University of Lagos Campus

UNILAG – The Central Core

The University of Lagos, located in Akoka district of the city, was established in the early 1960s to provide a new centre of learning for the city. The campus and its significance is currently being researched  by Adefola Toye as part of her PhD investigation, and she’s recently published an introductory article in the latest Docomomo special edition too).

We spent the morning walking around the campus, and this was the first quality that resonated – it is walkable. It’s also more integrated into its urban context – rather than isolated on a remote hilltop like so many other universities in the region. Equally, there are tranquil elements and solitude, especially along the waterfront overlooking the lagoon. 

The central core is overlooked by Senate House tower and podiums designed by James Cubitt architects in the 1980s – all of the familiar brise soleil and double-skin façade motifs but extruded, layered, and clad in mosaic tiles. The brise soleil are actually hollow forms with a thin layer of cement and mosaic. There’s the classic Cubitt curved concrete motif (as seen on the Elder Dempster buildings in Lagos and Freetown).

Senate House faces into the plaza-precinct of the university, and here the campus responds to the landscape – both reacting the gradient that leads to the lagoon beyond, and as a man-made series of platforms, routes, and under crofts. It’s a space that has been crafted to catch the lagoon breeze and designed for gatherings, ceremonies, performances, and spending time with friends. The core campus buildings, designed by American practice Robert S. McMillan Associates in the early 1960s, overlook and enclose the space, including the university library and council chamber drum. They’re not forming a street but more of a town square. The administrative buildings are also here, located within a protective shaded courtyard and solitary palm tree. The scale shifts from the large public space into a much more intimate enclosure. The concrete former is expressed on all these buildings to reveal the timber grain, expertly cast into projecting scooped forms, parapets, and balustrades. There’s a heavy, confident, solidity to the composition of the facades. The horizontal soffits of the roofscape frames the visas, respond to the multi-level precinct feel, and are adequately matched with the vertical window bays and concrete fins. The sombre materiality of the ubiquitous concrete is relieved with unexpected blasts of colour, such as the gold mosaic on the J F Ade Ajayi Auditorium.