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Urban Narratives (Simulizi Mijini) Symposium Report

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April 7, 2016
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Global Architecture, Tropical Architecture
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Urban Narratives (Simulizi Mijini) Symposium

Urban Narratives (Simulizi Mijini) Symposium was held at the British Council building in downtown Dar es Salam on 1st April. Accompanying the event was a small exhibition of short stories – compiled by Masters students from TU Berlin and Ardhi University. During the past four weeks the students have been exploring and mapping the city as well as interviewing and recording the everyday and extra-ordinary narratives of life in the city. The result is a very special collection with some insightful, and often deeply moving, recollections. The stories should be on-line soon and we’ll post a link to them.

The symposium was arranged in 15-minute presentation slots, so the pace was fast and varied, starting with the international perspective (Jackson on India and Ghana, Lagae on curating an open air architecture museum in Lumbumbashi, Adanali offering a wonderful but at times disturbing insight into the plight of Istanbul, see http://reclaimistanbul.com).

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Yasar Adanali presentation

Part 2 considered the Eastern and Southern African context with Hannah Le Roux considering the notion of movement and heritage in South Africa and Johannesburg in particular. She also shared a wonderful image from the South African Automobile Association revealing the road networks that traversed the continent in the 1950s. Joy Mboya spoke about a festival created by local communities called Nai ni Who http://nainiwho.co.ke. This was followed by a discussion of the neighboring island of Zanzibar by Muhammad Juma, and the problems of preserving and building, in and around the historical context of Stonetown. Zanzibar was explored further after lunch with a project that is seeking to catalogue and document the built fabric of stonetown as well as associated memories and stories.

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Colonial Road Networks of Africa

Annika Seifert shared the vision for the new DARCH building and exhibition spaces located in The Old Boma, including how the material was selected and curated (https://www.facebook.com/DARCHTZ/). The new museum located in a historical colonial building, located opposite the Zanzibar ferry terminal, will be a great resource for the city with its roof top café and ‘public space’.

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The Old Boma

The session and roundtable was wrapped up by Walter Bgoya, who kept things lively, very entertaining and sharply to the point. It was a very enjoyable day and stoked lots of ideas for future research as well as fuelling the desire to take action. As Muhammad Juma reminded us, it is never too late to start campaigning for heritage and making the case to protect and preserve our built environment.

International Symposium on Urban Heritage: Simulizi Mijini/Urban Narratives

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March 24, 2016
Africa, Global Architecture, Historiography
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INVITATION – International Symposium on Urban Heritage: Simulizi Mijini/Urban Narratives

The Dar Centre for Architectural Heritage (DARCH) in collaboration with the Technical University Berlin and the Architects Association of Tanzania have the pleasure of inviting you to participate in the:

International Symposium “Simulizi Mijini/Urban Narratives“

1 April 2016, 9:00 – 17:00 hrs
@ The British Council, Samora Avenue
urban narratives
Urban Heritage: What is it? Whose is it? Who defines it?
How can it build inclusive cities?
We will look at international examples of inclusive heritage practices and discuss their relevance for the context of Dar es Salaam.
The detailed programme will follow soon, kindly share with your network and RSVP to darch.tz@gmail.com
We will be delighted to welcome you to the event!
Sincere regards,
Aida Mulokozi
CEO DARCH

Call for Papers: Tropical Zone: people, practices and pedagogies in Fabrications

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March 21, 2016
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Global Architecture, Historiography, Tropical Architecture
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Fabrications Journal: Tropical Zone: people, practices and pedagogies (27:2)

Two decades of architectural debate on environmental issues have cast new light on climatic responses, with very different interpretations of the meanings and constructions of the ‘tropical’ zone. Colonial, modernist and regional responses have been scrutinised as genealogically linked. Scientific discourses, cultural prejudices and social approaches intertwined to produce a resilient dialectic that has been reproduced, augmented or interrogated in research. This issue of Fabrications invites contributors to address the theme of the tropical zone as an architectural construct created and disseminated by a range of actors including educators, practitioners and their clientele, and state and institutional networks. Who were they/what were these and how did they approach this subject? What was their contribution to architectural production? How was that contribution received? How is it viewed retroactively in the light of new scholarship?

This issue anticipates papers that interrogate the term, its application and its imprint in regional histories, during the colonial and modern periods and after decolonisation in environments identified by the descriptor ‘tropical’. However, it also seeks new definitions of the term and its usage, in the context of contemporary environmental debates. It looks for new analyses of discursive trends from metropolitan centres of imperialism, from former colonies and from regions that regard themselves as climatically distinct. This issue is also open to papers that discuss how an understanding of the tropical zone relates to green architecture and new techno-scientific building processes, both in terms of aesthetics and politics.

Guidelines for Authors

Papers should be submitted online at  www.edmgr.com/rfab  by 10 October 2016, 6-9000 words, full details at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfab20/current

Notes from Kumasi Part 3

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March 4, 2016
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Tropical Architecture
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Notes from Kumasi Part 3

At the KNUST campus the library and Great Hall complex work very well within their elevated landscape setting. The Gerlach and Gillies-Reyburn’s muscular grey abstract ‘kente’ cloth brutalist hall and library extension is arranged in a ‘quad’. The complex overlooks the campus, facing a formal axis that leads to the administrative and teaching blocks. The composition is completed on its south flank by an architectural gem, which we discovered is the original KNUST library block. Is this James Cubitt’s riposte to Fry and Drew’s Ibadan Library?

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The Old Library Block

The ‘old’ KNUST library presents an essay in tropical architectural design. Still sitting on its cast, fluted piloti this four storey structure employs screen walling, operable louver windows, and shading devices to both demonstrate and celebrate the possibilities of creating a successful architectural resolution to the needs of passive design. Its forlorn main entrance, clad in travertine, and superseded by the Gerlach and Gillies-Reyburn entrance to the East, shows the quality of materials employed in specific areas of its design.

 

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Administration Offices and Meeting Room

Inside, much of the Library building seems frozen in time. Reading carrels lie empty whilst the daylight filled reading spaces, with custom built, empty journal shelves have few readers, and ageing academic book collections. The e-resource room however has been kitted out with desktop computers and seems to be the most used student space in the building. A second “IT” floor was being planned, and the new desktop computers were just being commissioned, in spaces flooded with artificial light, closed to the exterior with floor to ceiling fabric curtains – only this space in the building needed fans for cooling. Meanwhile the offices at the top floor with their no longer used spiral staircase took one to another world of naturally cross ventilated office space, and custom designed insect screens – demonstrating that climate responsive design in the tropics still works. One hopes its on-going transformation doesn’t forget this idea.

Notes from Kumasi: part 2

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March 3, 2016
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana
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Notes from Kumasi Part 2

The KNUST campus continued to delight as we explored its many building types, landscape and wildlife. The staff housing [over twenty different types], is generally low density bungalows generously positioned along the sweeping roads to the west of the campus. The Vice-Chancellor’s lodge is also set amongst the staff housing, its pierced screen providing shading to the verandah-cum-corridor behind.

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Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge

At Unity Hall, the two high-rise accommodation blocks dominate the arrangement, but they also frame the quadrangle that contains badminton courts, refectory and other social spaces. The space is also commandeered for laundry drying and we observed architecture students surveying the landscaped elements with their drawing boards set up under the shade of the loggia. Just a short walk from Unity is the sports track and Paa Joe Stadium. The seating is set within the raked landscape and the grandstand has a graceful concertinaed concrete roof that reduces in depth as it cantilevers over the seating.

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Unity Hall

We were fortunate enough to view the architectural drawings of these buildings – but sadly, the climate has rendered them in a poor state and plans for digitization must be urgently progressed to preserve this important archive of material.

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Paa Joe Stadium

Off campus we visited the Manhyia Palace built in 1925. Upon returning from exile the Ashantehene Nana Prempeh 1 was offered the building by the British (the former palace having been destroyed in the ‘War of the Golden Stool’ in 1900). The palace is now a museum with some excellent artifacts and collections. The palace grounds also contain the Manhyia archives, managed by the West African Studies department of Legon University. The archives contain records dating back to 1926 including many documents on land development, sanitation, state buildings and town planning. We’re looking forward to seeing what this archive holds – an initial inspection revealed many plans and previously untapped material!

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Manhyia Palace Museum

Notes from Kumasi

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February 29, 2016
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Tropical Architecture
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Tisano East Police Quarters

 

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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.

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Korle Gono Housing Estate: regulated street patterns and services

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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

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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.
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“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

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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 20th century architecture, and meeting with contacts as part of the British Academy funded ‘From Colonial Gold Coast to Tropical Ghana’ architecture project. Tuesday 23rd 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 20th 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 21st century upgrade..

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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.

Ibadan University: Kenneth Dike Library

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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