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Symposium CFP: Spaces for Health and Healing in Africa

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March 23, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, call for papers, Conferences, European Transnational, Ghana, Global Architecture, Historiography, Lagos, MENA, Nigeria, North Africa, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, Zanzibar
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Spaces for Health and Healing in Africa

Symposium 16 – 17 April 

Liverpool School of Architecture 

Liverpool School of Architecture, at the University of Liverpool and the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology of the Johns Hopkins University invite proposals for a hybrid symposium to be held in Liverpool from the 17-18 April 2025.  

Pathology Labs, Korle Bu Hospital, Accra, c1958

We welcome presentations that explore various settings for health and healing, such as shrines, sacred healing huts, and herbal ‘apothecaries’ and other spaces for indigenous medicine and healing practices; ‘basic’ health care infrastructure incorporating dispensaries, clinics, and hospitals  developed for early missionary and colonial medicine; post-independence medical centres. We are also interested in papers examining the use of healthcare ‘vectors’ such as barefoot doctors, travelling midwives and paramedics and their spread of health care practices such as vaccinations, and childhood nutrition programmes in urban and rural areas. 

We are interested in the settings for full range of medical specialisms from paediatrics to psychiatry and also more contemporary physical design responses to contemporary pandemics such as Ebola and Covid. Evidence and records of mixtures of indigenous and western healthcare practices in some community settings and the emergence and involvement of teaching hospitals in healthcare planning is also of interest.  

Other possible topics include the role of military hospitals, colonial and modern, and contemporary healthcare infrastructure and provisions for displaced persons and refugees.  We encourage interdisciplinary approaches–history of medicine, medical anthropology and sociology, oral history, among others. 

Our area of interest is the African continent, from the ‘MEANA’ countries of the maghreb, north of the Sahara, to all countries South of the Kalahari and East and West of the Sahara. Health and healing facilities on islands in proximity to main continental mass such as Zanzibar, Mauritius, Fernando Po and Cape Verde are also of unique interest. 

We are seeking to publish selected outputs from the symposium in a volume currently under negotiation with the publisher. We welcome abstracts (500 words max) and short CVs (1page) Please also indicate whether you intend to deliver your paper in person or online. For more information please contact  Ola Uduku o.uduku@liverpool.ac.uk or Bill Leslie, swleslie@jhu.edu

Liverpool School of Architecture: AHUWA Studio Field trip to Ghana 2025

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February 6, 2025
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Heritage, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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We’ve just returned from a Liverpool School of Architecture BA3 field trip to Ghana. 17 students from the AHUWA studio visited Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, and Aburi. We’ll be setting a theoretical design project at the former Kingsway Stores site on Accra’s High Street. Students will be using the site to test climatically appropriate design solutions, naturally cooled interiors, and how a new botanical research station, exhibition, and garden could be reimagined in the historic core of Accra.

We visited Jamestown, the Padmore Library, Accra Library, Black Star Square and various streets and buildings around central Accra.

Joe Addo kindly gave us permission to visit his home in Medina, and from there we went to the University of Ghana.

In Kumasi we visited the KNUST campus as well as the Ejisu Besease Shrine – an early 19thC shrine and one of the few surviving Asanti traditional buildings (now all UNESCO heritage sites).

The large new build with the white columns behind the glazing is going to be the new arts and architecture building on campus. It sits at the end of the road axis leading to the library and great hall. It’s not finished yet and we couldn’t visit the interior. From there we went to the Kumasi Cultural Centre to see the Nickson and Borys designed Asanti Regional Library before heading to Adum and central Kumasi. We travelled by bus to from Kumasi to Cape Coast where we visited the Cape Coast castle – with an excellent tour of its disturbing and poignant history. We returned along the coast road back to Accra to continue our buildings visits there and to the Botanical Gardens at Aburi.

We visited the dot atelier new artist studios and gallery spaces designed by Adjaye Associates too. A 3-storey rammed earth building with concrete frame and distinctive saw-tooth roof above the gallery. The clerestory windows set within the roof are north-facing. The vertical circulation has large openings offering views out over the suburb and allowing the sea-breeze to circulate through the building. A metal flashing detail was being retrofitted below the exposed concrete floor and the pisé – the mud was being eroded at that point and required some additional protection. It’s a fascinating structure and clearly an experimental project that requires fine-tuning and testing.

I gave a talk on some of our research and studies of Accra’s heritage structure for the Ghana Institute of Architects and Centre for Architecture and Arts Heritage. Architect David Kojo Derban kindly organised the event – and is pursuing an important mission to preserve, list, and celebrate the heritage structures and spaces within Ghana. David kindly showed us a project he’s been tasked with restoring. It’s the Osu Salem Presbyterian Middle Boys Boarding School – founded by the Basel Mission of Switzerland in 1843. The timber frames, shutters, windows, and verandahs were all pre-fabricated in Germany and then imported. The wattle and daub walls were infilled using local adobe, stones, and plaster. The school is now severely dilapidated and in urgent need of repair. It may not survive the next rain season.

Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores

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July 25, 2024
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Ibadan, Nigeria, United Africa Company
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This week we installed our new exhibition: Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores, at Lever House, Port Sunlight.

Following on from our research project into the architecture of the United Africa Company we’ve curated an exhibition that focuses on the department stores and their contribution to design, urban development and retail throughout the 20thC.

The exhibition has been co-curated with archivist Claire Tunstall, and developed from the research undertaken during the last 4 years with Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra, Paul Robinson, and Michele Tenzon.

The exhibition includes images from the Unilever Archive arranged across two freestanding pavilions along with archival films, and a set of newly commissioned 3D printed models beautifully crafted by Liverpool School of Architecture students. The pavilions were fabricated using CNC routers with the expert help of LSA’s technicians.

The catalogue is available here. This is just the start – the next step is to tour the exhibition from their current home in Port Sunlight to Birkenhead, Liverpool, Accra, and Lagos.

Visit of Head of School, Sierra Leone School of Architecture and Academic Colleague Dr Joe Ben Davies Engineering Alumna University of Liverpool

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May 28, 2024
Africa, AHUWA, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture
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Visit of Head of School, Sierra Leone School of Architecture and Academic Colleague Dr Joe Ben Davies Engineering Alumna University of Liverpool

Joe Ben Davies, Ola Uduku, Ken Ndomahina at LSA

Professor Ola Uduku was delighted to welcome Ken Ndomahina, Head of the recently established Sierra Leone School of Architecture who was visiting Liverpool with his academic colleague Dr. Joe Ben Davies, an alumna of the University of Liverpool, School of Engineering.  A good discussion about what future Architecture teaching and research collaborations took place.  Key curriculum pillars, sustainable materials,  approaches to mass housing,  architectural history research were discussed. 

We agreed to the following; the sharing of the GAHTC digital lecture notes on the History of Tropical Architecture, LSA staff engaging in discussing and working with the Sierra Leone Architecture school to identify their future curriculum priorities and. Future  possibilities of support and collaboration at Masters and other PG degree levels, including possibilities for future joint research projects. 

We plan to stay in touch and consider possible future workshop possibilities, links to a possible future Masters in African urban heritage and planning, and Business School workshops on the economics and efficiencies of international teaching development .

Ibadan: Nickson and Borys, Cocoa House

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May 21, 2024
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Ibadan, Nigeria, Poland, transnational, Tropical Architecture
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We reported on the largest building in Ibadan and the wonderful cocoa dome and swimming pool back in January – and whilst we knew the contractors were Cappa and D’Alberto, the architects remained unknown….

We searched various journals and articles from the time, and eventually came across a reference to a skyscraper shopping precinct project from 1960 in the journal Interbuild. Ola Uduku continued a different line of inquiry and traced the project down in West African Builder.…

The architects were listed as ‘The Plan Group (West Africa)’ – not a well-known practice or one that has featured heavily in existing literature and research, but it was a name that I’d certainly come across before.

I trawled through our old notes and archival references, and found a file on ‘The Plan Group’ from the archives in Fourah Bay, Sierra Leone (Box 661). It turns out that the Plan Group was a multidisciplinary practice/development agency established by Nickson and Borys. Their aim was to provide an integrated design service, with particularly attention given to cost control and engineering, as well as mitigating risk for the client on large complex design projects.

In a letter sent to the Sierra Leonian government from 1960, Borys set out his vision for the practice, including listing the projects they were already working on, such as a 20 storey block in Lagos, the Ibadan project mentioned above, and a township near Lagos for 35,000 people – were these other Nigerian projects completed? And if so, where/what are they?

The Ibadan project was a multipurpose and speculative venture, aimed at providing office space as well as leisure facilities through the nightclub, swimming pool and cinema complex. There was also a large department store as part of the scheme. This wasn’t a Kingsway Store, so could it have been a competing UTC or A G Leventis?

As well as the Cocoadome having mosaic decoration, Cocoa House roof garden also has some really special mosaic work clearly executed by a talented artist, but now hidden away from public view. If you visit the building be sure to venture to the top floor to spend an hour in the museum, and as to see the mosaic work and views out across the city.

We’ve learned a lot about Nickson and Borys over the last 18 months – firstly finding out exactly who Borys is (ZdzisÅ‚aw Borysowicz), and that he studied at the Liverpool School of Architecture Polish School during WW2. We’d like to write a full biography on him and the practice. We’ve visited a number of his works in Sierra Leone, and now the Cocoa Project in Ibadan, and the intriguing references to Lagos too. Whilst the bulk of his practice was in the tropics he also worked in the Falkland Islands – so was clearly part of the colonial architectural infrastructure.

Here’s one of his student projects published in the The Architects’ Journal from 1944

Banjul, The Gambia: From Kingsway to Pierre Goudiaby

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May 6, 2024
Africa, AHUWA, United Africa Company
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As part of the Architecture of the United Africa Project I wanted to visit Banjul to investigate if there was any surviving buildings remaining from the UAC era. There was surprisingly little material in the UAC archive relating to the town and wider country – and we knew that the business focused its efforts elsewhere in West Africa. Despite this – there was a Kingsway Store, Palm Line Offices, and possibly several other European trading companies operating merchant stores, warehousing, wholesaling, and produce export businesses.

Kingsway Stores
UAC warehousing
Possibly African and Eastern Trading Corporation?

Banjul is a compact capital and we were able to quickly locate the old trading spots located around the Albert Market area. Here there are many traders importing fabric and textiles from China and India and it remains a thriving port. The Kingsway Stores and associated wholesaling lockups are still there, along with a series of other colonial period structures. Some of the older trading villas are now complete ruins and urgent documentation is required if rehabilitation isn’t possible.

Old Trading Store now ruined and overgrown

There are a number of Modern structures that we couldn’t identify, and some experimental architecture amongst the more restrained trading stores. There’s clearly a need for a mapping and documentation project to list and identify the history of these structures.

One of the highlights was the number of banking offices, including a design by Pierre Goudiaby (b 1947), the Senegalise architect responsible for Gambia’s airport, the National Theatre in Dakar, and the gigantic 49m tall African Renaissance Monument, also in Dakar.

Bank in Banjul by Pierre Goudiaby, 1985
Banjul Airport, Pierre Goudiaby, 1997
African Renaissance Monument, Pierre Goudiaby, 2008

Bibliothéque Centrale de l’UCAD and archivist department

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May 5, 2024
Africa, AHUWA
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The old university library was completed shortly after Independence and located at the terminus of a long ceremonial avenue that cuts through the campus. By the late 1990s further space was required for study and new book acquisitions, but rather than build an extension or separate block, the solution was to partially wrap the old library with new segments and entrance portico to create additional room and atriums. The older structure is still clearly visible (see the rectilinear mosaic elements) but these forms are now joined by more playful additions whilst observing the strict symmetry. The inverted scoop of the entrance portico references Corbusier’s Assembly at Chandigarh (and is similar to Wilford’s Lowry Centre in Salford), but here it runs perpendicular to the main building with a zig-zag motif on the exposed gable. The addition was designed by Tétreault Parent Languedoc and Oscar Afrique in 2001.

The flanks of the avenue include the University Conference centre buildings and the Archivist Department. On top of ornate red brick podiums, where the bricks are laid in soldier bond and proud of the building line, sit curved forms clad in sea shells that add subtle texture and shadow. The buildings were designed by Henri Chomette and Roland Depret in 1976.

International Trade Fair, Dakar, Senegal

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May 4, 2024
Africa, AHUWA
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A visit to the international  conference centre in Dakar is a must for late ‘modern’ architecture aficionados. The approach sets the scene, as one passes through the triangular entrance gates.

A creation of architect Fernand Bonamy designed and built following an architectural competition in 1974  its triangular programme is clear from the outset. This trade fair complex, which remains in working use, was designed to incorporate the triangle both in elevation and functional section. This has been a largely successful exercise in which the triangle is pre-eminent in all aspects of design. 

Walking around one feels the eerie nature of triangular space. Broken by long walkways with circular-cylindrical fulcrum points where the direction changes and the gradual slope continues upwards or downwards to the final traverse destination. 

A series of exhibition pavilions are the centrepiece of this much recorded and photographed campus, whilst the main exhibition hall provides a glorious 70’s interior complete with psychedelic wall designs . The dogged following of the triangular programme does provide a coherent set of buildings – which also feel part of a giant Alice in Wonderland setting where the triangles are here there and everywhere. There are a few breaks as the HVAC external ductwork terminate in lozenge- and not triangular shaped flues . 

As we walked around, the campus was being prepared for yet another exhibition / expo. This helps highlight the ongoing use and  versatility of the exhibition space format, democratically giving each exhibitor the same space, shape and form to engage with, triangular in every way. 

As I walk away from triangular wonderland  I wonder what else this amazing set could support? A parkour and skate park for the suburban kids whose flats look down on the complex? A contained mini athletics course, it could certainly hold a 200m track circuit and many triangular spaces could provide storage for track and field equipment. Or could it indeed be a film set for the next James Bond Action or Hammer Horror movie – The return of the Triangles.

Dakar: Senegal visit

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May 1, 2024
Africa, AHUWA, Heritage, transnational, Tropical Architecture
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We’re making a visit into Dakar in Senegal this week. It’s mainly an exploratory trip as we’ve not ventured into Francophone Africa before and are eager to meet up with some architects here and friends from MOHOA .

Today was all about pounding the streets and exploring some of the everyday commercial architecture, public buildings, docklands, religious buildings, museums, and streetscapes of downtown Dakar. It didn’t disappoint and using our trusty Vol2 of the Sub-Saharan Africa guide we were quickly able to track down some of the classics (and many more that don’t feature in the impressive guide).

Chamber of Commerce, 1926.
Kermel Market, 1910, Charles Pleyber

The Kermel market sits amongst an array of colonial era structures. It was destroyed by fire 1993, but rebuilt in 1997 to match the original design.

Dakar railway station with faience ceramic facade detailing. The newer interior structure provides control to the tracks and adds further commercial space.

Commercial structures, residences, markets, and banks by the docklands of Dakar. I thought the images top left and top middle were the Sandaga Market – but not sure now. There’s going to be a lot of further research and investigation required after this trip….

Museum of Black Civilisation
Grand National Theatre, 2011, Pierre Goudiaby Atepa

Just beyond the Train Station are two vast civic structures – the National Theatre [the largest in Africa] and the Museum of Black Civilisation, built by the Shanghai Construction Group in 2018.

Institut d’Hygiène Sociale was a highlight today – designed by Henry Adenot around 1932 attempted to introduce more regional or local interpretations to the colonial architecture canon. This building has been described as Sudano-Sahelian but it borrows liberally from across Western African architecture, as well as introducing zig-zag motifs, sunbursts, and playful interiors.

Most of the downtown area it set out according to a grid plan, with buildings reaching 4 or 5 stories in height. There’s a variety of commercial structures some bearing the name of the old trading companies and families, others depicting bas relief decorative panels or double-skin solar breakers.

New Exhibition: Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence at the V&A, London

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February 26, 2024
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Ibadan, Lagos, Nigeria, transnational, Tropical Architecture
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Sick Hagemeyer shop assistant as a seventies icon posing in front of the United Trading Company headquarters, Accra, 1971 . © James Barnor. Courtesy of galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière

An exhibition that we’ve been very much looking forward to opens this week at the V&A Museum in London. We’ve got a few of our models on display at the exhibition, and have been involved behind the scenes. There’s a large contingent from the Transnational Architecture Group making their way to various opening events this week and you can expect a series of reviews and critiques here shortly.

There’s also an article out today by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian that discusses the exhibition concept – and some of our favourite buildings.

Senior Staff Club House, KNUST, Kumasi by Miro Marasović, Nikso Ciko and John Owuso Addo, film still from ‘Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence’. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/tropical-modernism-architecture-and-independence

Opens: Saturday 2nd March – September 2024