Alan Vaughan-Richards House

Alan Vaughan-Richards (1925–1989) studied at the AA and worked for Architects Co-Partnership in Nigeria before establishing his own practice in Lagos.  His house and studio in Ikoyi, Lagos has featured on the TAG blog before as part of the archiving and digitisation of Vaughan-Richards’ drawings undertaken by Ola Uduku, and further published here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429506765-16/alan-vaughan-richards-archive-ola-uduku .

The house was originally planned as five interlocking circular rooms – responding to Yoruba housing forms. It contained a water feature, disco-lights, and a hardwood bar too. Set within the sweeping walls are built-in furniture, seating, storage and carefully curated spaces for art and sculpture. In section the light flows in from the roofscape, whilst also ventilating the passively cooled space. Vaughan-Richards collaborated with various artists and sculptors to produce door screens (one includes a carving of the house), furniture, and panels that feature in almost every space. A seating area cantilevers over the garden and once offered views over the lagoon beyond (now reclaimed land and gradually being built upon). The materials, natural ventilation, and careful positioning of the windows create delightful interiors with views out over the landscape and the giant trees that are home to African Greys. The house is a compact and modest scale with a refreshing lack of pretensions.  It was gradually extended by Vaughan-Richards to accommodate his growing family and a new floor was added above.

Outside the main property is a geodesic domed room providing additional visitor space and also used for exhibitions and events.

Vaughan-Richards designed many buildings across Nigeria. He really deserves a monograph dedicated to his important work. We also visited King JaJa hall at Unilag that was designed by Vaughan-Richards.

Thank you to Remi Vaughan-Richards for allowing us to visit the house and to Oluwaseyi Akerele for showing us JaJa and the campus.

UNILAG – The Central Core

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

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

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

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