Author Archives: jacksoniain

Notes from Kumasi

Leaving Accra we departed for Kumasi– there was a change of pace in this dusty Ashanti city. Flying in, the low-rise collection of housing and settlements spreads across the horizon. The city has a hotter, inland climate, but the KNUST campus has this relieved somewhat by its lush mature vegetation. A visit to the recently restored KNUST Staff Club and walk around the campus to the ‘central area’, gave a good feel, and introduction to KNUST.

KNUST Senior Staff Club House, designed by Cubitt

The following day united us with more visiting staff from University of Edinburgh and we set off on an extended excursion to various buildings in Kumasi city. Fry and Drew’s Prempeh College and Opoku Ware schools, are visited first and present us with a first hand view of this couples’ best exemplars of institutional tropical modernism. Visits followed to Nickson’s Anglican Cathedral, a towering structure, with less external architectural sophistication than F+D’s educational oeuvres, but provided interiors that successfully captured the spirit of high Anglicanism in its light-filled interior.

Anglican Cathedral, Kumasi, designed by R. Nickson from 1950

A dusk-tinted view of the campus concluded the day’s visitations, its welcome calm was a good antidote to the ‘busy-ness’ of the town. The buildings at the ‘Tech’, as it is colloquially called, sat sedately in their lush tropical setting, showing off Scott and Cubitt’s earliest university campus in Africa.

The historic ‘central’ administrative area of Kumasi formed the focus of the next day. The post office and Ghana electricity building suggest they are examples of late ‘PWD’ post war architecture, whilst the historic memorial to the West Africa Frontier Force, soldiers who fell in WW1 in Abbysinia (Ethiopia) and Burma (Myamaar) give us pause for remembrance. Walking up towards the military museum we find that although it is closed, we can still pay officially for a visit and take the chance. More than an hour later, we are overwhelmed with the sheer military-related history this deceptively small former garrison fort contained. As a colleague commented, “this gave [me] the context” to this city.

Kumasi GPO, designed by PWD?

Visits to the Asawasi and Fanti Town districts, the latter adjoining the Cathedral area, gave good examples of early housing layouts in Kumasi designs by known planners in some cases. At Fanti Town we inadvertently came across the’ coffin district’, and attempted a stop at the Bantana district of the town to photograph circular hut housing we had identified the day before. The military museum guide had confirmed that these historic huts still provided accommodation for the army. As the garrison was still camped at the site we could not investigate this much further.

Notes from Accra: Part 2

By jacksoniain

February 28, 2016

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Tropical Architecture

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Notes from Accra Part 2

Our journey continued with visits to Tessano ‘East’ which had a few remnants of the original site and service planned estate, best exemplified by the police station and a few administrative blocks, which often defined the colonial housing plan layout. A visit to the University of Ghana, at Legon followed. Designed in the late 1940s by Harrison Barnes and Hubbard, the leafy campus sits upon on a hill, high above Central Accra. The campus architecture has a curious oriental aesthetic which defines the its identity, with a number of significant buildings including the Balme Library and the Main Hall. In the African Studies department we joined our British Academy project associate, Dr Irene Appeaning Addo, for a very productive meeting.

Tisano East Police Quarters

The Grand Hall and Tower at Legon University, Accra

A trip to the Korle Gonno Housing Estate followed, using then new drained highway over the Korle Bu inlet and past the University of Ghana Hospital. The Korle Gonno Estate demonstrated a very early example of decant housing as from conversations with an older resident of the estate it was found out that many of the original residents had been moved from the Jamestown area of Accra to Korle Gonnu, a few miles down the coast. The estate was more intact than Tessano, with a number of the original buildings still evident.

Korle Gono Housing Estate: regulated street patterns and services

Korle-Gono Model, c.1920? Photograph held in the National Archives, Kew, UK.

A walk around the “Ringway” estate ,where we resided took us to the “Osu” layout and a road which had a pair of suspected James Cubitt-designed residences . A second visit just before departure from Accra confirmed this, although their external facades had been significantly altered. The pair of residences are now in use by the diplomatic corps.

Architects from Socialist Countries in Ghana (1957–67): Modern Architecture and Mondialisation

By jacksoniain

February 27, 2016

Africa, Ghana, Poland

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Building on our Ghana theme I’d like to share an excellent paper recently published by a good friend of the TAG blog, Dr. Lukasz Stanek from Manchester University.

“When seen from Labadi Road, the buildings of Accra’s International Trade Fair (ITF) appear among abandoned billboards, scarce trees that offer shade to resting taxi drivers, and tables where coconuts, bottled water, sweets, and telephone cards are sold next to the road.

The buildings neighbor the La settlement, where streets meander between houses, shops, bars, schools, and shrines, while on the other side of Labadi Road, at the seashore, a luxuri–ous housing estate is under construction next to upscale hotels that overlook Labadi Beach. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s leader after the country achieved independence (1957), initiated the fair as a prestige project, but it was opened on 1 February 1967 by Joseph Arthur Ankrah the chairman of the National Liberation Council, who led the putsch that toppled Nkrumah in 1966. Once conveying a sense of radical moder-nity, the buildings have suffered from underinvestment and insufﬁcient maintenance, but most of them are still in use, rented for exhibitions that take place every few months, for political rallies, and for religious services.

From 1962 to 1967, the Ghana National Construction Corporation (GNCC), the state ofﬁce charged with design, construction, and maintenance of governmental buildings and infrastructure in Nkrumah’s Ghana, designed and con-structed the ITF. The designers of the fair were two young architects from socialist Poland, Jacek Chyrosz and Stanisław Rymaszewski, who worked with the Ghanaian Victor (Vic) Adegbite, the chief architect. Chyrosz and Rymaszewski were employed by the GNCC on a contract with Polservice, the so-called central agency of foreign trade, which mediated the export of labor from socialist Poland.

“Made in Ghana Pavilion” 1967, International Trade Fair, designed by Jacek Chyrosz, Stanislaw Rymaszewski and Vic Adegbite

At the GNCC, they worked together with Ghanaian architects and foreign professionals, many from socialist countries. This collaboration reﬂected the alliance of Nkrumah’s government with socialist countries, which was demonstrated at the fair by the exhibitions of Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, and Poland (Figure 3). At the same time, the Ankrah administration used the fair to facilitate Ghana’s reopening toward the West. Hence, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), two major allies of Nkrumah, were absent.

By contrast, the two pavilions not to be overlooked were those of Great Britain, Ghana’s former colonial ruler and its main trade partner, and the United States, which granted Ghana loans for its many infrastructural projects in the 1960s, in particular the Akosombo Dam, ﬁnanced jointly with the United Kingdom and the World Bank. India was represented as a member of the Commonwealth rather than as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, since Nkrumah’s attempt to position Ghana among Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia as one of the leading nations of the movement was abandoned after the change of the regime. Collaboration among African countries was particularly favored, not as a way of carrying on Nkrumah’s vision of pan-African union but with a more modest aim, that of the stimulation of trade among African countries. Displays representing African countries were gathered in the round Africa Pavilion at the end of the ramp through which visitors entered the fair, before they moved on to Pavilion A (the “Made in Ghana” pavilion) and the pavilions rented to other countries and Ghanaian state ﬁrms.”

Read the rest of the article at: https://www.academia.edu/19448876/Architects_from_Socialist_Countries_in_Ghana_1957_67_Modern_Architecture_and_Mondialisation

Notes from Accra

By jacksoniain

February 25, 2016

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Tropical Architecture

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Notes from Accra

Iain Jackson and Ola Uduku have spent the last two days in Accra catching up with 20^th century architecture, and meeting with contacts as part of the British Academy funded ‘From Colonial Gold Coast to Tropical Ghana’ architecture project. Tuesday 23^rd February was spent visiting the Ghana National Museum complex, the gem in the crown being Denys Lasdun’s prefabricated dome shaped museum, currently closed for refurbishment. The imagination and vision of the building were still clearly there in our viewing of the stripped down structure ready for conservation.

Our next stop took us to Nickson and Borys’ Children’s library building nearer to Central Accra. This had been sympathetically restored, and again was a great demonstration exemplar of ‘West African Modern’ and the developmental vision of the departing colonial government to establish libraries that were open to all citizens. The upper area remained devoid of activity but had potential to be a great multipurpose programme space.

Children’s Library

The final visit of the day was to Joe Osae-Addo’s Archi-Africa – TuDelft Berlage Architecture school studio, in Accra’s Jamestown neighbourhood, on the urban fabric of everyday life in Accra. The impromptu crit we were invited to take part in was an enjoyable experience and the schemes were full of promise.

TU Delft and Archi-Africa in the newly converted Jamestown Studio

Day two involved visits to Jamestown – as a walking visit this time to take in early 20^th century colonial PWD, and also warehouse architecture in the neighbourhood. A visit to Adabraka also yielded a few examples of early PWD worker housing, which was followed by an afternoon visit to Achimota School, which conveyed the height of the colonial education project with architectural symbolism and style. A few later additions to the campus by Nickson and Borys and other’s also fitted well into the College’s narrative of colonial imperialism and privilege. The final visit for the day was to Scott House, which lived up to its deified tropical modernism status, whilst the Western Tessano neighbourhood had transformed into an upper class gated area, that unexpectedly gave us a glimpse of an earlier [likely Cubitt?] designed semi detached housing unit, currently undergoing a further 21^st century upgrade..

One of the few surviving examples of its type in Adabraka

We will be moving onto Kumasi on Friday and will update from there early next week.

Envisioning the Indian City Podcast

By jacksoniain

December 16, 2015

British Colonial Architecture, European Transnational, India

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As part of the Envisioning the Indian City project we have been invited to produce a short set of podcasts for the ‘Realise’ series at Liverpool University. Each podcast is devoted to one of the cities we have been researching [Goa, Pondicherry, Kolkata and Chandigarh] for the past few years in collaboration with Jadavpur University in Kolkata.

india-backing

You may listen to us here: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/realise-podcast/ and read more about the project here: https://eticproject.wordpress.com

Field notes from the Augmented Reality project

By jacksoniain

December 15, 2015

British Colonial Architecture, India, South East Asia

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This gallery contains 3 photos.

Originally posted on Envisioning the Indian City:
Standing on the Esplanade crossing, looking down Lenin Sarani with the “Tipu Sultan” mosque on our left, Kawshik Aki pressed his shutter. Bringing his camera down from his eyes he looked at the preview, shook his head, took a step to the left and clicked again.Meanwhile I stood…

Ibadan University: Kenneth Dike Library

By jacksoniain

December 4, 2015

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Tropical Architecture

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3D Printed Model of Kenneth Dike Library

We’ve been playing with a couple of 3D printers [Makerbot and Ultimaker] and testing how they might be used to create a small collection of models to supplement our History of Architecture lectures.

In the age of ‘Stream Capture’ and recorded lectures including a small exhibition of key case study models in the lecture theatre will hopefully entice the students to attend the live event and will also form an opportunity to further explore light, scale and the qualities of buildings that are not as easily expressed through photographs and orthographic drawings.

Our first test case used a computer model of the Kenneth Dike Library, Ibadan [designed by Fry and Drew] expertly produced by Jacopo Galli and generously shared with us. The model doesn’t show the entire buiding but a key section enabing the interior to be viewed. The ambition is a for an online library of models that can be downloaded and then printed as and when they are required by faculty and students.

The week that belonged to Timescape Kolkata

By jacksoniain

December 3, 2015

British Colonial Architecture, India

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Here are some further updates on the Augmented Reality App we developed for Kolkata….

Envisioning the Indian City

Timescape Kolkata, an augmented reality app developed by the ETIC project, launched earlier this week at the Victoria Memorial Hall. The innovative app allows iOS and Android phone users to experience the antiquated city through photographs produced by Frederick Fiebig, W.G Stretton and Company and the reputable Bourne and Shepherd.

Once Timescape (www.time-scape.org) is downloaded from here, users can explore rare archival images and data about heritage sites in Kolkata. As you walk through the city, views will be ‘augmented’ by a corresponding nineteenth century photograph taken at the exact site. Another click or with a single swipe a host of archival information including sounds and histories will be available.

TimescapeKolkata

The idea germinated following the UGC-UKIERI funded ETIC Liverpool conference held last year. In the School of the Arts library, after negotiating theories of the contemporary city, a series of questions emerged. What if Frederick Fiebig’s handpainted candid Calcutta…

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‘Envisioning the Indian City/ Augmented Reality Project’ Symposium UGC-UKIERI Thematic Partnership Visualising the City

By jacksoniain

November 23, 2015

India, South East Asia

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This weekend is the final gathering of the ‘Envisioning the Indian City’ project team in Kolkata, as well as the launch of our Augmented Reality app that overlays historical photographs of Kolkata onto contemporary cartography. If you are in Kolkata please do join us.

Visualizing the City_flyer final-1

Cities are inhabited spaces felt through all our senses, especially those of touch, hearing, smell, and so on. In representation, in imagination, in planning and conceptualization, however, they are above all visualized spaces, appearing before our eyes as seen, remembered, or projected. This one-day symposium will focus on the ways in which cities and city-spaces are experienced through the visual register, though we want to interpret this term as widely as possible to include modes of conceptualizing or laying out city-spaces.

Through a series of presentations from architects, historians, literary scholars and art historians, we wish to bring out multiple ways of seeing the city: as a planned (or not-so-planned) space fitting into a conceptual grid; as a scenic location represented through art or captured in memory; and as a visual experience that feeds into the phantasmagoria of city life. Individual presenters may bring out even more nuanced ways of visualizing the city and historic proto-city sites.

The symposium is the last in a series of international workshops and research seminars under the UGC-UKIERI International Thematic Partnership ‘Envisioning the Indian City: Researching Cross-cultural Exchanges in Colonial and Post-colonial India ’ between the University of Liverpool and Jadavpur University, 2013-15: https://eticproject. wordpress.com. This research project focused on four significant city-sites, Goa, Pondicherry, Kolkata and Chandigarh – the first three originating in distinct colonial encounters (with the Portuguese, the French and the British) and the fourth a creation of the post-colonial Indian state. However, in the course of research, other cities and other ways of understanding or viewing urbanity also came into focus, and our work was immeasurably enriched by the contributions of urban historians and scholars worldwide, as part of an ongoing conversation about cities, space, modernity, and cross-cultural encounters.

In the last phase of the project, our team has been developing the Kolkata layers for the Augmented Reality App through which historic photographs and other archival footage related to existing city-sites can be accessed on one’s mobile phone. This final phase of project research has been enabled by a generous grant from the University of Liverpool and the archival resources of the British Library’s Photographic Collection. We have also been greatly assisted by support from our other non-HEI associates, such as the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, where the AR App, Timescape Kolkata, will be launched on 28th November at 6 pm, after a panel discussion featuring urban specialists and advisors to the project: Timescape Kolkata: Seeing the Past in the Present.

The day-long symposium on Visualizing the City (Jadavpur University, 10 am – 4.30 pm), however, is not simply a prelude to the launch. It will draw together perspectives from architecture, town planning, history, art, literature and contemporary urban culture to reflect on the major project theme of ‘Envisioning the Indian City’. Our invited speakers are Professors Miki Desai (CEPT Ahmedabad), Snehanshu Mukherji (Architect; Visiting Faculty, SPA Delhi), Swapan Chakravorty (Presidency University), Tapati Guha-Thakurta (CSSSCal), Jonathan Gil Harris (Ashoka University) and Dhir Sarangi (Jawaharlal Nehru University). Entry to the symposium and launch are free and we welcome participation and interaction.

Visualizing the City_flyer final

10 am:

Introductory Remarks and Welcome to Participants: Nandini Das (University of Liverpool) and Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University), ETIC Project Coordinators

10.15 am – 11.45 am: Session 1: Chair, Nandini Das

Jonathan Gil Harris (Ashoka University): From the Ethiopian Highlands and Baghdad to the Nehr-e-Ambari: How to Build a Transnational Deccan City Dhir Sarangi (Jawaharlal Nehru University): French Visualizations of India through Maps and Drawings from the 18th Century

45 am – 12 noon: Coffee

12 noon – 1.30 pm: Session 2: Chair, Nilanjana Gupta

Snehanshu Mukherjee (TEAM/ Visiting Faculty, SPA Delhi): The Vanishing City

Miki Desai (CEPT Ahmedabad): Towns in Transition: a Missing Link in Visualizing the Indian Urbanity: Case Study, Gujarat

1.30 pm – 2.30 pm Lunch

2.30 pm – 4.00 pm: Session 3: Chair, Supriya Chaudhuri

Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta): The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories

Swapan Chakravorty (Presidency University): ‘All Its Several Lodgings Composed’: Visualizing Houses of Art for a New Kolkata

All are welcome.

Please join us after the Symposium for the launch of the AR App, Timescape: Kolkata, at Victoria Memorial Hall, 6 pm

New Research in Planning Perspectives: Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998): a Japanese planner devoted to historic cities in the Middle East and North Africa

By jacksoniain

October 21, 2015

Africa, Global Architecture

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New Research: Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998): a Japanese planner devoted to historic cities in the Middle East and North Africa, published in Planning Perspectives by Kosuke Matsubara

Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998) was a Japanese urban planner whose life-work was urban planning in the Middle East and North Africa. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of his work, which still remains unknown. His early masterpiece, the ‘Square House’, shows how he was influenced by Kiyoshi Seike to apply historic spatial composition to realize width and convertibility in low-cost housing.

Gyoji Banshoya
K. Shinohara, M. Yamada, K. Seike, G. Banshoya, and S. Miyasaka. Source: Hayashi, “Seike Kiyoshi to Gendai no Jukyo Design,” 6

Following this, Banshoya studied under the supervision of Gerald Hanning and George Candilis at Ateliers de Baˆtisseurs in Paris, and went to Algiers to engage in the study of ‘evolutionary habitat’. As a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) expert, he began working with Michel Ecochard in 1962 in Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo. They were responsible for the elaboration of master plans for these three cities, and that of Damascus still remains as a legally active master plan today. Coupled with the Syrian political struggle since the 1980s, there has been some reaction against their modernist policies. However, the case is made for a detailed examination of Banshoya’s work, and re-evaluation of its legacy for the urban planning history of the Middle East and North Africa.

You may read the full article here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02665433.2015.1073610