atelier masōmī, Kéré Architecture, MASS Design Group, Sumayya Vally and Moad Musbahi, Theaster Gates Studio, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Liam Young, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, to name a few.

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This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Last November, the annual climate conference COP 27 came to a close in Sharm el-Sheikh with a tentative agreement, reached at the last moment, to set up a “loss and damage” climate fund for Africa and other developing countries. For Africans, this was cause for muted celebration, because for generations the continent has built its climate change agenda almost exclusively around the pursuit of climate justice, a desire to enforce liability on the industrialized nations responsible for the bulk of global carbon emissions. All of this has unfolded, in a sort of willful blindness, while a majority of Africans struggled with the most prosaic challenges: inefficient urban sanitation; poor stormwater management; a paucity of water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities; willful and unabated deforestation; and environmental degradation.

A defining feature of the architecture of the Swahili Coast—apart from its coral stone buildings and mangrove poles used to elaborate those structures—is undoubtedly the ornamented door so commonly found across this coastal area. Richly decorated, and historically often layered with meaning, these doors, apart from serving the more utilitarian function of an entrance, were also signifiers of status and wealth. From this Swahili Coast to the Arabian Peninsula, these doors of the coast are very much markers of their location, representative of trade and migration.

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Simultaneously gripping, disconcerting, and chaotic, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki is an exhilarating cinematic ride. The 1973 drama — the first full-length film by the Senegalese director — is the fantastical narration of a young couple in Dakar, eager to escape the Senegalese capital for the allure of Paris. It’s a character-driven film in many ways, primarily centered on the couple’s adventures, but it is also a subtle visual examination of the urbanism of post-independence Dakar, where the city and its architecture are essential fixtures in a surreal storyline.

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