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We Need New African Architecture

AfricaFebruary/March 2025vol9-no1
African Architecture

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Union Building by Herbert Baker, South Africa. Léo Doctors’ Housing, Burkina Faso. / KÉRÉ ARCHITECTURE. Tower in the Great Enclosure, Great Zimbabwe. / WIKIMEDIA. Map of German East Africa (Korogwe) / LOC GOV.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / ARCHITECTURE DEPT.

We Need New African Architecture

With 600 million people expected to migrate to African cities by 2050, Africa must rethink its architecture as existing approaches have proven inadequate.
African Architecture

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Union Building by Herbert Baker, South Africa. Léo Doctors’ Housing, Burkina Faso. / KÉRÉ ARCHITECTURE. Tower in the Great Enclosure, Great Zimbabwe. / WIKIMEDIA. Map of German East Africa (Korogwe) / LOC GOV.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / ARCHITECTURE DEPT.

We Need New African Architecture

With 600 million people expected to migrate to African cities by 2050, Africa must rethink its architecture as existing approaches have proven inadequate.

More than ever before, and less than ever again, humanity is an urban species. It is expected that by 2050, 57 per cent of the global population will live in cities, and 90 per cent of future population growth will be accounted for by urban dwellers. This is particularly true on the African continent, where climate catastrophe and the collapse of indigenous communities will drive millions into already-strained cities. Urbanization, as we have seen it in Africa, has hardly been an encouraging process, being primarily one of overcrowding, slumification, and a lack of infrastructure development by the state: 84 per cent of the continent’s urban dwellers have access to drinking water while 54 per cent to sanitation. In the coming decades, we will only see this process accelerate, and conditions worsen.

This poses a challenge for African governments, businesses and communities: how do we address the problems of rapid urbanization? And more than that, how can we use architecture to shape authentically African cities? The solution lies in looking back to indigenous architectural methods and looking around to innovations in design and construction.

In order to address the problems of climate change and sustainability, slumification and public health, architects across the continent are embracing modern technologies and traditional techniques. I argue that this blend of tradition and innovation offers us a scalable approach to urbanization. To understand where African architecture is today, and where it might be going, it is worth understanding where it comes from.

VESTIGES OF THE IMPERIALIST PAST

Africa as we know it today is a colonial creation. From borders to the built environment, we live with the uneasy inheritance of the Berlin Conference. In South Africa, British imperialism consciously created an architecture that would transform the landscape into one more like that of the mother country. Its leading designer was Herbert Baker.

Born in 1862, in the village of Cobham, Kent, Baker’s success in the United Kingdom led him to South Africa, where he designed and oversaw the execution of some of the country’s most important buildings. He is credited with the design of several elite schools, key churches and government buildings. His achievements across the empire include the South African High Commission in London, Parliament House in New Delhi and the Union Buildings in Pretoria.

Baker’s career, from early beginnings to international acclaim, was implicated in the British imperial project. One of his most important clients was Cecil John Rhodes, arch-imperialist and mining magnate. In 1900, Rhodes commissioned Baker to build a humble cottage for artists and intellectuals, what resulted was a Cape Dutch creation, Woolsack House, which gave its name to the residence and road that form part of the University of Cape Town. The first occupant of that house was the poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling. He further commissioned Groote Schuur, an English-style country house with Cape Dutch embellishments, which is now the official residence of the South African president.

It is impossible to classify Baker’s oeuvre under a single style as his works range from the rustic Cape Dutch to the Neo-Classical as seen in the Union Buildings. His ecclesiastical commissions borrow from the Neo-Gothic and Romanesque, as do his schools. The single unifying characteristic of these styles is their philosophy—each represents an architecture of European grandeur, of somewhere else. This is in line with the colonial ideology of Baker and his ilk; erasure and imposition are the mechanisms by which empire spreads. The landscape was a tabula rasa, to be understood as lacking a history of human occupation, to be thought of in geological terms. A land ready for the taking.

The land, however, was never empty. Vast and innumerable civilizations rose and fell in the centuries before colonialism. They built complex and well-planned cities with locally available materials. From Ibadan to Kilwa, to the agrarian towns of the Tswana people, to the mobile capitals of the Zulu empire with their beehive houses, indigenous peoples built to suit their conditions and needs.

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Faced with the fetishized example of indigenous architecture, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the colonial narrative buckled but continued nonetheless. Once they had decided that local populations were essentially subhuman, the imperialists could not attribute anything of significance to them. A guidebook to the ruins read: ‘No Bantu people, surely, ever possessed the continuity of effort necessary to achieve such masterpieces of architecture.’ The ruins were speculatively attributed to some ancient Arabian or biblical civilization. Whatever could not be explained away was destroyed. The fractal urbanist streets and earthwork walls of Edo, the capital of the Benin Empire, were sacked, blown up, and erased from the history books by the British during their conquest in 1897. Today, Benin City features the Royal Palace of the Oba, a structure in the classical style of Andrea Palladio, the Italian architect of the Renaissance age.

The project of settlement, having conquered and made invisible indigenous populations, was a project of psychic and physical construction. It was roads, bridges, cities, ports, political institutions, systems of education—a vast totality which sought to change the facts on the ground and thus make British control of the land a fait accompli, even as it was being contested. In 1910, the formation of the Union of South Africa, a British dominion, marked the completion of this project, and the Union Buildings were stamped onto the hills of Arcadia as its symbolic and administrative centre. The buildings have two wings, joined by a curved arcade of pillars, symbolizing the coming together of Boer and Briton. At the time, these groups hardly made up 20 per cent of the new country’s population.

The nation is an imagined community, a unifying abstraction, and architecture is its concrete expression. The message of the buildings is simple—this is a white man’s country and the white man’s government rules with majesty and force. With their visible mass, the buildings are an impressive, oppressive presence, a reminder in stone of who was in charge.

Today, the Union Buildings remain in use as the office of the president in the administrative capital, Pretoria. In the new democratic era, they are at once a magnificent and malign place, a reminder of colonial history, and necessary office space. An intervention, in the form of a large bronze statue of Nelson Mandela, has been made to transform something of their character, but this is, as they say in the classics, putting lipstick on a pig. I argue that no decorative intervention, nor even stylistic overhaul could change the imperial attitude the buildings represent.

It is not the pillars, statues, or soaring domes that are the problem, it is their essential structure, and how that structure sits in the landscape, how it responds to climate (or fails to do so), and from where it draws its visual language. Access to the buildings is governed by a combination of inherent and contingent measures—the distance between door and street, the small, controlled gates guarded by policemen, and the very imposing nature of the buildings.

At the end of the colonial era, particularly during the mass decolonization of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, constructions like the Union Buildings came to represent a regrettable history. The erasure, imposition, and exclusions the buildings represent create a haunted independent Africa. In the new era, a new style was needed.

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POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITY

The wave of African decolonialization (1955-1980) brought, along with its promise, its problems. New, post-colonial state institutions had to be set up, and alongside these, the public architecture of the new state. It wasn’t just a matter of what should be built, but in what style.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the ravaged cityscapes of western Europe had to be rebuilt quickly, and for the leaders of the Modern architectural movement, this presented an opportunity to reshape European cities in a style that represented a new humanity. It was to be post-national and international, forsaking the irrationality and idiosyncrasies of local styles, which seemed representative of the identitarian fervour that made fascism possible.

Architectural Modernism, mostly in the form of Brutalism and the International style, presented a solution to this European problem. Advancements in construction technology liberated architects from the technical constraints that brick, stone and wood presented. Brutalism, a term from the French for raw concrete (beton brut) was to make frequent and imaginative use of the material, whose dexterity and strength diminished the need for oppressive walls—everything was to be sculptural masses and sheets of glass—no locality, no identity. This lack of identity is evident at the level of visual language. In ‘Five Points of a New Architecture’, a Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, declared the core components of Modern architecture namely, the use of concrete pilotis, free design of the ground plan and façade, the use of horizontal windows and flat roofs that could host gardens. The early Modernists adhered to a standard of ‘universality’, a belief that architecture had ‘natural laws’, rational principles that applied to all buildings everywhere. The aim was to ‘purify’ architecture, and thus ‘purify’ political and social reality. Le Corbusier’s five points are less a stylistic guide than an assertion of an almost mathematical approach to design.

For the post-colonial African state, Modernism represented a potent means of asserting Africa’s place on the world stage. In Beira, the railway station with its layered horizontality and parabolic arch represented progress and industry. In Nairobi, the Kenyatta Conference Centre’s soaring cylindrical tower and space-age hall declare, with fanned roof and unlikely cantilevers, a new political power rising in the city the British left behind. In Kampala, the main building of the international conference centre includes a textured concrete mass, seemingly floating over huge panes of glass, such that gravity appeared to no longer matter. Each of these buildings bears Le Corbusier’s mark. For architects, Modernism represented an opportunity for absolute architectural expression. For the early nation-builders, Modernism’s concepts of social responsibility, engendered by the post-war reconstruction and the welfare, resonated.

In Ghana, the language of Modernism adjusted to local needs, yielding the dialect of tropical Modernism. In buildings like the College of Technology, Kumasi, the solidity of concrete walls is perforated, yielding a bris-de-soleil, allowing light and air to filter in, while deflecting intense heat. In the former American embassy in Accra (now the headquarters of the Ministry for Women and Children’s Affairs) an overhanging roof creates a deep veranda, another way of addressing the local climate at the level of structure. Passive heating and cooling animate this style, sparing occupants the expense and health effects of air-conditioning. These responses to local conditions constitute Modernism’s concession of its own flaws; abstract rationality yields to pragmatism. In this style, flat roofs are inclined so rainwater slides off, rather than pooling in place, introducing new structural stresses and sites of decay.

And yet, even the tropical Modernist style was at least in part an attempt at retaining colonial control of the restive nation. British architects were commissioned to design new schools and infrastructure in the hopes that improved living conditions would erode calls for independence. But it was not to be a collaboration with the communities for which these buildings were constructed.

As the imperial era dismissed indigenous building practices, so did the new Modernists. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, the husband-and-wife team responsible for most tropical Modernism in Ghana before independence, once remarked: ‘There seemed to be no indigenous architecture, we therefore tried to invent an architecture which specifically met the needs of the West Africans and dealt with climate and the diseases it brought with it.’ Old wine in new jugs, old ideas in new buildings. Independence did not change the character of Modernism in Ghana, the revolutionary-then-authoritarian Kwame Nkrumah picked up right where the British left off.

The period of Modernism, even with its problems, was a period of hope but it was not to last. In the mid-1960s, political and economic instability swept sub-Saharan Africa, putting paid to the story of progress and industry that was being told through speech and space. Instability and population growth, coupled with the extraction-focused planning of existing infrastructure, saw the optimism of Modernism become the disappointment of rotting masses ruling the landscape, evidence of hubris and tone-deafness. The once shimmering plates of glass, the impenetrable concrete walls, shattered or cracked in their neglect. Vandalism ran rampant, and near-tropical humidity seeped into the small places.

In Abidjan, a pyramid in concrete, with sheets that jut out like scales, towers over its neighbourhood. The building is unoccupied, and unfit for occupation. In Lusaka, the axial spine of the University of Zambia is exposed to the elements—the building is in use, but unfinished, having been abandoned by its Israeli builders. The history of Modernism in Africa is often one of failed ambitions.

But were the ambitions ever realizable? Were they ever the right ambitions? La Pyramide, the abandoned market in Abidjan, failed not because of neglect, but because its very design was unsuitable for its purpose as the ratio of retail space to circulation was economically inefficient. In Johannesburg, the razor-thin Civic Centre, a triumph of brutalism in the global south, has been stripped of its interiors by fire and vagrants. Built in 1962 to accommodate the municipal administration of Johannesburg, the economic powerhouse of the new South African Republic, it towers above an empty square. Once menacing with power, and redolent with bureaucratic rationality, it serves as a stark reminder of decay. The city it was meant to serve has not existed for quite some time, having expanded to include everything from the skyscrapers of Africa’s richest square mile to the squalor of its dormitory towns. The latter of these gives an ironic new spin to Le Corbusier’s dictum: ‘a house is a machine for living.’ There was no intention of supporting a life in these places, they were machines for disciplining the black working class. Modernist Monumentality failed to address local needs and has thus been left behind.

Modernism in Africa today, as in so many other places, is less evidence of a hopeful past, and more an approach to building that sought to enforce a global uniformity. The anonymity of the international style has come to represent, in parts of the world, the failure of socialist planning. In others, it represents the rootlessness of life under capitalism. Brutalism has come to mean the brutality of totalitarian states, as in South Africa where the style found favour with the apartheid government. In Ghana, where Nkrumah, patron of tropical Modernism, was overthrown in 1966, the movement gave way to air-conditioned architecture.

The movement’s decline on the continent can be read as contingent—a project that could have worked if a few things had never happened or had happened differently—but this is a falsification. The origins of Modernism, its ideals, and its marriage to certain materials, made it necessarily unsuited to African conditions. Concrete does not do well in humidity, plate glass, with its expense, imposes needless burdens on cash-strapped states. The interest Modernist architects took in the continent stemmed from the sense that it was a blank slate, waiting to be filled with the new. African cityscapes became laboratories for humanity, Africans remained the guinea pigs of Western experimentation, passive and disposable. As critic, Biodun Jeyifo argues, Modernism was the wake of coloniality, not its aftermath but its afterlife.

The ‘universality’ of Modernist architecture belonged to an abstract vision of humanity, having little to do with the material and social needs of local communities. In seeking to announce the arrival of Africa on the world stage, the early nation-builders replicated the sneering disdain of the imperial era.

But the early nation-builders were no fools, they were simply men faced with a nearly intractable problem—‘how to become modern and return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.’ In a contemporary world, no one imagines that the pre-colonial civilizations of Africa can be revived wholesale, but history has proven that it will not do to cede our landscapes to the ideas of other peoples.

Perhaps the answer lies not in crafting a new ‘African’ style, or any style at all. The future of African architecture might lie in abandoning the need for coherent narratives. In declaring allegiance to the specificity of place and culture.

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NEW AFRICAN ARCHITECTURE

Architecture today does not have a unifying style. After Modernism, came Postmodernism, a philosophical approach that explicitly shunned grand narratives. This resulted in the explosion of radically different architectures, from Starchitect, Zaha Hadid’s yonic forms to the kitschy and eclectic designs of architect and philosopher, Robert Venturi. Post-Modernism makes free use of historical styles, neither shunning the old nor lionizing it. This philosophy may well be the answer to the nearly intractable problem; returning to sources, taking part in universal civilization.

Advancements in historical research have yielded a gold mine of African architectural history. We now have evidence of the mighty walls of Edo, which measure more than 16,000 km in length, and more than that, of the fractal principles according to which the city was planned. Fractals are a geometric process that involves the continual sequencing of patterns. In the urban design of Edo, this planning was reflected in the relationship between different levels of space—from the small scale of the compound to the larger scale of neighbourhoods, to the city plan as a whole. European visitors to the city claimed it was chaotic, a city that grew without limits or thought. History has proven that the city reflected mathematical principles that did not exist in Europe at the time.

The benefit of fractal planning is that it breaks the city down, such that elements of what is necessary for urban living are reflected at every level. This is not dissimilar from the contemporary concept of the 15-minute city, which requires that the rudiments of living be no more than a 15-minute walk away from the homes of local inhabitants. In a continent characterized by urban congestion, poor mobility and segregated neighbourhoods, the fractal offers a return to more communal ways of living. Where local environments can support a variety of functions, they sustain greater integration of how one lives with where one lives, and thus with the people with whom one lives.

The imperative of sustainability and the looming scarcity of concrete have forced us to investigate our use of materials. The practice of building with mud remains common across the continent, and its value as a passive cooling and heating material has become apparent. Mud takes in heat during the day and discharges it at night, forming a readily available thermal mass. This obviates the need for artificial cooling and heating. But the longevity of such structures, as well as their suitability for modern living, is in question. Here is where we are reminded that history has lessons, not instructions. Impregnating mud bricks with soluble silicone enhances their durability and resistance to weather, and when coupled with structural interventions, these buildings stand the test of time.

As temperatures rise, along with sea levels, architecture must respond to provide liveable conditions for its users and inhabitants. Architectural interventions through history provide solutions in the form of deep verandas as seen in the South African Cape Dutch style, brise-soleil as seen in Ghanaian Tropical modernism and cooling towers as seen in Diébédo Francis Kéré’s Startup Lions Campus. However, good buildings alone cannot solve the problem. We have significant evidence that urban wetlands play a vital role not only in securing biodiversity but also in providing protection from flooding and high temperatures. For this reason, it is becoming increasingly necessary to build in ways that protect existing wetlands, rehabilitate damaged ones, and create new wetlands where water and labour-intensive monoculture green spaces exist. New African architecture must be ecologically responsive. 

The architecture of colonialism and modernity was not merely a style, it was a relationship between the community and the buildings—or rather, a lack of relationship, a conscious exclusion of the indigenous peoples. New African architecture cannot be a purely visual language, it must be a transformation of collective relations to space, material, design and use. 

Kéré is a paradigmatic example of an African architect working with traditional materials, and communal relations.  Born in the Burkinabe village of Gando in 1965, Kéré received a scholarship to study architecture at the Technische Universitat in Berlin, graduating in 2004. He has since become one of the world’s most prominent architects. He is a winner of the Aga Khan Award, the Thomas Jefferson Medal, the Pritzker Prize and many others. One of Kéré’s more famous works is the primary school in Gando. 

The buildings, built by the community using mud bricks and eucalyptus wood, feature overhanging roofs to protect interiors from rain and direct sunlight while allowing air to flow freely, thus passively cooling them. The mud bricks replace conventional, heat-retaining concrete or clay, and have the benefit of being locally and thus cheaply produced. The use of eucalyptus wood constitutes an attempt to roll back botched attempts at reforestation in the area. Eucalyptus is a water-hungry and flammable material, making it unsuited to the hot, dry landscape of Gando. The trees cut down are replaced by mango trees adding a new source of food for the community. The initial success of the project has led to its expansion. A library, secondary school, and food allotment have been added, increasing the diversity of the food supply and providing a space for local youth to learn sustainable farming techniques and contribute to their families’ subsistence without sacrificing their education. 

Kéré’s inclusive approach to design and construction creates buildings that are functional, aesthetically interesting, and catalysts for new social realities and relationships. Buildings last where they are well-made and well-maintained, and the buildings we maintain are those for which we have some use or to which we have some attachment. Broadening the number of possible uses of a building ensures that it becomes a part of the daily life of the community, involving the community in construction gives it a sense of pride and ownership, not to mention driving down construction costs and making maintenance a simple business that can be done with locally available materials. 

The ethos of Gando Primary School is carried into Kéré’s other projects not only in the visual language but also in the commitment to context and community. The floating roof and mud-brick construction is present in the Goethe Institute Dakar and Leo Surgical Clinic and Health Centre, yet absent in projects such as the Freuer Waldorschule Weilheim and Thomas Sankara Memorial. In these latter two projects, however, the themes of Kéré’s work remain present. They serve to create open, useable space, rather than merely enclose and they form part of greater spatial possibilities rather than a spatial plan. 

The distinction between spatial possibility and spatial planning might be what sociologist Richard Sennett calls ‘disorder’, which is not chaos but openness to other uses of the building or the space that surrounds it. By designing open, flexible buildings, Kéré stands in contrast to architects like Baker, whose architectural designs are driven by a commitment to scale, domination and the architectural history of Europe. 

Kéré is by no means the only African architect designing in this context-centred way. There exist projects such as NLÉ’s Makoko floating school, a pilot for a larger system of floating buildings designed for the Makoko water community of Lagos. This project aims to address land scarcity in the local area, as well as present a climate-adaptive, modular alternative to conventional brick-and-mortar buildings. Another example is the sandbag house project built by MMA Architects in South Africa, in which sandbags are compressed and used to build the outer shell of the dwelling—a simple and cost-effective method of construction. 

In South Africa, the varied architecture of a post-nationalist nation has taken hold. The Constitutional Court in Braamfontein sits on the ruins of the Old Fort, initially built by Paul Kruger (president of the Zuid-Afrikanse Republik) to menace Uitlanders—white immigrants from the cape drawn northwards by the discovery of gold. In the aftermath of the formation of the Union of South Africa, the Fort became a prison. Today, its inward-facing façade (reminiscent of the Laager mentality) stands as a piece of history. Not far off is the open, outward-facing court, which has a ribbon window just above the heads of the esteemed justices. As they hold sessions, the judges of the apex court are aware of the movement of feet behind them; the majesty of the law is conducted at the level of the person on the street. 

While many examples of such innovation exist, there are not quite enough of them. The lack of funding, resistance to new design approaches, and hesitance among architects to undertake such projects stand in the way. The Makoko primary school project is an example of failure to launch, and many an architect would be hesitant to pursue a similar project, fearing reputational damage and resource wastage. If we are to have a new African architecture, we must embrace different ways of thinking not only about buildings themselves, but the process of their design, the spaces in which they might be constructed, and the longevity of structures. We must decentre the architect. 

South African architect, Jo Neoro, highlights construction practices among South Africa’s shack-dwelling communities. They make use of discarded or abundant materials, from corrugated iron sheets to old wood pallets and pre-existing concrete platforms. This is not to say that we ought to embrace informal housing as a suitable way of addressing the housing crisis, but that we can learn from and leverage existing practices, supply communities with basic materials and guidance regarding safety and architectural best practices, and then simply let them solve their own problems. The sandbag house project is an example of such a practice. Additionally, we can think differently about the usage of space. In Johannesburg, the practice of transforming high-way underpasses into marketplaces, as in the now fashionable Kwa Mai Mai, is common, using an otherwise dead space to support local businesses. The ephemerality of such a use of space reminds us that a pre-planned, inflexible and determinate approach to urban design falls apart in the African context, where the paucity of resources and space demands a different way of relating to our environment. This is the disordered city, open to a variety of uses, facilitating flow, and sustainable as a matter of necessity. 

600 million people are expected to migrate to African cities by 2050, which means narratives come a distant second to basic shelter. Governments, the private sector and citizens alike will need to rise to the challenge of creating sustainable, healthy and affordable housing. 

Existing approaches have proven inadequate. The hopeful rationalism of Modernist approaches has left us a legacy of monotonous and acontextual architecture. In South Africa, the continuation of Apartheid-era brick-and-mortar single-family housing has proven slow and left marginalized communities living in isolated, desolate landscapes that alienate them from their communities and do not facilitate a sense of ownership. We clearly cannot build as we always have done. New African architecture cannot afford to replicate the mistakes of the last three centuries, we cannot afford architecture ideated in the ivory tower and subsequently stamped onto the landscape. We need a post-stylistic architecture, the architecture of here and now⎈

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