What the architecture of Demas Nwoko got me thinking.
The first step to solving a problem is of course understanding the problem.
Gillian and Hopwood’s documentation of the Artist-architect is one addition to my library I’ve craved for years now, but it took me this long to cop so maybe I never wanted it badly enough? How the Yoruba would say ‘eni taa baafe ni ile ren jina’; you love someone and their house is never too far.
Not really.
Plain and simple, getting architectonic texts from Nigeria can be difficult.
It would take less days for amazon to deliver Adjaye’s Adjaye Africa Architecture from the abroad than what it took to trawl through Ibadan and Lagos’ bookstores for Arc. Fola-Alade’s autobiography, who I only got to know of from Professor Ekundayo Adeyemi’s “In the making of an architect” (a gift from last May’s Lagos Architect Forum), both of them easily one of the most influential architects and educators to have ever taught and practiced in the country.
You wouldn’t need a poll to know that a larger percentage of students of architecture haven’t heard the first thing about them. Nigeria suffers from a dearth of sense of history (cue the civil war) and it makes sense that architecture is just a part of the infected sum. Cause and effect.
At a point during LAF 9.0, everyone seemed to be deferring a la demi-god to a certain sage-like personality and I had to go ask Arc. Abimbola Ajayi who Kitoye Ibare-Akinsan was. I think I heard the person next to her gasp in disbelief.
Why?
We do not know our heroes. An identity crisis deeper than you think, drawing blank stares and not recognition when important names of the profession are mentioned. There’s such a wide disconnect between the fledgling architect and the practicing. A chasm that could be easily bridged not just with books. The Internet is such a wonderful place.
The average young architect, wants to visit the Bauhaus in Dessau and Dubai with its scrapers, see Niemeyer, Calatrava, and Zaha Hadid’s works, with little interest in the gems served up in our backyards like the Independence house et al. Anecdotes of the success and sacrifices of the first students of the Zaria school hold little meaning to us and are fast vanishing.
A real shame, Imagine an American architect not knowing who Louis Sullivan or Phillip Johnson or Frank Lloyd Wright was. Or a British architect oblivious the works of James Stirling, Peter Cook, Richard Rogers.
The recent publication by the Association of Consulting Architects in Nigeria (ACA Nigeria). “Architecture in Nigeria” is probably the best thing we have bearing the works of Nigerian architects (or maybe I’m wrong, I hope I am), but it failed to make a splash, a missed opportunity to create meaning, more depth than a coffee table book with pictures and brief biodata of buildings done by firms with nameless architects. One could spend money on something else.
I hear there’s going to be a second volume of the book, so maybe it will could take a cue from Philip Johnson’s Museum of Modern Art curated “Deconstructivist Architecture” where works of deconstructive proponents du jour; Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhaas, Eisenmann, Hadid, Himmelbau, Tschumi, where exhibited by taking them apart and showing the thinking that went into the birthing of selected buildings and how they worked. Maybe.
Everything about the pedagogy of students of Architecture in Nigeria conditions us to look to the outside. Everything. This will always leave us looking to external influences for internal problems. Personally, Paul Goldberger and Patrick Schumacher’s essays, Micheal Hays and Reinier De Graaf’s theories, Zumthor, Koolhaas’s servings and Corb’s “Towards a new architecture” especially, are favourites I keep close. Now I might not always fully grasp their yarns but they’ve naturally become, guiding lights of sorts slowly shaping my architecture worldview.
This would make absolute sense if I wasn’t planning to practice in this clime but the disparity in context and reality would sometimes make these ideas a tour de force to implement over here. Say, Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture, imagine justifying the extra cost of Pilotis, of a free plan, of clerestory windows, of green roofs on residential buildings every single time to the average Nigerian developer never mind the many benefits to the building’s users, or of an ornament-free façade to a client who really needs to tell passers-by that he has more money than they do. Bonne Chance!
Except some of the Architects before us have not only solved these conundrums but have gone ahead to conflate these ideas with our solutions that work for our climate, how we function in our spaces, our cultural and social context, creating a bespoke architecture based on user experience, this is architectural alchemy at its best.
The point of all their great work is lost when there is little documentation, the fledgling architect has little to look to from the who have devised savvy solutions that work and falls into the mire of producing drawings solely based on the style in vogue. The Independence house for example, the only hard facts are its starting and completion dates, everything else is hearsay from people who were alive at the time with interests in the project. The federal body in-charge has no information on the first super-tall building in the country!
So why don’t produce enough texts of our own? Are our predecessors guilty of not penning their own stories, findings and experience for posterity or they did and we are just too lazy to seek them from bookstores and libraries? Colo-mentality?
Again, Not really.
I realized the only easily accessible texts on our context are mostly research papers, uploaded on the internet by masters and doctorate students, and only because it’s a requirement.
I know there are innumerable texts existing on our architecture and its heroes, but how available, our libraries? We could start with donating these texts to the libraries of departments of Architecture. Banister fletcher and the usual suspects. All Western, external influences solving foreign problems.
Penning reasons behind architectural decisions does not just serve to explain thoughts to inspire the young architect but even more importantly, to spark discourse amongst practicing Architects. A body of work igniting conversations is never a terrible thing.
The efforts of a handful of progressive ideas such as Open House Lagos at educating on our architecture isn’t going unnoticed and is surely going to bear fruit. Those who can’t make it stalk social media to share whatever they can of the experience. Baby steps, we’ll get there.
If we are to develop solutions unique to us… We need a community that will build the design confidence of the next generation of African architects and designers.” — Christian Benimana TEDGlobal 2017
Maybe the history and theories of Nigerian architecture should be ‘unlumped’ from the history of Architecture (of a diverse world of dissimilar contexts) taken in our universities and come into a course of its own?
Maybe more Isaac Fola-Alade and less Frank Lloyd Wright?
More Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry and less Charles and Ray Eames?
More Fred Archibong, more Nike Davies-Okundaye, more Victor Ehikhamenor in our arts?
Maybe one day the voice would be loud enough and we’ll stop writing about how we don’t write enough on our architecture.
