Courtesy of FDL, ADAGP 2014 | Le Corbusier in Chandigarh with the plan of the city and a model of the Modular Man, his universal system of proportion, 1951
The Victoria & Albert Museum is set to present an expansive exhibition focused on Tropical Modernism, an architectural movement that emerged in the late 1940s. British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry were instrumental in developing this approach, combining modernism’s functional goals with local climate adaptations in warm and humid weather. This movement, which embodies Britain's unique contribution to international modernism, evolved against a backdrop of anti-colonial resistance, blending colonial architectural principles with local needs.
The home is a fundamental expression of architectural movements within the fabric of a city. As one of the smallest typologies, it is the simplest canvas to exhibit the design ethos of any particular era. African cities have continuously negotiated the meaning of their residential dwellings, from traditional architecture to colonial architecture, and the influx of post-colonial modern architecture. Vernacular architecture explored homes with spatial patterns rooted in cultural dexterity, envelopes built with indigenous materials and forms, endowed with traditional motifs. These were in stark contrast to colonial homes that featured a range of imported architectural styles across the continent, neglecting their climatic and cultural contexts while amplifying social class.
Architecture in the Global South often embodies a rich cultural heritage and craftsmanship, incorporating vibrant colors, intricate patterns, and symbolic elements. It also tackles the challenges faced by developing economies, such as limited resources, rapid urbanization, and social inequality, by promoting inclusive and community-driven design solutions. As installations and pavilions serve as radical templates for interrogating these architectural ideals and seeking innovative solutions, we present the top architectural installations as part of our year-in-review. They encompass curated exhibitions like the Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as permanent pavilion structures in specific contexts that delve into local materials, waste reuse, and the reinterpretation of historical narratives.
Located 270km north of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and near the border with Mauritania, is the Island of Saint-Louis. It is a prominent colonial city in West Africa, known for its blend of Mediterranean architecture with a tropical climate. Saint-Louis was founded by the French Colony in 1659 as its first trading post on the Atlantic coast of Africa. It later became the capital of French West Africa (AOF) and Senegal. However, it lost this status in 1902, which led to its economic decline.
This complex history has made Saint-Louis a melting point for different layers of architecture and urbanism. The island showcases a grid urban form with double-storey villas, which is typical of 19th-century French colonial urbanism. Additionally, it features tropical courtyards, shaded balconies, 1920s art déco houses, and early '30s modern civic buildings. However, due to its economic and infrastructural isolation, this architecture and urban heritage have continuously degraded. Therefore, it seeks new interventions for the conservation, restoration, and re-adaptation of the city.
Rammed earth is one of the oldest methods of constructing walls and still holds great potential for modern earth construction. One aspect of this potential is the gift of its colors and layers, which become visible as the formworks are removed, revealing a layered character. As a process that involves the layer-by-layer compression of gravel, sand, silt, and clay, its resulting appearance is a horizontal stratification of earth tones, material content, and curing procedures. This colorful appearance of rammed earth walls can be controlled and explored through patterns, texture, pigmentation, and natural clay colors, offering an opportunity to push its boundaries within architecture.
Tropical Africa boasts vast forests that cover 3.6 million square kilometers of land in West, East, and Central Africa. These forests provide valuable timber resources that significantly impact sectors, such as the furniture, fuel, and paper industries. However, interestingly, timber is seemingly absent in the contemporary architecture of the countries in this region. While architectural taste plays a role, the main reasons for this absence can be attributed to the wood industries' inability to meet the requirements of availability, affordability, aesthetic appeal, durability, and climatic and structural performance of timber. The wood industry in tropical Africa is mainly composed of informal and small-scale operations, focused primarily on sawing logs rather than refining wood for architectural or structural purposes. Despite this, the large number of informal enterprises in the region presents an opportunity to reshape the wood industry and utilize the local forestry resources to construct timber buildings.
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.
Willow Technologies is a material research and building technology practice that has been selected as part of ArchDaily's 2023 Best New Practices. Founded by Ghanaian-Filipino designer and architectural scientist Mae-Ling Lokko, it operates in the gap between research, development, and diffusion of bio-based building materials. Working with agro-waste and bio-based materials usually incurs technical questions regarding scalability, industrial production, standardization, fireproofing, and mechanical strength. Exploring this data is where Willow Technologies situates itself, but peculiarly through the lens of developing regions in West Africa. Through comprehensive works with coconuts, moringa, rice, and other indigenous crops, Lokko’s practice has been able to investigate and catalog the material character of various crops, their possible by-products, local transformation techniques, and the prospect and challenges of scalability as building materials.
In Lagos, a city with a complex urban fabric that includes historical buildings and vast interpretations of contemporary architecture, lies PatrickWaheed Design Consulting (PWDC). This design practice, Co-led by Adeyemo Shokunbi, aims to contribute to a Nigerian architectural language through the renaissance of local materials. Through explorations anchored in local laterite, they have developed the material as a modern finishing technique, investigated its potential as a natural dye, discovered new ways to employ its thermal properties, and now build the research prospect of other local materials. I had the opportunity to speak with Architect Shokunbi, who discussed the initial inspirations and investigations during the construction of two building projects (Mad House & Abijo Mosque) in Lagos. These projects brought the Laterite finishing technique to life and now help build the case for a Nigerian architectural language.
As one takes a visual tour through the city, one might spot structures that break the rhythm of finished architectural products. These are buildings encased in grids of metal or wooden sections, sometimes wrapped in colored nets, that communicate a moment of construction, repair, renovation, or demolition. They are called scaffolding systems, temporary structures built in the city to aid in the erection or maintenance of buildings. However, they have evolved to speak their own architectural language. As city-making is a continuous process, scaffolds serve as beacons, proposing silhouettes of the height, shape, or forms of new buildings. They step into the sidewalks, acting as shade or obstructions to the flow of human and vehicular traffic. In contrast to the permanence of architecture, they exhibit a sense of temporality that helps communicate time, the growth of neighborhoods, and the evolution of a city.
The final installment of The Architect's Studio series at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art showcases the works of Cave_bureau, an architectural studio from Kenya. The exhibition explores the volcanic caves of Kenya, emphasizing the concept of "reversed futurism." Cave_bureau believes that by studying the past, they can develop sustainable solutions for the future.
In the south of Burkina Faso, sharing borders with the northern environs of Ghana is Tiébélé; a small village exhibiting fractal patterns of circular and rectangular buildings, housing one of the oldest ethnic groups in West Africa; the Kassena tribe. With vernacular houses dating back to the 15th century, the village’s buildings strike a distinctive character through its symbol-laden painted walls. It is an architecture of wall decoration where the community uses their building envelope as a canvas for geometric shapes and symbols of local folklore, expressing the culture’s history and unique heritage. This architecture is the product of a unique form of communal collaboration, where all men and women in the community are tasked with contributing to the construction and finishing of any new house. This practice serves as a transmission point for Kassena culture across generations.
Fractals are complex geometric shapes with fractional dimensional properties. They have emerged as swirling patterns within the frontiers of mathematics, information technology, and computer graphics. Over the last 30 years, these patterns have also become important modeling tools in other fields, including biology, geology, and other natural sciences. However, fractals have existed far beyond the birth of computers, and have been observed by anthropologists in indigenous African societies. One of which is Ron Eglash; an American scientist who presents the evidence of fractals in the architecture, art, textile sculpture, and religion of indigenous African societies. In his book, “African Fractals: Modern Computing and indigenous design”, the fractals in African societies are not simply accidental or intuitive but are design themes that evolve from cultural practices and societal structures.
The luxury hotel, as an architectural typology, is distinctive. In effect, it's a self-contained community, a building that immerses the well-off visitor into their local context. Self-contained communities they might be, but these hotels are also vessels of the wider socioeconomic character of a place, where luxury living is often next door to informal settlements in the most extreme examples of social inequality.
Compared to that of the West and East, awareness and knowledge of the architecture of sub-Saharan Africa—Africa south of the Sahara Desert—is scant. A new book intends to mitigate this oversight, and it’s a significant accomplishment. Architectural Guide Sub-Saharan Africa (DOM publishers, 2021), edited by Philipp Meuser, Adil Dalbai, and Livingstone Mukasa, was more than six years in the making. The seven-volume guide presents architecture in the continent’s 49 sub-Saharan nation-states, includes contributions by nearly 340 authors, 5,000 photos, more than 850 buildings, and 49 articles expressly devoted to theorizing African architecture in its social, economic, historical, and cultural context. I interviewed two of the editors—Adil Dalbai, an architectural researcher and practitioner specializing in sub-Saharan Africa, and Livingstone Mukasa, a native Ugandan architect interested in the intersections of architectural history and cultural anthropology—about the challenges of creating the guide, some of its revelations about the architecture of Africa, and its potential impact.
https://www.archdaily.com/979526/a-remarkably-comprehensive-new-guide-to-the-architecture-of-sub-saharan-africaMichael J. Crosbie
Meet 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, Francis Kéré, Burkina Faso-born black architect, in an interview about his architectural philosophy, with Louisiana Channel. As the official statement of the Pritzker Architecture Prize notes, “Through buildings that demonstrate beauty, modesty, and invention, and by the integrity of his architecture and geste, Kéré gracefully upholds the mission of this Prize”, continually “empowering and transforming communities through the process of architecture.”
“Through buildings that demonstrate beauty, modesty, boldness, and invention, and by the integrity of his architecture and geste, Kéré gracefully upholds the mission of this Prize,” explains the official statement of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Announced today by Tom Pritzker, Chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, Francis Kéré is the 51st winner of the award founded in 1979, succeeding Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. Praised “for the gifts he has created through his work, gifts that go beyond the realm of the architecture discipline”, the acclaimed architect is present equally in Burkina Faso and Germany, professionally and personally.
.jpg?1648133923 "Burkina Institute of Technology (BIT) / Kéré Architecture. Image Courtesy of Francis Kéré")
