Our monograph Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company has just been published with Bloomsbury. We’re delighted to finally share our findings with you on the architecture of Western and Central Africa. The work begins with an critique of the archive and the UAC collections, before examining the Royal Niger Company, the development of Burutu and Lagos; the Lever’s concessions in Congo, the timber townships of Samreboi and Sapele; real estate and construction, the Kingsway Stores, and much more.
In addition to the main chapters the monograph includes specially commissioned essays from ‘responders’ as well as a series of photographic essays using previously unpublished images from the superb Unilever archives.
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.
When I was scanning the images for the Kingsway Stores exhibition and recent article, I came across the Takoradi Kingsway in a colour slide. It wasn’t a building I was familiar with and hadn’t seen any other references to it within the wider UAC archive. The design is also different to the other branches – it doesn’t seem to fit with the earlier Millers (old Accra) or F&A Swanzy (Kumasi) stores – nor with the James Lomax-Simpson designs found at neighbouring Sekondi and Cape Coast. The branch at Sekondi complicates things further – why would there be a Kingsway at both Sekondi and Takoradi when they’re so physically close together? The Takoradi branch is also a substantial structure – far larger than might be expected for a town of this scale. Perhaps it was used as a warehouse or depot for the wider enterprise, receiving the imported goods from the neighbouring port that had opened in the 1920s, or was it used as a regional office and retail outlet for the UAC (or one of its predecessors) when the new town and port was set out? The archives include some replanning and refurbishment plans from the 1960s but nothing on the structure’s history and design. The neo-classical facade with ionic columns in antis is also unusual – contrasting with the more moderne 1930s turrets and cantilevered canopies.
Kingsway Takoradi, Ghana: reproduced from an original in the Unilever Archive UAC/1/11/10/1/10, 1958.
I began to look at the maps of Takoradi to try to locate the structure, but couldn’t find anything on this scale – it was only when I reviewed my photos of the town that I found a contemporary image. The building is still standing and largely unaltered. It’s located amongst the other large European trading properties that were built around the customs house, train station and post office. There’s also shipping offices for Palm Line and Elder Dempster, along with a Barclays bank within this commercial cluster.
Ghosts, Gifts and The Red Clay Revolution By Iain Jackson and Martin Wallace
Ibrahim Mahama is a man on a mission. An artist whose raison d’etre is both to provoke questions about Ghana’s colonial past and to inspire actions towards a more positive, equitable future. Hot on the heels of his Purple Hibiscus work at the Barbican, ‘Songs about Roses’ opened in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket on 13th July 2024.
But in some ways, these and his other international shows are just the tip of the iceberg because the main event is on the outskirts of Tamale, northern Ghana, where Mahama was born. In July he showed us around and shared the thinking behind the immense project.
Red Clay: Studio, Archive, Gallery, School: Tamale, Ghana
For the past 9 years, Mahama has used the proceeds of his international career to build art ‘infrastructure’ in Tamale from the ground up. He has created a huge studio-gallery-archive complex called Red Clay. It’s here that much of his work returns after it’s been exhibited around the world, put on display in vast colonnaded hand-made brick structures with polished terrazzo floors. When he’s not working elsewhere, he lives on site. This is an artist’s studio with a difference. Open to the public; there is no entrance fee. It is a gift.
Recognising the economic precarity of the vast majority of Ghanaians, Mahama ‘wants the people of Tamale to be able to experience this art, and the best art made by others too.’ An exhibition on James Barnor’s photography is currently on show. ‘Even if they could’, Mahama asks, ‘why should they have to travel to the Serpentine to experience this art?’ A full retrospective of Barnor’s work is on show in SCCA, a sister institution built by Mahama on the other side of Tamale. It is another, large-scale, free-access space dedicated to platforming under-appreciated Ghanaian artists of the past. A disused concrete silo structure has also been acquired by Mahama in Tamale. Left abandoned and unfinished following the 1966 coup it became a ruin before it was even finished. Mahama has renamed it Nkrumah Volini and uses it to discuss the political shifts in Ghana’s history as well as showing films and installations.
Nkrumah Volini
While Red Clay draws international visitors each week, the vast majority of its patrons are local people, some bringing picnics to the only free public space in Tamale. Busloads of children from schools in neighbouring villages are allowed to touch and explore these vast installations. The big idea here isn’t about art per se but to use objects and their material histories (their ‘ghosts’) as an invitation to ask questions and begin to imagine future possibilities. It’s about demystifying technology, sparking curiosity, and encouraging a desire to pursue visions through creative problem solving.
Selom Kudjie giving a tour at Nkrumah Volini
This invitation is backed up by educational opportunities. Classes for building PCs and coding are delivered in one of the seven aeroplanes Mahama has brought to this rural savannah, creating something of a surreal transport hub where the journeys are cerebral rather than physical. He also imported old trains from Germany that are in the process of being converted into accommodation for visiting artists (including the one used by Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Ghana in 1961).
When the railways were built in Ghana they did not extend into the northern territories, and many local visitors have never encountered a train before. Leading us through the now gutted carriages, Mahama reminds us about the immense amount of labour involved in making the colonial railways. He speculates on how many tonnes of resources and produce machines like these helped to extract during the colonial period. His work operates on these differing layers – at once an engaging and accessible spectacle that evokes traces of the histories of industry and technological innovation, whilst also critically examining the deployment and impact of these machines.
Ibrahim Mahama looking at his sketchbook archive
Informal tours of Red Clay are delivered by a series of local ambassadors employed by Mahama. They make the ideas at play accessible to local visitors in their own language, Dagbani. It’s a place where children and families are welcome. Letting people see processes rather than only the finished art pieces is also part of the offer. When the trains and planes were transported across country on flatbed lorries, Mahama documented their conspicuous journeys and the quizzical, joyous public response; bold, large-scale action that provokes excitement and a sense of ambition.
In one of the giant red-brick rooms, preparations for a New York show at White Cube in September are underway. A team of local women dip their brushes into the same black ink sometimes used to create semi-permanent eyeliner. But here they graffiti names and words agreed with Mahama across rough reclaimed leather panels that have been ripped from the floors of the train carriages as part of the refurb. Nothing is wasted. The humdrum is defamiliarized and ghosts within materials are encouraged to tell their tales.
Studio work in progress
In another brick-built hanger, women have walked from miles around to swap their tired, old enamelled bowls for shiny, new aluminium ones. Mahama wants the old ones as an index of the thousands of hours labour their battered frames represent. He has exchanged about 1500 and plans to balance a diesel locomotive on the old bowls, echoing the usual way in which the bowls are carried on the head to transport all manner of produce around every village and town.
Enamel bowls collected for a new exhibition and exchanged for new aluminium bowlsNew bowls for Old
In one of the huge gallery spaces lit by towering windows is a piece first shown at White Cube Bermondsey 2019-21 entitled, ‘Capital Corpses’. Rows of gnarled desks salvaged from schools are mounted with old sewing machines facing a wall of blackboards replete with chalk lessons. When the machines are started by remote control, the clatter is at first startling and then uncanny; a room full of invisible operators burst into life, summoned to an unknown task. The school desks conjure an idea of children as future factory fodder. Like so much of Mahama’s work, he counterpoints a certain nostalgia and appreciation of familiar historic objects with an acknowledgement of the stark horror that these things, machines and regimes inflicted.
Ibrahim Mahama and ‘Capital Corpses’, Red Clay, Tamale, Ghana
Mahama and his team have achieved a lot in Tamale over the last 9 years but much remains to be done to complete his revolutionary vision and unlock the full emancipatory potential of art. But he’s clearly in this for the long haul, determined to explore Ghana’s complex colonial history and to speculate about its possible futures. Red Clay is a place where these ghosts of past and future mingle in powerful ways and invite us to play.
We’d like to invite readers of TAG blog to our new exhibition preview, Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores. The preview runs from 23rd – 24th July 2024 between 10am-4pm at Lever House in Port Sunlight CH62 4UY.
Please RSVP with a preferred date and time to ijackson@liverpool.ac.uk [walk-ins are not possible – so please let us know beforehand!]. The exhibition catalogue PDF will be available here shortly.
The exhibition will display previously unseen Unilever archival material from the 1920s-1960s, as well as a series of specially commissioned architectural models of the boutiques from Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gambia.
3d printed model of Kingsway Apapa, Nigeria, by Mohadeseh Kani.
During the past 3 years we’ve been researching the architecture of the United Africa Company, and this exhibition focuses on one of their subsidiary companies, The Kingsway Stores. These shops provided some of the premiere retail environments of the time selling a wide array of imported goods from tinned food and distilled beverages through to the latest fashion, typewriters, bicycles, motorcars, and much more.
The stores were located at prime sites and became drivers for further real estate development whilst their architecture sought to demonstrate how ‘fine buildings enrich a nation’. The opening of a new Kingsway Store reflected a sense of modernity and success for a city – and politicians from the colonial, as well as independence period, were eager to associate with the stores. The political independence of Nigeria and Ghana saw a new array of emporiums opening as a commitment to the new regimes, as well as to capitalise on the independence euphoria and economic boom.
This exhibition tells this story through two specially fabricated pop-up pavilions. Hundreds of photographs, two films, maps, and models will be on display. After Lever House the exhibition will travel to Birkenhead, Liverpool, Accra, and Lagos….We do hope you can join us for the preview.
Iain Jackson – University of Liverpool, School of Architecture Claire Tunstall – Unilever Archives and Records Management
Exploring UNESCO and UIA – Histories of Architecture and Bureaucracy in Development Contexts
Organised by Frederike Lausch and Andreas Kalpakci
International organisations had a profound impact on the global architectural culture of the Cold War period. Two of them stood out: UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, an intergovernmental organisation) and UIA (the International Union of Architects, an international association of architectural societies). Their respective roles in the institutionalisation of heritage conservation and in the promotion of the architectural profession are well documented. Rather, this workshop places particular emphasis on the relationship between UNESCO and UIA. This relationship began in the formative years of both bodies in the immediate post-war era and continues to this day in areas such as architectural education and international architectural competitions.
As a discipline and discourse, architecture participated in the development regime that sought to restructure societies in the pursuit of socio-economic “progress”, thereby perpetuating colonial power dynamics. Exploring the relationship between UNESCO and UIA builds on recent scholarship that links bureaucracy to architecture’s involvement in development contexts, defining practices, directing information flows, and mediating legitimacy. Both organisations have been engaged in development contexts, from the 1963 UIA congress on “Architecture in Countries in the Process of Development” to the work of UNESCO’s Division for Human Settlements and the Socio-Cultural Environment, established in 1976. How did these organisations interact in terms of cooperation, competition, and interdependence? How did they provide training, knowledge transfer, and technical assistance to so-called “developing countries”? How did they mediate architecture in these contexts, contributing to nation-building and international exchange?
This workshop aims to explore critical histories of the multifaceted relationship between UNESCO and UIA in development contexts. It will address various aspects of their partnership, including environmental initiatives, housing programmes, school buildings, professionalisation efforts, heritage campaigns, international networking, and media strategies. The workshop will also serve as a platform for exchanging research methodologies, archival sources, and historiographical perspectives.
We invite papers that explore the relationship between UNESCO and UIA as development actors during the Cold War in a wide range of geographical contexts. Papers are free to focus either on the relationship between the two organisations or on each organisation individually. Topics may include the situated histories of specific projects (e.g. buildings, publications, exhibitions, and conferences), the agency of lesser-known voices (e.g. international experts, civil servants, and local stakeholders), and the interactions between Paris (the headquarters of both organisations), national professional societies of architects, and the often abstract “target audience”. Contributions are welcome from a variety of disciplines, including architectural history and theory, art history, cultural studies, international relations, cultural sociology, and the history and philosophy of science.
The workshop will take place from 21 November 2024 (half day) to 22 November 2024 (full day) in Zurich, Switzerland and will be available via live streaming. We aim to cover travel and accommodation costs, although the format (in person or hybrid) will depend on the availability of funding. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short bio of no more than 100 words to Frederike Lausch (lausch@arch.ethz.ch) and Andreas Kalpakci (andreas.kalpakci@gta.arch.ethz.ch) by 31 July 2024.
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 CivilisationGrand 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.
Charles Eric Wilkinson, late 1940s in British Guiana. Source: Michelle Joan Wilkinson.
My grandfather, Charles Eric Wilkinson, was a black architect-builder involved in major government-sponsored building and infrastructure projects in British Guiana from the 1930s to the 1970s. I place Wilkinson’s built work and its surviving archive of bookkeeping ledgers, letters, photographs, and architectural drawings in conversation with material from national archives in Guyana and England, adding oral histories from family members. White architects stationed in British Guiana and the Caribbean reported back to England about the “skilled craftsmen” (carpenters and building contractors) that they observed. Based on family lore and archives, I question the interactions between the supposed foreign “expert” architects and the local builders, seeking to document this period more accurately through architectural work that has remained in the shadows.
Wilkinson’s concrete house in the late 1950s, before he added a concrete fence and bridge from the front yard. Source: Michelle Joan Wilkinson.
The backdrop to my research is the rise of foreign-aided, self-help building schemes in British Guiana in 1954, the same year that Wilkinson endeavored to build a concrete house for his family. British and US architects were involved in British Guiana’s planning and housing development work. Howard Mackey, a Black American professor at Howard University, was on a team contributing to the self-help project. This period of Britain transitioning its so-called dependencies to self-sufficiencies provides an important context for understanding the role that black builders would play in shaping the built environment of the (independent) nation to come.
Gifted buildings are potent mechanisms of geopolitical reshuffling, premised on an uneven power relation between giver and receiver. How do such exchanges shape cities in transition?
Frances Richard: You have been working for several years on ideas of the architectural gift, and have realized this research in a number of projects. To cite a few: an exhibition you’ve co-organized with Damjan Kokalevski called “The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture” recently opened at the Architectural Museum in Munich. In 2022, you were convener for a conference at the British Academy titled “The Gift of Architecture: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives.” And your 2020 monograph Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War explores issues of international largesse and exchange — what you call “socialist worldmaking.”
Housing project for Libya, designed by Romproiect (Romania), 1980s. The design and construction of buildings such as this were typically subject to barter agreements. [Arhivele Naţionale ale României, f. Romproiect, 7288]
A focus on architectural gift-giving affords new ways of thinking about the worldwide processes triggered by capitalist industrialization and colonial exploitation.
Would you talk about the parameters and findings of this research? What is the architectural gift, as exemplified in what kinds of sites? Why has the inquiry followed the trajectories it has?
Łukasz Stanek: Architectural gift-giving is embedded in a long tradition of imperial and religious donations of buildings. But my collaborators and I have been interested in its relationship to modern urbanism; in how a focus on architectural gift-giving affords new ways of thinking about the worldwide processes triggered by capitalist industrialization and colonial exploitation since the 18th century. In my book, the temporal frame is more restricted: I studied Cold War collaborations — often unequal — between architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist countries in Eastern Europe, and their counterparts in West Africa and the Middle East. The movement of labor, blueprints, and construction materials and technologies across these geographies shaped cities such as Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, and many others, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Gifted buildings were among the most visible interventions by means of which the Soviet Union, China, and other socialist countries both supported the newly independent countries, and hoped to achieve political leverage and economic gains. To cite a few examples: the National Assembly Building in Conakry, a Chinese gift to Guinea; the Kikwajuni housing district in Zanzibar, an East German gift; or the House of Culture and Youth Theatre Complex in Darkhan, a Soviet gift to Mongolia.
Timothy Latim: Reflections on Kigali writing workshop
Context
I was invited to the one week writing workshop as a guest mentor to discuss with the students of architecture, how photography can be used to support architectural writing and design. The workshop held at the University of Rwanda was in close proximity to three of the buildings being studied and I got a chance to visit and discuss the buildings with the students.
First Impressions
Kigali is coined as the city of a thousand hills. An apt description of it. Standing at any one hill one observes the landscape unfolding, the undulating hills reveal themselves in layers to the observer. While it serves as an incredible sight, the topography is also a major influence in the design and development of Kigali. The varying layers of landscape can as a metaphor to the influence that the city has had over its history. This is apparent in the diversity of essays and research topics presented by the students. A broad reflection would categories these into three main ideas in regards to time. Colonial history, contemporary influence and ambitions of the city.
Historical – Colonial influences.
The influence on Rwanda predates the shadow of genocide. Into the realm of both native history and colonial influences. A guided tour and with the student to the Administration Building reveals an interesting dialogue between the architectural influences from the Belgium in the design and construction of the building. These were noted to be the fair faced used of materials in construction. While changes in the dynamics of Rwanda socially and politically influenced the use of the Administration building over time, from the use by military all the way to a university campus. Similar traces of the Belgium influence can be found all around the Univeristy. Which was interesting to being to unravel alongside the students.
Administration block University of Rwanda
Contemporary influences.
Completed in 2014 by Kigali by FBW Group. The Library complex serves an example of a contemporary building. A reflection of the trends and issues currently being resolved by the architecture fraternity. The use of form in the composition of the building. A conscious effort to design the building to be passive in regards to heating and cooling. And the use of locally available materials to clad the building.
Library college of science and technology, University of Rwanda
The School of Architecture, serves as an example of the wave of international architects responding to the regional influences on Rwanda. The School has a similar approach to its design. The form is prominent, a metaphorically it can be an interpretation to the hilly landscape. And the use of volcanic stone to clad the exterior of the building.
School of architecture, University of Rwanda
While both these buildings have a very strong relationship between form and programme. The studies done were focused more on the spatial and programmatic response of the architecture. From the space planing to the layout and interpretation of the materials on programme.
Future ambitions.
A walk around the civic Centre in Kigali, draws ones attention to the values being sought after. An egalitarian space, inclusive for all walks of life. And its in this context that Norsken is found, a stone throw away from the civic heart of the city hall. The building reflects on its insides what the civic centre reflects on its outsides. The buildings programmes vary across different fields with low tech to very high tech, future and contemporary issues with possible solutions. A hybrid of activity. Startups and established companies alongside each other.
The student investigations into this building were user-centric. Focus was placed on what layout and design choices were done; so the building created an egalitarian space and facilitated encounters among its users with the hope to encourage cross pollination of ideas in these chance encounters.
Its interesting to see that the same complexities on a country level, can still be found in the rich diversity in a small group of students. The workshop served as a fantastic incubation ground for research topics. Which was witnessed in the ideas presented by the students at the end of the workshop. The duration of the workshop forced the students to narrow down to the core ideas they could investigate. This was made possible perhaps by the daily feedback sessions between the mentors and the students. The mentors placed emphasis on reviewing what was written over what was said. One observation was that there was a some articles whose conclusions were presented without an understanding of the evidence. This was also addressed in the remarks given by the mentors. A suggestion would be to allow them a period of one week after the workshop, to research their topic and review their essay after.
Transnational Architecture Group 