Stone Town: Beyond Tourism and Heritage by Maria Lookmanji
This dissertation investigates the Indo-Zanzibari community’s daily practices that shape belonging in the historic city of Stone Town, Zanzibar, and their methods of community-based, socio-spatial maintenance of space. To address this overlooked topic related to conservation, results from a participatory photography methodology are analysed. The remote, participatory image-based research (RPIBR) allows the Indo-Zanzibaris to document their under-researched spatial priorities and negotiations, giving them agency due to the insider knowledge and co-curated documentation.
The visual analysis across 64 images shows Indo-Zanzibari belonging grounded in routine trade-focused activity, improvised contemporary additions and wide networks of circulation beyond the heritage-inscribed boundaries of Stone Town. Practices interpreted as chaos or neglect, are reframed to show the collective community familiarity and responsive knowledge to contextual constraints and the complicated conditions of the country.
By focusing on evidence of everyday practice, Indo-Zanzibari presence is shown through urban responsibility and spatial negotiation rather than a curated display of performed heritage outside of lived necessity. The dissertation questions the nature of traditional conservation guidelines, emphasising the need to shift priority away from tourism and static heritage narratives, which aim to simply preserve the built environment, and instead draw attention to community and cultural survival.
How should we catalogue, describe, present, and interpret museum objects? These are never easy questions and even more difficult when they form part of an ‘ethnographic’ collection.
The @leverartgallery in Port Sunlight has a major collection gathered by industrialist William Lever from his sojourns to West and Central Africa – but very little is known about the objects, and they rarely get displayed because of this.
Together with colleagues from @liverpoolmuseums and AHUWA / Liverpool University we invited members of the Congolese Association to join us in a workshop and to rethink how we might begin to catalogue and understand the art, instruments, weapons, fabrics… We were delighted to be joined by Congolese Ambassador Ndolamb Ngokwey and to have expert facilitation from @bluesaint .
It was only a trial , but the proof of concept worked really well. Looking forward to seeing the other objects and learning more.3 d
The call to prayer echoes across the neighbourhood as people congregate under the sweeping domes and tall minarets of Ghana’s National Mosque in Accra. For many, it is a place of faith, community and national pride. Yet, few pause to consider that this landmark – now firmly part of Accra’s skyline – was funded and built by Turkey.
This detail points to a bigger story. Some of Ghana’s most important public buildings are shaped by global relationships as much as local needs. And those relationships are not just economic; they are deeply political.
Therefore buildings are not just functional. They are powerful expressions of political power, used to describe and project ideas about hierarchy, state authority, solidarity and modernity.
As a result, architecture can be used to explore the identity and ideology of African states and international partners who choose to finance or donate new buildings to Africa featuring western architectural aesthetics.
I am a scholar of African architecture. I collaborated with scholars from different areas of expertise, including political scientists, on a project that studied the connection between architecture and power in Africa. From Ghana, two projects were used to illustrate international relations in architecture, highlighting the interplay of power and agency. One was the National Mosque and the other was the seat of Ghana’s government, Jubilee House, an edifice funded by the government of India.
Ghana and India’s ties can be traced to their co-founding of the Non-Aligned Movement. These were a group of states not formally aligned with major power blocs during the cold war. Ghana and Turkey’s relationship goes as far back as 1957. Turkey is one of the leading investors in Ghana’s economy.
Our work established that when a country finances and constructs a major building abroad, it leaves a visible and lasting imprint on another nation’s landscape. The building becomes part of everyday life while reflecting the influence of its external sponsor. These buildings normalise the presence of the sponsoring nation and are a constant reminder of its political interests.
History written in buildings
Foreigners have been shaping Ghana’s built environment for centuries, from colonial forts along the coast to post-independence modernist projects designed by international architects.
Ghana’s architecture tells a layered story of power and exchange. During the colonial era, Europeans constructed forts and castles that dominated coastal landscapes. These were not just military structures; they were symbols of control and gateways to global trade networks, including the transatlantic slave trade. Sections of these buildings were later repurposed as schools, embedding education within spaces marked by violence and coercion.
This dual legacy highlights how architecture can carry multiple, often conflicting meanings over time.
After independence, Ghana sought to project a new national identity through modern architecture.
Foreign architects were commissioned to design housing, universities and civic buildings that would signal progress and global relevance. This moment reflected both aspiration and dependence: a desire to appear modern on the world stage, combined with reliance on external expertise and resources.
‘Soft power’
Today, Ghana continues to engage with global partners through architecture and infrastructure development. The National Mosque is one example. Backed by Turkey with the active involvement of Ghanaian Muslims, it represents both religious solidarity and diplomatic outreach underpinned by local agency.
Its scale, design and prominence make it a visible marker of Turkey’s presence in Ghana. The National Mosque Complex is modelled after the Ottoman-era Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. The national mosque in Accra features domes, semi-domes and arcaded porticos. These are the characteristics of Ottoman architecture, a predominant classical style for mosques in Turkey and the Islamic world.
Another example of political “gift” is Jubilee House, the seat of government. While financed and constructed with support from India, it incorporates the form of the Akan stool, a deeply significant symbol of authority in Ghanaian culture. This blending of external funding with local agency and symbolism shows that these projects are not simply imposed. They are shaped through negotiation.
Across the continent, similar patterns can be seen. China has funded major government buildings, including the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa and the Zimbabwe parliamentary complex. These projects are often described as “gifts”, but they also reflect strategic relationships and long-term influence. Political scientist Innocent Batsani-Ncube has illustrated how China’s large-scale investment in the Zimbabwe parliament is used as a proxy for its sustained activities in and around African parliamentary institutions.
Ghana’s case
It is easy to view foreign-funded infrastructure as purely beneficial, especially given Ghana’s development needs. But architecture is never neutral. Buildings embody power relationships in terms of the scale, materiality, the architectural features and the location in urban areas.
They reflect who has the resources to design, finance and construct, and whose ideas are ultimately realised in physical form. A mosque, a parliament or a presidential palace is not just a functional space; it is a statement about identity, legitimacy and global belonging of both the sponsor and the recipient country. In this sense, architecture becomes part of diplomacy. It is a way of making relationships visible – and durable.
Describing these projects simply as soft power, however, does not capture the full picture. Soft power theory often assumes that influence flows smoothly from powerful countries to less powerful ones.
Ghana’s experience suggests something more complex. Buildings cannot simply be “exported” like films or fashion. They are rooted in specific places, histories and communities. This creates friction.
For example, Ghana’s engagement with foreign-built projects often involves negotiation over design, symbolism and use. Local government officials, religious leaders and communities play a role in shaping outcomes.
In the case of the National Mosque, Ghanaian Muslim communities were not passive recipients. Their advocacy and social influence were crucial to the project’s realisation. Similarly, the incorporation of the Akan stool in Jubilee House reflects an effort to assert cultural identity. These examples show that foreign influence is most often mediated by local contexts.
Ghanaian actors’ agency in these processes has limits, however. Many decisions about large-scale projects are made by political elites. As a result, the interests reflected in these buildings may not represent the broader population.
These examples point to broader questions. Do foreign-funded buildings contribute to long-term development, or are they primarily symbolic? How can Ghana ensure that such projects reflect local priorities and needs? And what does it mean to build a national identity in a world shaped by global partnerships?
The links among soft power, public and cultural diplomacy, and development across the continent will continue to be subjects of research.
International relations scholars Joanne Tomkinson and Julia Gallagher contributed to the research that this article is derived from.
“Join us to celebrate the launch of a major digital platform which makes available over 4000 archival drawings, photographs and documents related to the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture (1954–71) – a programme attended by a generation of architects and planners who would help to shape practice across the Global South. The platform maps the careers, experiences and legacies of over 550 alumni, across 82 countries – foregrounding previously hidden histories and revealing the transnational relationships and networks of practices, institutions and government bodies which interacted with and informed the pedagogy of the Department.
Students at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, constructing geodesic dome, 1964. Photograph: AA Archives
This project was generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.”
An interesting image of the Dome being built in Kumasi from 1964 above – a number of these were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s (and one was shown at the V&A Tropical Modernism exhibition too). It reminded me of the photo taken by Michael Hirst (also an AA Department of Tropical Architecture graduate) of the dome built by Fuller in Accra…
Image courtesy of Michael Hirst, 1958, Buckminster Fuller Dome built in front of Accra’s Law Courts, Ghana.
SAH Conference, Chicago, 2027: The call for papers has been announced – and there are some fascinating and timely panels planned. This one caught our eye….
Session Chairs: Zhijian Sun and Qingyun Lin
Session Title: Cooling the Tropical Built Environment: Discomfort, Decolonization, and
Decarbonization
Session Description:
Tropical climate and building problems related to heat and humidity have long troubled
professionals both within and beyond the tropics, who resorted to various climatic
techniques around (late-)colonial networks to tame the tropics. During the Cold War, the
tropical world became a contested arena in the name of development aid. Despite relying
on a globally circulated climatic knowledge, thermal comfort norms and cooling
technologies, these state and non-state actors from socialist, capitalist and non-aligned
countries who engaged in postcolonial development, often produced discourses of
“tropicality” that deviated from Euro-American templates.
The stakeholders in the Global South were never merely passive recipients of
technological expertise, however. Rather they were often active mediators of multi-
directional global exchanges of “architectural resources”, in Łukasz Stanek’s (2020) term.
We invite papers interrogating global, transnational and local dynamics through
marginalized cases in the long-twentieth centuries across any (sub-)tropical areas,
including Asia-Pacific region, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East
and elsewhere. We particularly welcome the nuanced perspective of “seeing from the
South,” especially how Southern institutions and individuals negotiated external
interventions around “collaborative” frameworks filled with heterogeneity, competition and
contingency. By examining processes, consequences and legacy of local reimagination
and reinterpretation of climate, built spaces, thermal (dis)comfort, labor and body, this
panel speaks to what Daniel Barber (2019) calls “decarbonization as decolonization.”
Drawing on Nicole Starosielski’s (2021) critical temperature studies, we view tropical built
environment’s (uneven) management of heat and cold as means of “enacting racialized,
classed and gendered forms of power.” We encourage proposals that engage the
interdependence between architecture’s climatic techniques, human body, non-human
actors, and exercise of socio-political power, focusing on the underappreciated roles of
marginalized people, suppressed knowledge, neglected practices, or ignored things.
I’ve been visiting buildings in Accra that I don’t know much about today.
SSMIT Pension House: super bit of brutalism near the ministries. This building looks after the state pensions – but who designed it? Perhaps a forgotten Nickson & Borys? Rather nice open staircase and precise brise soleil…. I can’t find any references to it in my collections or at the RIBA library catalogue. I’ll have to check WABA Journal again, but don’t recall ever reading about this significant building?
Accra Technical Institute. My reliable sources say it’s designed by none other than James Cubitt. Could be – it resembles his early work at KNUST, Kumasi. OR should I have gone to the Accra Technical College? But the dates for that institution don’t seem to add up.
Then there’s a delightful commercial building in Jamestown. It resembles the UAC Kingsway Store in Sekondi. It definitely wasn’t a Kingsway, but perhaps was linked to the UAC?
Finally “Betty House”. A rather large house in what was a prestigious neighbourhood in Jamestown at Korle Wokon. Historically important as the residence of Nana Akufo-Addo’s father and served as HQ for Ghana’s first political party, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) after its formation in 1947.
Bringing the Kingsway Stores Home: Our Exhibition Opens in Accra15 Jan – Easter
On 15th January, we celebrated the opening of “Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores” at Jamestown Cafe and Gallery in Accra, marking a significant milestone in our ongoing research into the architectural and commercial legacy of the United Africa Company. The launch evening brought together an engaged audience including President of the Ghana Institute of Architects Tony Asare, Dr Abena Busia, and Ronnie Micallef, the incoming High Commissioner of Malta in Accra, for what proved to be a thought-provoking discussion about retail modernism, colonial commerce, and architectural heritage in West Africa. David Kojo Derban gave a wonderful opening talk to contextualise the exhibition, along with a wider welcome from cafe and gallery owner architect Joe Owusu Addo.
The exhibition represents the culmination of over 5 years of collaborative research examining the Kingsway department store chain, which operated across West Africa throughout much of the twentieth century. Working alongside Unilever archivist Claire Tunstall and colleagues Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra, Paul Robinson, and Michele Tenzon, we’ve traced the fascinating story of these iconic shopping emporiums from their inception through the independence periods of West Africa and beyond.
This work forms part of our broader investigation into the United Africa Company, published last year by Bloomsbury as “Architecture, Empire, Trade.” In our recent Journal of Design History article, co-authored with Ewan Harrison, Irene Appeaning Addo, and Oluwaseun Muraina, we wrote that “Kingsway responded to independence by instrumentalizing a particularly modernist domesticity through a series of didactic marketing efforts and the construction of boldly modernist new stores.” The article reveals how these stores weren’t simply places of commerce but architectural statements where “modernism is here revealed as complexly imbricated with colonial and neocolonial profit-seeking.”
The exhibition itself has journeyed from Liverpool to Ghana, carefully packed and stored at Jamestown Cafe before being installed in early January. Two freestanding pavilions display archival photographs from the Unilever Archive, accompanied by newly commissioned 3D-printed models created by Liverpool School of Architecture students and archival films that bring the stores’ bustling atmosphere to life. The pavilions themselves, fabricated using CNC routers by our expert technical team at Liverpool lead by James Galliford, echo the modernist architectural language of the stores they document.
What makes presenting this exhibition in Accra particularly meaningful is the opportunity to share this research in the very city where the first Kingsway store stood. The ruins stand next door to the gallery – a poignant reminder of this commercial and architectural heritage. Through collaboration with Allotey Bruce Konuah, we’ve extended the exhibition beyond the gallery walls with vinyl street banners installed on both the gallery exterior, creating a dialogue between past and present. The banners also contain QR codes so visitors and passers-by can freely download the catalogue.
Our commitment to sharing this research extends beyond this single exhibition. We were interviewed on Asaase Radio morning show and it was great to share our work with a broader audience across Ghana. Following the exhibitions run in Accra through to Easter, we hope to tour the exhibition to other venues, continuing the conversation about how retail modernism, colonial commerce, and architectural heritage intersect. This exhibition reminds us that architecture is never merely about buildings; it’s about the economic, social, and political systems that produce them.
China’s Two Tropical Architectures: Climatic Regimes, Socialist Reconstruction, and Global Maoism in Guangzhou and Dar es Salaam, 1955-76, by Sun Zhijian, National University of Singapore, supervised by Prof Jiat-Hwee Chang.
Abstract:
In the contexts of decolonization and the Cold War, the tropical world became a contested arena with fierce competition among various old and new donors in the name of development aid, of which the infrastructural construction constituted the backbone. In the past decade, a growing body of literature on postcolonial tropical architecture has challenged current accounts weighed towards the built environment produced by either the former metropolitan powers or the Soviet-bloc, by shedding new light on the role of a third category of emerging aid donors, especially socialist China. Following the Sino-Soviet Split (1960), the Chinese attempted to promote an alternative socialist development path in newly-independent African states to that proposed by their Soviet-allied rivals. However, despite the allegedly age-old Sino-African solidarity, as latecomers in the unfamiliar tropics, the Chinese struggled against many challenges, among which the most crucial was the hot-and-humid climate as well as building problems it caused. This process almost coincided with their domestic socialist reconstruction through coping with the scorching heat and humidity in subtropical Guangdong under the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and subsequent revolutions.
Based on archival materials from China, Tanzania and the UK, this thesis is a transnational history of China’s two tropical architectures in relation to both domestic politics and global geo-politics in the mid-to-late 20th century, i.e. China’s overseas architectural aid in decolonizing Dar es Salaam, Tanzania under Nyerere’s Ujamaa socialism, which was the largest sub-Saharan African recipient of China’s assistance in the Cold War, and China’s domestic subtropical modern architecture in Maoist Guangzhou, which has long been the stronghold of China’s subtropical knowledge production. Through case studies of sample projects of industrial and agricultural infrastructures in Guangzhou and Dar es Salaam, it answers two overarching questions: Since China’s two tropical architectures took place concurrently, were there any transnational interactions between their knowledge production and practice? (If so, how did they happen?) How did the Chinese socio-cultural construction of the tropics give rise to a distinctively “anti-imperialist” mechanism of tropical architecture from that of the West and socialist North?
Moving beyond traditional architectural historiography relying primarily on stylistic analysis, it draws on theories of “techno-political regimes” and “critical temperature studies” to develop the notion of “climatic regimes” to capture the interdependence between tropical architecture’s climatic management and the exercise of socio-political power. As the socio-technical arrangements of an interlinked body of climatic knowledge, thermal comfort norms, sanitary discourses, urban typologies and architectural expertise transcending Cold-War rivalries, climatic regimes render intelligible a certain set of climatic parameters, trigger remedial strategies dealing with environmental concerns and normalize people’s thermal sensation for certain political goals. It argues that China’s two tropical architectures were not only concurrent, but more importantly, were co-constitutive with each other through a highly-centralized bureaucratic network of socialist state-run institutions rather than the genius of certain individuals, in which not only architects and planners, but also building physicists, meteorologists, physiologists, ventilating engineers and technocratic Party cadres were all active mediators of global flows of resources and expertise. Divergent from the Soviet-bloc’s climatic regimes paying particular attention to former colonial thermal segregations of mass housing in Africa, the Chinese endeavors driven by the Sino-Tanzanian common appetite for rapid industrialization and self-reliance under the principle of “Production First, Livelihood Second” resulted in the uneven distribution of climatic considerations between industrial and non-industrial spaces in the work-unit typologies both within and beyond China. By revealing how the Chinese tropicality worked from within and vice versa, it contributes to existing literature on the histories of both modern Chinese architecture’s transnational influence and global tropical architecture, as well as recent scholarly attention to thermal comfort in the built environment against the Anthropogenic climate change.
As Hardly Found: Art and Tropical Architecture centres artists and artworks that have so far been overlooked by histories of ‘tropical architecture’. In this collection of essays, historians, artists and archivists address works of art connected to epicentres of teaching and practice within the movement – focusing on the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association and its collaborators such as Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology – which emerged in the mid-20th century alongside anticolonial struggles that dismantled the British Empire.
Here, authors use creative, critical and speculative methods to inhabit the gaps in archives of tropical architecture, highlighting artworks in Nigeria, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Costa Rica, Cuba and the UK. Their contributions trace connections within a network of relations between art and architecture; one which recentres the rich and diverse forms of environmental knowledge, social values and material cultures contributed by artists working in these contexts.
We are delighted to welcome the editor, Albert Brenchat-Aguilar, and the team from AA Publications, who will give a short introduction to the book. A small installation will accompany, food and refreshments will be provided.
Transnational Architecture Group 