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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.

New Paper: Stanek Ł. “Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry”

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October 10, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Eastern European, Ghana, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Stanek Ł. Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry. Comparative Studies in Society and History. Published online 2024:1-34. Full paper available here: doi:10.1017/S0010417524000185

Soviet Uzbekistan Today (Through the Republican Press Pages). August. (Tashkent: The Uzbek Society of Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 1963).

This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War.

Exhibition Preview: Shopping Emporiums of West Africa: The Kingsway Stores.

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June 27, 2024
Africa, Ghana, Heritage, Ibadan, Lagos, Nigeria, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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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

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 (Zdzisław 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

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.

Shadow Work: Architecting While Black in British Guiana, by Michelle Joan Wilkinson

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April 13, 2024
British Colonial Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, West Indies
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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.

The full article is available here at Architecture Beyond Europe Journal : https://journals.openedition.org/abe/14943, full citation : Michelle Joan Wilkinson, “Shadow Work: Architecting While Black in British Guiana”, ABE Journal [Online], 21 | 2023, Online since 07 July 2023, connection on 13 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/14943; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.14943

The Architectural Gift: Lukasz Stanek in conversation with Frances Richard, Places Journal

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April 10, 2024
Africa, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Middle East, Poland, transnational
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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.

The conversation continues at https://placesjournal.org/article/the-architectural-gift/

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

Lagos Broad Street and Marina Environs

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January 21, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Lagos, Nigeria, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Central Lagos- quick picture show before (Nigeria Magazine 1962) and after (Jan 2024):

Barclays Bank by Walker, Harwood, and Cranswick
St Paul’s School by Nickson and Borys
Federal Parliament Building, by Public Works Department – see also https://joliba-africa.com/2020/08/21/the-federal-parliament-at-tbs-old-racecourse-c1960/

BP Building by Fry and Drew

Western House by Nickson and Borys

Niger House for UAC by Watkins Grey

Book shop House Godwin Hopwood

Elder Dempster by James Cubitt – heavily modified with the new glazed facade.

Bristol Hotel by Godwin and Hopwood

Godwin and Hopwood Residence, Godwin and Hopwood

YMCA – slender single room deep plan, exposed staircase at the gable with concrete wrapping around. Commercial retail units at the base, pavilion and garden at the roof. Cracking scheme – but who is the architect?

Seminar: The African Archive Experience; Challenges in Archival Curation and Archival-Based Research Work in West Africa

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July 7, 2023
Africa, AHUWA, Ghana, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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THE AFRICAN ARCHIVAL EXPERIENCE 

CHALLENGES IN ARCHIVAL CURATION AND ARCHIVAL-BASED RESEARCH WORK IN WEST AFRICA 

12.30pm Tuesday 11th July 2023

Room G.04 Liverpool School of Architecture Building, Abercromby Square, Liverpool

Zoom Link: Contact ijackson@liverpool.ac.uk for the link

Abstract:

We are delighted to be able to host Professor Ayo Olukoju (Institute of African and Diaspora studies, University of Lagos) and Professor Sam Ntewusu (Institute of African Studies University of Ghana) who are visiting the University of Liverpool and also the Unilever Archives to explore the possibilities of future collaborative research and teaching activities across our institutions and others in NW England.

Both Professors are historians who have worked with archival sources in their research in West Africa. They have generously agreed to share, through this seminar, the challenges and issues with working with archival material and sources from a West African perspective and also some of the hopes they have for future collaborations.

Do join us to hear their views and also join the conversation – how do we make the most of archives in the 21st century in different locations and places? Importantly do we need to decolonise the archive, and if so how?  

All Welcome: 

A sandwich lunch will be provided at Room G.04

Professor Ola Uduku

Co-director AHUWA Research Centre 

Hosted by the AHUWA Research centre  in association with Unilever Archives, School of History and Institutes of African Studies and African Diaspora Studies  at the University of Ghana, and the University of Lagos