Who Are Our Heroes? — a Nigerian Architecture Renaissance Project (NARP)
“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, 2017
The NARP is a project that seeks to Document, Collect and Archive the works and achievements of the most influential Architects and Educators to have practiced and taught in the country. The need for the project stems from a dearth of sense of history among young architects and architecture students.
We do not know our heroes.
This creates an identity crisis problem that shows up when blank stares, not recognition draws up when names that have contributed important work to the profession are mentioned. It gets more apparent when these students and young professionals, in attempts to give meaning to what Nigerian or African architecture can be defined as, look outside Nigeria and Africa for inspiration. This disparity of-course ends up in the creation of buildings that don’t work and are void of context.
A situation absolutely unnecessary as Architects before have not only solved these conundrums but gone ahead to conflate modernist philosophies with solutions that work for our climate, how we function in our spaces, in our cultural and social context, creating a bespoke architecture based on user experience.
The Project will then be open-source and non-profit, meeting the ‘Millennial” and ‘Gen Z” demography of students of architecture in the middle by bringing this solved to them through mediums they use, the Internet. While this chasm could be easily bridged with books, The Internet is such a wonderful place, gifting information faster and safely storing prized information than any physical library would, making it a most efficient way to preach this all too important, face-saving gospel.
The materials profiled will contribute to the pedagogy of Nigerian Architecture, by penning and explaining thoughts and reasons behind architectural decisions and even more importantly, spark discourse amongst practicing Architects. A body of work igniting conversations; it will inspire and ensure young architects and those who are also keen on the topic of architecture and its history are grounded in the who’s who of architecture in Nigeria before or while they venture out to learn about the architects and theorists of the west.
•Vision -
To plug the disconnect by bringing the works, stories and reasons behind these lost and fast-disappearing noteworthy works of Nigerian Architects to the younger generation.
• Mission -
Our mission is to close the identified knowledge gap by documenting selected works, anecdotes, books, analysis, design process and drawings through photography, words and digitization such as virtual reality and digital reconstruction where possible, in mediums most used by the target demography; The internet and social media.
