A large portion of the work we present here is linked to Liverpool and the Liverpool School of Architecture – and we’ve set about consolidating and developing these findings into an exhibition. Timed to coincide with the opening of our new building, designed by O’Donnell and Tuomey the exhibition presents the school’s 130+year history with a major focus on ‘the tropics’ and Middle East, as well as the Polish School, and contemporary works. The exhibition is arranged around five pavilions that a thematically and geographically arranged, and there’s a timeline of events and major collection of contemporary models too.
We’ve commissioned a major monograph to present the work in greater detail with excellent entries from leading architects and historians, including:
Shama Anbrine, Tadeusz Barucki, Richard Brook, Joy Burgess, Emma Curtin, Richard Dod, Martin Dodge, Chomchon Fusinpaiboon, Jocelyn Froimovich, Marco Iuliano, Juliana Yat Shun Kei, Kyna Leski, Daniel Naegele, Simon Pepper, Alan Powers, Peter Richmond, Michelangelo Sabatino, Joseph Sharples, Michael Shippobottom, Matthew Steele, Adam Voelcker, Mercedes Volait, Dominic Wilkinson, Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, Rixt Woudstra, Junjie Xi, Patrick Zamarian, Yulun Zheng.
As well essays from the contributors we’ve produced a series of reflective articles, chronologies, biographies, and thematic chapters that cover Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, Poland, West Africa, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, and the school’s connection to the British School in Rome.
The book will be available shortly as a 560page hardback, and of course you’ll be able to download a free PDF copy here and from Liverpool University website in due course. We will update with a link and upload an exhibition walkthrough here.
If you’re in Liverpool on Thursday 1st October 6pm , please come to the opening of the exhibition at the Liverpool School of Architecture. The show runs until the 18th December and you are welcome to drop in anytime.
IJ: this is well worth viewing if you’re at the Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival 26:
Edward Lawrenson , Killian O’Dochartaigh
About the installation
In 1899, the newly established Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine sent an expedition to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to investigate malaria prevention. Among its recommendations was the creation of an exclusive enclave of ‘houses for Europeans’ on a plateau above the city, where the altitude would protect colonial settlers from the perceived dangers of the tropical environment. Hill Station: Architecture and the Altitudes of Empire traces the architectural history of this colonial settlement and its entanglement with the expansion of the British Empire and the emergence of tropical medicine. At the core of the installation are the ways ideas about health, race, climate, and disease became embedded in the built environment as well as the complex links between Freetown and Liverpool, two major port cities connected by colonial maritime trading networks.
‘Urban Nodes & Narratives on Dansoman, Adabraka & Madina’
As part of ACCRA—one50, the Foundation for Contemporary Art—Ghana, in collaboration with [Applied] Foreign Affairs, presents a public panel discussion on Acupuncturing Accra — a metropolitan-scale artistic research, mapping and archiving project exploring three urban nodes in Adabraka, Dansoman and Madina.
Call for Papers: Beyond Colonial Narratives: Methods for Studying Colonial Built Environments in the Global South
Date: 9th December 2026 Location: School Of The Arts Old Library, University of Liverpool, Abercromby Square
The Heritage Institute at the University of Liverpool are pleased to announce a PGR Conference on Colonial and Postcolonial Architectural History, to take place at the University of Liverpool, 09 December 2026. The conference is an excellent opportunity for postgraduate research students and graduates to present papers and receive critical feedback from peers and experts in the field.
Conference theme/scope
Recent scholarship on colonial architecture and planning in the Global South has increasingly examined the politics of colonial power, imperial narratives, and their enduring legacies in the built environment.
Such studies have moved beyond simplistic centre-periphery models to explore how local actors engaged with, contested, appropriated, and redefined colonial projects in domestic, infrastructural, and urban contexts.
Methodologically, such works have drawn on approaches ranging from reading against the grain of colonial archives to examining non-official records and period literature that better represent the experiences of colonial societies. Scholars have also turned to alternative sources like oral histories, social practices, visual and material culture, and media to recover the voices and experiences of colonial subjects that are often absent from official archives.
This conference aims to further explore the diverse methodologies available for studying colonial built environments beyond colonial narratives and perspectives. It seeks to expand existing historiography by focusing on contributors who remain marginal or obscured within conventional architectural and planning histories, such as local professionals, artisans, labourers/workers, and inhabitants.
More broadly, the conference invites reflections on how approaches from architecture, urban planning, history, social sciences, and the humanities can deepen our understanding of the relationships between colonial administrations and local societies.
We invite paper proposals from postgraduate students working on Colonial and Postcolonial Architectural History, broadly defined. Of particular interest are papers that employ primary sources and non-traditional methodologies. We particularly welcome contributions that:
Focus on local professionals, artisans, labourers/workers, and inhabitants and other contributors who remain marginal or obscured within conventional architectural and planning histories.
Reflect on how methodological approaches from architecture, urban planning, history, social sciences, and the humanities can deepen our understanding of the relationships between colonial administrations and local societies.
Reveal processes of negotiation, adaptation, resistance, and collaboration between colonial and local authorities and building professionals, labourers/artisans, and everyday users of built environments.
Apply archival records produced by colonial subjects and non-state actors, as well as ethnography, oral history, participatory research, and critical analyses of popular culture, media, and material practices.
We encourage potential participants to interpret these themes broadly. Presentations should be made for 10-minute presentations. We especially welcome submissions from speakers with limited conference experience.
To be considered, each prospective participant should submit a 250-word abstract to heritage@liverpool.ac.uk by 23rd September 2026
Apartheid Urbanism and Architectural Power: A Spatial Survey of Lord Holford’s Durban Planning Proposals through Archival Analysis by S’busile Mgaga. New research from William Holford’s archive at the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives.
Abstract
Holford was a British modernist planner commissioned to advise on Durban’s urban development during apartheid. This dissertation examines how his work brought together modernist planning principles, imperial knowledge systems, and apartheid governance in shaping the city’s urban form. It examines the role of British planner Lord William Holford in the planning of Durban during the apartheid era. Holford, a RIBA Gold Medal winner and knighted figure in post-war British planning, was commissioned by the Durban City Council in the 1950s and 1960s to advise on urban development and produce long-term plans for the city centre. Using archival material from the Lord Holford Collection at the University of Liverpool, this study analyses Holford’s reports, correspondence, zoning diagrams, and circulation plans, with particular focus on the Durban 1985 – A Plan for Central Durban volumes.
The research demonstrates that Holford proposed a spatial framework centred on a consolidated white commercial core, hierarchical road networks, controlled circulation systems, and zoning strategies that reinforced racial separation. His plans prioritised efficiency, order, and traffic movement, while marginalising African, Indian, and Coloured populations to peripheral zones and reinforcing apartheid’s labour and residential geographies. Although the archive is framed within the neutral language of modernist planning, these proposals aligned closely with apartheid state objectives.
By reconstructing Durban’s projected spatial future from Holford’s archival materials, the dissertation shows how international planning expertise contributed directly to the production and legitimisation of apartheid urban form. The study argues that Holford’s work illustrates how administrative planning practices functioned as instruments of racialised governance, embedding apartheid ideology into the physical structure of the city.
Images with the courtesy of University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. Read the full dissertation here:
The African Architectural and Urban History Network (AFRAUHN), in collaboration with the Department of Architecture at the University of Nairobi, invites proposals for papers about emerging discourses and themes in African architectural and urban practices for a major international conference being held at the University of Nairobi from 8th September – 10th September 2026.
It will be the second AFRAUHN bi-annual conference, the first having taken place at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning in South Africa in July 2024. Recognizing that discourses about African architecture and urban planning are more complex than the bifurcated ‘traditional’/‘colonial’ or ‘African’/‘Western’ models which still tend to dominate the research, writing, environmental design and spatial design practices in the continent, this conference instead welcomes contributions that critically examine the status quo(s) of these models and disciplines – be that in terms of academic, practice, national institutions or regulatory bodies, or as are imagined by policy-makers in forms of urban development which are then disseminated to the public.
This second AFRAUHN bi-annual conference is organized to coincide with the inaugural Pan-African Biennale of Architecture, curated by Omar Degan and team, and which is also being held in September 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya
SESSION 1: 10.00–12.30 – Reclaiming Regional Identity in Kenyan Architecture [4 papers x 20minutes each]
Chair: Prof Robert Rukwaro
This session explores the intellectual and philosophical foundations of Kenyan architectural identity through the lens of vernacular knowledge systems, material intelligence, and spatial order. The presentation argues that traditional architecture in Kenya is not merely heritage to be preserved, but a living epistemic framework capable of informing contemporary design practice. Indigenous construction logics across Kenya’s diverse communities, ecological adaptation strategies, and collective spatial memory are examined as repositories of theory rather than cultural artefacts.
The discussion interrogates the tension between global architectural visibility and regional authenticity within the Kenyan context. If international planning and design models and homogenised aesthetics have shaped much of contemporary built production in Nairobi and other urban centres, what would it mean to design from within Kenyan ontologies rather than around them? How can architectural historiography and design research reposition Kenyan spatial traditions as generative rather than derivative?
Given that this platform seeks to advance scholarly and professional debate on Kenyan architectural identity, we welcome papers from researchers, practitioners, and emerging scholars working on vernacular knowledge, regional historiography, climatic adaptation, material culture, and contemporary reinterpretations of indigenous spatial systems. Papers may engage historical case studies, theoretical reflections, built work, or methodological innovations. As this convening includes significant time for dialogue and exchange, participants interested in contributing to the discussion are strongly encouraged to take part.
Lunch: 12:30–14:00
SESSION 2: 14.00–16.30 – Architectural Education in Africa: When the Curriculum Leans Towards a Eurocentric Body of Knowledge [4 papers x 20minutes each]
Chair: Arch. Erastus Abonyo
This discussion critically examines the structural imbalance in architectural education in Africa, where curricular frameworks often privilege Euro-American canons while local knowledge systems remain marginalised. The presentation interrogates how epistemic hierarchies are reproduced through studio culture, citation practices, accreditation standards, and benchmarking systems, questioning how legitimacy in architectural scholarship is constructed within African institutions.
The conversation explores the professional and intellectual consequences of this imbalance. How can architectural education in African prepare students for contexts defined by informality, hybrid land regimes, climate vulnerability, and postcolonial spatial inequality characteristic of African cities and towns? In what ways can indigenous material intelligence, oral archives, and community spatial governance be integrated as methodological frameworks rather than aesthetic references?
This convening especially welcomes papers that reflect upon the following pedagogical and methodological questions:
• How have architectural curricula in Africa been shaped by inherited colonial academic models, and what remains structurally embedded? • What knowledge systems and epistemologies construct ideas of “architecture” within African institutions, and what forms of knowledge are excluded? • How do accreditation standards, benchmarking systems, and global validation mechanisms influence curricular design and research priorities? • In what ways can studio culture, critique language, and research training be recalibrated to centre African socio-spatial realities?
Contributions that critically engage these questions—through empirical research, curriculum analysis, policy review, or pedagogical experimentation—are particularly encouraged.
Coffee/tea break: 16.30–17.00
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE LECTURE:19.00
OMAR DEGAN, Curating the Pan-African Biennale of Architecture: From Fragility to Resilience
This session will provide a forum for discussion amongst early career researchers involved in the recently concluded and British Academy-funded ‘Writing Campus Modernisms’ project. This project engaged a number of academic institutions and scholars/students across Africa in the creation of an open-source working collection of fiches documenting campus design in three African countries: Ghana, Nigeria and Rwanda. Whilst the personal experiences of each speaker will be the focus of the four contributions, the challenges, connections and opportunities that this project produced will form the background to the discussion which the speakers will deliver.
Given that this panel is framed around the reflections of Early Career Researchers who were involved in the ‘Writing Campus Modernisms’ research project – with four such ECR presenters already identified – we welcome a maximum of two further short paper contributions from Africa-based ECRs with experience related to research writing focused specifically on post-Second World War campus architecture in Africa. As this session also includes a significant slot for audience participation and discussion, we thus welcome all participants who are interested in contributing to take part.
Lunch: 12:30–14:00
SESSION 4: 14.00–16.30 – Shifting the Ground for Thinking the Historiographies of African Architecture and Urbanism [4 papers x 20minutes each]
Chair: Prof Ikem Okoye
Does the Africa-focused historian’s familiar distrust of the archive and its orientation extend to the built environments that form a structural, symbolic, and representational knowledge apparatus? Should it? An archive implies more than a physical repository of knowledge; it also reflects a value system. Histories of built environments intervene in both. They provide tangible and knowledge-related custodianship of documentary records that confer the legitimacy of governing bodies, and they also suggest alternate archival evidence and forms of authority.
This session invites papers, especially from early-career scholars, addressing any of these issues and or questions. The aim is to bring together senior scholars and those yet at the beginning of their professional careers as architectural or art historians and/or architectural or art critics, to create a discussion in a dialogical format.
Coffee/tea break: 16.30–17.00
Plenary Discussion: 17.00–18.30
This session will include short presentations and a roundtable discussion among some specially invited speakers from among the participants who are presenting their work in the Pan-African Biennale of Architecture at the same time as the AFRAUHN conference. The session will then lead into the main keynote lecture.
Chair: Prof Ola Uduku
Conference dinner: 20.30–22.00
THURSDAY, 10th SEPTEMBER 2026: CONFERENCE DAY 3
SESSION 5: 10.00–12.30 – What happened to Tropical Architecture? [4 papers x 20 minutes each]
Chair: Prof Nnamdi Elleh
What happened to tropical architecture that is adapted to the regional climates of Africa?
In Africa’s cities, we live, socialize and work in large buildings. Each day, these buildings are confronted with needs for heating, cooling, dust protection, daylighting, maintenance etc to provide conducive environments that function well for users. The cadence of life in these large African buildings suggests there is nothing nostalgic in questioning what happened to the concept of tropical architecture? We acknowledge the work of architects like Francis Kere and Nina Maritz in providing natural cooling, daylighting, and an appropriate use of materials and construction technology.
However, in cities as diverse as Cape Town, Abidjan, Cairo, Djibouti, Luanda or Casablanca, the bourgeoning African built environment is increasingly dominated by high- and medium-rise crystalline structures that are sealed as if built in a climate zone that fluctuates seasonally between extreme cold and heat. In a period when sustainable environmental design is a buzzword, it is baffling that architects still design structures which need artificial heating/cooling.
This session welcomes papers that explore how clients and designers can become re-sensitized to by taking advantage of natural African environments.
Lunch: 12.30–14.00
SESSION 6: 14.00–16.30 – Constructing Coloniality: Nodes of Imperialism and the East African Built Environment [4 papers x 20 minutes each]
Chair: Prof Eva Branscome
This session focuses on the coloniality of architecture and heritage of East Africa in relation to the diverse empires and trading networks which historically connected that region to peoples across the Arabian Sea and on associated islands in the Indian Ocean, as well as to Europe and the Indian subcontinent or further afield. The aim is to reassess East Africa’s built environment in wake of those former colonial systems.
Building types can include yet are not limited to the following:domestic environments; landscapes and agricultural production; urban environments such as streets, squares and gardens; factories and other sites of industrial production; sites of assembly, leisure and entertainment; places of worship; buildings for colonial administration; commercial infrastructure such as ports, waterways and railways; heritage sites and current conservation practices.
The session especially welcomes papers which reflect upon the following historiographical and methodological questions:
How have the professions, disciplines and discourses of architecture, design and heritage been shaped by and participated in imperialism, coloniality and racism?
What are the knowledge systems and epistemologies that construct ideas of ‘architecture’ and ‘heritage’, and what is excluded and why?
How do financial systems, supply chains and concepts of tenure and relations to the land shape the production of built environments?
How does the coloniality of architecture and built heritage relate to histories of extractivism and energy use?
Tea break: 16.30–17.00
SESSION 7: 17.00–18.00 – Design Research in African Architectural and Urban History [2 speakers x 20 minutes each]
Chair: Prof Murray Fraser
This final session offers a forum for those involved in designing for the African built environment to discuss the kinds of design research that they are engaged upon as a component of their built or unbuilt work. Particularly welcome are those proposals for presentations by up-and-coming architects/architectural practices who are currently designing innovative and anticipatory projects for villages, towns or cities on the African continent.
AFRAUHN FUTURE STEPS: 18.00–18.30
Discussion about future plans for the AFRAUHN research network.
FRIDAY, 11th SEPTEMBER 2026
TRAVEL TO MOMBASA
Conference participants/attendees are also invited to take the train to Mombasa for a specially organised architectural and urban tour of that coastal city. Early registration is required from those wanting to take part in this tour. Costs for this will be confirmed in due course.
Supporting institutions
Pan-African Biennale of Architecture
Architectural Association of Kenya
Campus Innovation Laboratory (CIL),University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Department of Art History, University of Delaware, USA
Liverpool School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, UK
The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK.
Scientific Committee
Professor Irene Appeaning Addo, University of Ghana, Legon (Ghana)
George Arrabu Ndege, President of the Architectural Association of Kenya
Professor Eva Branscome, University College London (UK)
Dr Warebi Brisibe, Rivers State University of Science and Technology (Nigeria)
Professor Marshall Brown, Princeton University (USA)
Omar Degan, Pan-African Biennale of Architecture
Professor Nnamdi Elleh, University of Witwatersrand (South Africa)
Professor Murray Fraser, University College London (UK)
Prof Julia Gallagher, King’s College London (UK)
Jacqueline Khairu, Chairperson – Architects’ Chapter, Architectural Association of Kenya
Dr Linda Nkatha Gichuyia, University of Nairobi (Kenya)
Professor Ikem Stanley Okoye, University of Delaware (USA)
Prof Robert Rukwaro, University of Nairobi (Kenya)
Dr Anooradha Siddiqi, Barnard College, Columbia University (USA)
Architecture, Empire and Trade wins at the Architectural Book Awards 2026
Architecture, Empire and Trade: The United Africa Companyhas won a category prize at this year’s Architectural Book Awards. It was named a joint winner for Best Architectural History Book of 2026. It’s free open access and now available in a paperback as well as hardback.
The awards are run by Booklaunch, the quarterly on books and publishing. Judging is anonymous. The categories change each year to fit what has been submitted and the awards are currently in their fourth year.
The judging took an unusual turn this year. For the first time the panel declined to name an overall Book of the Year. The editor, Stephen Games, said the field was too strong and too varied to rank one title above the rest. The judges took the view that serious criticism follows the evidence rather than forcing a hierarchy. So they named category winners and left it there.
Nine titles won across four categories. Between them they are the work of twenty authors, editors and photographers. Four came from university presses.
Our category, history, had four joint winners. We proudly share it with Women at Work, a study of the Cambridge School of Architecture; The Belgian Friendship Building; and Marvin Trachtenberg’s reassessment of Brunelleschi. Good company.
The book is the work of five of us: Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, Claire Tunstall and myself. The team spans Liverpool, Manchester, Amsterdam, Delft, and the Unilever Archives. It is published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts – I’d like to thank my co-authors for their hard work, and to James Thompson and Ros O’Cleirigh at Bloomsbury for their ongoing support.
The book is part of the wider AHUWA work on British commercial urbanism in West Africa. That work continues, including current research on the timber trade across Ghana and Nigeria, working with Claire on digitising/AIing the archives, and continuing the Kingsway exhibitions. The prize puts the book in front of readers who might not otherwise come across it. That is reason enough to be pleased, and thanks to the judges for selecting our work.
Stone Town: Beyond Tourism and Heritage by Maria Lookmanji
This dissertation investigates the Indo-Zanzibari community’s daily practices that shape belonging in the historic city of Stone Town, Zanzibar, and their methods of community-based, socio-spatial maintenance of space. To address this overlooked topic related to conservation, results from a participatory photography methodology are analysed. The remote, participatory image-based research (RPIBR) allows the Indo-Zanzibaris to document their under-researched spatial priorities and negotiations, giving them agency due to the insider knowledge and co-curated documentation.
The visual analysis across 64 images shows Indo-Zanzibari belonging grounded in routine trade-focused activity, improvised contemporary additions and wide networks of circulation beyond the heritage-inscribed boundaries of Stone Town. Practices interpreted as chaos or neglect, are reframed to show the collective community familiarity and responsive knowledge to contextual constraints and the complicated conditions of the country.
By focusing on evidence of everyday practice, Indo-Zanzibari presence is shown through urban responsibility and spatial negotiation rather than a curated display of performed heritage outside of lived necessity. The dissertation questions the nature of traditional conservation guidelines, emphasising the need to shift priority away from tourism and static heritage narratives, which aim to simply preserve the built environment, and instead draw attention to community and cultural survival.
How should we catalogue, describe, present, and interpret museum objects? These are never easy questions and even more difficult when they form part of an ‘ethnographic’ collection.
The @leverartgallery in Port Sunlight has a major collection gathered by industrialist William Lever from his sojourns to West and Central Africa – but very little is known about the objects, and they rarely get displayed because of this.
Together with colleagues from @liverpoolmuseums and AHUWA / Liverpool University we invited members of the Congolese Association to join us in a workshop and to rethink how we might begin to catalogue and understand the art, instruments, weapons, fabrics… We were delighted to be joined by Congolese Ambassador Ndolamb Ngokwey and to have expert facilitation from @bluesaint .
It was only a trial , but the proof of concept worked really well. Looking forward to seeing the other objects and learning more.3 d
The Architectural History of Postcolonial West African Universities
Adefola Toye is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, co-supervised with The National Archives through a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. Her research examines university architecture in mid-twentieth-century Nigeria, tracing how campus design and construction shifted as political control transferred from colonial to independent governments.
The post-war period saw a wave of university building across British West Africa, funded through Colonial Development and Welfare Acts and overseen by the Inter-University Council for Higher Education in the Colonies. University College Ibadan, designed by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, is the most widely studied example. But Adefola’s research moves beyond Ibadan to less well-known institutions: the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology (1951) and the four universities established immediately after independence in 1960, including Ahmadu Bello University, Obafemi Awolowo University, and the University of Lagos.
In this post for The National Archives, Adefola discusses how she has used colonial records at Kew to study these institutions and their built environments. She also addresses a problem central to any archival study of this period. As independence approached, British oversight diminished and documentation thinned out. The Colonial Office files become sparser, and the story can only be reconstructed by working across multiple archives and geographies, from the National Archives of Nigeria to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Michigan State University. Her argument is clear: no single archive can sustain a full account of how these campuses were planned, negotiated, and built. The research demands a multi-archival and transnational approach.
Congratulations to Adefola on successfully defending her PhD on 8th May 2026.
