Tropical Architecture

Readers of the transnational architecture blog may already be familiar with the work of Nickson & Borys. The practice had a large presence in anglophone West Africa in the mid-20^th century, especially in Accra, where it completed several high-profile public buildings, and in Lagos, where it designed numerous commercial buildings from the 1950s to the 1990s. Although much remains uncertain about the practice, their work in those two cities have received critical attention, with the practice’s central library complex in Accra, for example, justly celebrated in the Getty’s ‘Keeping it Modern‘ programme. Less well known is the practice’s work in Sierra Leone, despite the fact the practice operated an office in Freetown and designed numerous high-profile buildings there in the 1950s and 1960s.

Perspective Sketch of Lungi Airport, Freetown: by Nickson and Borys

Our trip to Sierra Leone in fact began with a Nickson & Borys building – Lungi International Airport was completed to designs by the practice in c1960 and, although built to slightly different designs to those illustrated, is little altered today. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the practice’s largest commission in the city – the Townhall and Municipal Offices. Completed for Freetown City Council on a suitably prominent site in the centre of the city’s historic grid of streets that run parallel to one another down a steep slope to the sea wall. This was laid out in the 1790s and the timber and stone houses and chapels built by the City’s Krio elite in the early years of its development can still be found dotted amongst later commercial and public buildings. A perspective view of Nickson & Borys’ offices for the municipality published in 1962 show an elegant tower and podium arrangement of blocks: the main tower had a slightly kinked façade with windows protected by vertical brise-soleil, whilst the podium block is enlivened with patterned concrete screens – here Nickson & Borys applied the quintessential features of tropical modernism to the office tower typology. Not a trace of this survives in the new Freetown City Council offices built in 2018 on the same site – a 14 storey tower designed by the South Korean Overseas Development Fund, with facades clad in chlorine-blue glass.

West African Builder and Architect: Nickson and Borys perspective drawings for GPO and Municipal Offices

Better preserved, and also showing Nickson & Borys’ characteristic utilisation of brise-soliel and concrete screens, is the city’s former Barclays Branch. Barclays was the largest bank operating in British colonised Africa, its pillared and pedimented branches often stood in city centre sites adjacent to the government offices. Barclays greeted decolonisation by commissioning prominent new modernist branches, signalling its commitment to servicing (and profiting from) markets in newly independent countries. The Freetown Branch is perhaps the most architecturally accomplished of these. The building extends through the breadth of one city block on a central avenue in the historic grid, Siaka Stevens Street. Its long façade is broken by window embrasures protected by in-set concrete screens or applied lengths of brise-soleil, adding a geometric richness to an otherwise simple building. The practice’s lively approach to pattern-making, seen at the Accra Library Complex, is here shown to its fullest extent.

Former Barclays DCO Branch in Freetown, designed by Nickson and Borys

In 1965 Nickson & Borys unveiled plans to redevelop much of Freetown’s historic grid as a mega-structural development of new offices and hotel towers, rising from a podium of shopping facilities. Whilst this Plan Voisin for Freetown was destined to remain unexecuted, a flavour of what the practice proposed for the city is encapsulated in an executed large-scale development designed by the practice that stretches the length of steeply sloping Gloucester Street. Built for the Sierra Leone General Post Office, the complex included Freetown’s main public post office, the headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, a telephone exchange and a sorting office all of which are externally expressed. The slope in the site and the differing functions were utilised by the practice to form a highly sophisticated and very urban composition.

A similar impulse can be detected in the final Nickson & Borys commission we visited: the Sierra Leone Grammar School at Murray Town. Built as the new premises of a venerable Freetown institution – the first Grammar School was opened in the city by the Church Missionary Society in 1845 – the commission came to the practice through Borys’ role as the consultant architect to the Sierra Leone Ministry of Education in c1960 when the school had moved to a sloping greenfield site on the edge of the city. Here Nickson & Borys arranged the school accommodation in a dense composition of three staggered blocks linked to one another across the contour of the site’s ridgeline. Each of the blocks was given a differing façade treatment: the administration block was articulated with deeply set vertical brise-soleil; whilst the classroom blocks feature geometric pierced concrete screen walls. The three blocks were linked by external staircases and walkways, characteristically these are approached as another opportunity for rich pattern making with the staircase and balcony rails articulated into alternating blocks of solid and void. These open circulation spaces perhaps owe something to Fry and Drew’s famous schools in Ghana, but the compact – almost megastrucutral – arrangement of the blocks is far removed from Fry and Drew’s formal axial schemas. Similarly, the modelling of the concrete forms was rather heavier than was usual in Fry and Drew’s schools – perhaps testament to the care and skill of the school’s contractor, Taylor Woodrow Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone Grammar School, by Nickson and Borys, circulation and science labs

Towards the end of our visit to the Grammar School we were shown the assembly hall. A rather modest space internally, externally the assembly hall is vibrantly expressed through a fan-shaped extrusion that terminates in an expressively kinked end-wall, with heavily modelled vertical openings cast in concrete. Both the plan form and detailing was strongly reminiscent of the George Padmore Memorial Library in Accra – a fan-shaped block with kinked end walls that bore thickly moulded concrete rainwater goods. In my last post for the Transnational Architecture Blog I had thought Nickson & Borys were unlikely to be the George Padmore’s designers: now, having seen the practice’s treatment of the Sierra Leone Grammar School’s assembly hall, I am far less sure…

Hill Station: Colonial Period Housing in Freetown, Sierra Leone

By jacksoniain

January 11, 2023

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture

2 Comments

On an escarpment, 250m above the city of Freetown, is the small settlement of Hill Station. This was an exclusive resort built for the British colonial administrators and staff between 1902 and 1904. Modelled on the Indian hill stations (such as Simla) and the sanatorium at Aburi, Ghana, it aimed to provide cooler, more healthier abodes for the Colonists. Ronald Ross’s recent discoveries on mosquitoes and malaria also prompted the move away from the city, and the increasing desire for racially segregated housing and cordon sanitaires.

The houses were exported as kits from the UK ready to be assembled and clad on site. Hefty concrete bases are topped with steel frames that provide living accommodation at first floor level . Access is via a perpendicular staircase leading to a verandah. The raised bungalows catch the breeze and offer far reaching views over the forest, city, and ocean below. A club offered the only source of entertainment for the residents of this leafy, isolated, community.

How to access the Hill Station was solved by building a narrow gauge railway line from the city. It operated to suit the office hours of the government officials, and ran from 1904 until 1929 when it was replaced by road and bus service. Each day the officials would commute into town and return at the end of the day to their verandah’s and billiards at the Club House. It was an elaborate and hugely expensive experiment that benefited just a few dozen individuals. To build and maintain a railway through this challenging terrain was an immense task.

New build on left with origin Hill Station residence on right

Today, just 12 of the original 24 two-storey houses survive, still occupied by civil servants and their families (and still without a piped water supply). Many of the houses are being modified and extended, and the large plots split-up and sold to facilitate new development.

Freetown: Stores, Banks, and Municipal Buildings

By jacksoniain

January 8, 2023

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Heritage, Sierra Leone, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company

4 Comments

As part of our project to research the architecture of the United Africa Company (UAC) we’re visiting Freetown in Sierra Leone.

We spent the first day looking around the commercial business area wrapped around the giant cotton tree. The city grid was set out by the Sierra Leone Company surveyors in the 1790s and its wide streets and blocks are largely intact. Interspersed among the commercial properties are churches, houses, and schools, some dating back to the 19th Century.

Adjacent to the Cotton Tree are the municipal offices, post office and former telephone exchange, and the major bank branches. Nickson and Borys designed a major branch for Barclays DCO and Ronald Ward for British Bank of West Africa (more on these by Ewan Harrison shortly). The Sierra Leone Central Bank is also located here – now refurbished and with its concrete mural sadly covered over with signage (designed by Ministry of Works in 1964).

GPO and Telephone Exchange, Nickson and Borys

Further downhill, towards the old railway station and harbour, are the major merchant stores and retailers.

We visited the old Kingsway Stores – now a bank – but still with its deco-inspired flourishes at each end of the facade. The CFAO is still clearly recognisable, and several other stores display strong characteristics of GB Ollivant and Leventis properties we’ve seen elsewhere in Western Africa.

Heading further eastwards beyond the older city grid is ‘PZ Roundabout’ named after trading company Patterson Zochonis. Here the formality of the central business area gives way to more lively street markets and less formal city planning.

Further along Fourah Bay Road is the old Fourah Bay College building. The College was founded in 1827 in association with Durham University and was the first western style educational establishment in West Africa. It was mainly focused on missionary training. The delicate front verandah is formed with steel members bolted together and the ruinous state of the building has further exposed the steel structure inside. The beams were made by Glengarnock Iron and Steel Co in Ayrshire, Scotland and shipped out to Sierra Leone during the construction of the college building in the 1840s.

Old Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, with construction starting in 1845, work supervised by Rev Edward Jones.

The college is located just a short distance from the sea, and what is now the busy port of Cline Town. Here the major shipping company Elder Dempster had their offices. They commissioned James Cubitt to design their premises in 1958. Cubitt also designed the Elder Dempster tower in Lagos, Nigeria, but rather than a dramatic tower overlooking the marina, here there is a more restrained horizontal solution with projecting concrete brise soleil and a porte-cochère. Inside the booking hall is a dramatic spiral staircase that wraps around what resembles a ship’s funnel.
Warehouses and storage sheds dominate the area, including the former UAC stores opposite the National Railway Museum.

Former Elder Dempster Offices, James Cubitt

There’s an impressive collection of architecture in this historic port city. In the UAC archive there are extensive photographic albums from 1915 through the 1960s documenting many of the streets and buildings we visited. Our task now is to identify more of these structures, and to research the history that resulted in their commissioning, design, and wider significance.

New Research Centre Launch: AHUWA

By jacksoniain

November 23, 2022

Africa, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, Nigeria, Tropical Architecture

Kingsway Stores, Sekondi: 20th Century Society Building of the Month

By jacksoniain

October 12, 2022

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company

3 Comments

Ewan Harrison Writes:

**Kingsway, Sekondi Advertisement** Picture courtesy of Unilever Archives

Kingsway Stores was the most exclusive retail chain in colonial British West Africa. Established by a British import-export firm, Miller Brothers, the chain’s first two department stores opened in Accra and Kumasi in 1915-1920 and were explicitly modelled on Harrods and Selfridges. Named for the boulevard in London’s Holborn, where Millers was headquartered in a stodgily baroque office building, the Kingsway Stores sold imported food, clothing and home wear to a primarily British expatriate clientele. By 1929, a series of mergers and takeovers saw Miller Brothers absorbed into Unilever’s vast African subsidiary, the United Africa Company, which is currently the subject of a collaborative research project led by the University of Liverpool and Unilever Archives, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

**Kingsway Stores, Sekondi, 2022** Image: Iain Jackson

The Kingsway chain grew under the United Africa Co.’s ownership and by the early 1950s, Kingsway stores traded in each of the British West African capitals, Accra, Lagos, Freetown, Banjul, and in many of the larger towns and cities across the region: Kumasi, Cape Coast, Sekondi, and Tamale in the Ghana, and in Jos and Kaduna in Nigeria. Like many of these stores, the Sekondi store was designed by the Unilever In-House Architects and Engineering Department, headed by James Lomax-Simpson. A graduate of the University of Liverpool School of Architecture, Lomax-Simpson designed numerous buildings for Unilever, including housing at the famous company town, Port Sunlight. The designs that his team produced for United Africa Co. offices, warehouses and retail stores across West Africa tended towards the mildly moderne, with some slight modifications for local climatic conditions through the use of canopies and verandas to provide shading from the sun and allow for the higher loads of rainwater run-off required during the rainy season. The Sekondi Kingsway store is a paradigmatic example of this work.

**Party at Kingsway Store in Bathurst/Banjul, Gambia, held in 1953.** Picture courtesy of Unilever Archives.

The growth of the Kingsway chain in the interwar years reflected the expansion of British expatriate technicians, civil servants and businessmen during a period known as ‘the second colonial occupation.’ Increased investment in development projects, ultimately designed to maximise the flow of cocoa and precious metals from West Africa and thus boost Britain’s dollar reserves, saw not only an increase in British expatriate staff working in late colonial West Africa, but also their increasing embourgeoisement. The growth of the chain also reflected, and, indeed, facilitated, changes in the gender balance of British communities in West Africa. British women were originally discouraged from settling in the region, but by the 1940s the availability of malaria prophylaxis and yellow fever vaccines saw increasing numbers of women taking positions within colonial administrations, and wives joining their husbands on tours of duty across the region. As Laura Ann Stoler notes, the presence of European women ‘accentuated the refinements of privilege and the etiquettes of racial difference… women put new demands on the white communities to tighten their ranks, clarify their boundaries and mark out their social space.’ Racially segregated bungalow reservations proliferated across ‘British’ West Africa in this period. Within these reservations, ‘Europeanness’ was performed through a constant round of dinner parties, drinks parties, tennis parties, through the consumption of imported tinned and preserved food, through patterns of dress and home decoration. Kingsway stores, which emphasised that ‘orders were delivered direct to bungalows,’ supplied all the goods required for this memetic of bourgeoise English life.

Figure 4 **Kingsway Stores, Ibadan. 1960. TP Bennett & Partners.** Picture courtesy of Unilever Archives.

By the mid-1950s, as political decolonisation neared in West Africa and both civil services and expatriate companies increasingly ‘Africanised’ their staff, the Kingsway Stores faced the loss of its primary customer base. Perhaps paradoxically, the company management combatted this through a programme of expansion. Boldly modernist new stores, designed by the British commercial architectural firm TP Bennett & Partners, were opened in Accra, in the Lagos suburbs, in Ibadan and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. At the same time, didactic marketing campaigns – exhibitions, product demonstrations, fashion shows – were instrumentalised to sell a vision of modern, and, indeed, modernist, domesticity to an elite African clientele. An Ideal Homes Exhibition, sponsored by the British Design Council and held at the Lagos Kingsway Store in 1962, for example, offered advice on ‘such subjects as how to create harmony with simple furnishings and the tricks of entertaining which make a house-wife into a hostess.’ Kingsway at the end of empire therefore shrewdly manoeuvred itself away from selling ‘Europeanness,’ to selling ‘Modernity’ to the emerging, post-colonial, African elite, a shift in mode that sheds light on the entanglements between modernist architecture and design on the one hand, and colonial and neo-colonial profit extraction on the other.

**Fig 5: Kingsway Stores advertisement, c1960.** Picture courtesy of Unilever Archives.

Originally published here https://c20society.org.uk/building-of-the-month/kingsway-stores-sekondi-ghana October 2022

The West African Builder and Architect (WABA)

By jacksoniain

October 10, 2022

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Nigeria, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company

2 Comments

Adefola Toye writes:

The first architectural journal in West Africa, The West African Builder and Architect (WABA) was published in 8 volumes between 1961 and 1968, and covered the field of architecture and building in the region. Nation-building programmes had started in newly independent West African nations by the early 1960s. These projects were centred on large-scale infrastructure projects for national development, which sparked a boom in design and construction. In contrast to earlier architecture journals on colonial Africa that were published for a metropolitan readership,ⁱ WABA was founded by and for professionals based in West African countries to share information on practice in the developing industry and encourage cooperation among practitioners.ⁱⁱ

The journal began with an editorial panel of British architects: Kennett Scott in Ghana, and Anthony Halliday and Robin Atkinson of Fry & Drew and Partners in Nigeria.ⁱⁱⁱ  Oluwole Olumuyiwa, one of the few Nigerian architects who studied abroad and established practices upon their return, was the only West African on the panel. Among the WABA’s target audience was the modest number of engineering and architecture students studying in West Africa. It aspired to equip them with valuable information regarding their future careers that were specific to their environment. 

Published articles included news on new projects finished in Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone as well as articles by skilled professionals discussing contemporary design and building methods in West Africa. Regular publication features included technical reviews of new products, updates on development work in the countries covered, and advertising placements.

At that time, British practices operating since the 1940s dominated the architecture field in the region.  They completed late colonial buildings using tropical modernist designs. This group of foreign architectural firms, including James Cubitt & Partners, Kennett Scott Associates, Architects’ Co-Partnership, Fry,  Drew & Partners, etc.,  produced a significant number of the new structures published in the  WABA journal. The projects of the general contractor, Taylor Woodrow and the engineering consultant, Ove Arup & Partners were also listed. Buildings for government organisations, corporations, and residences, constituted the bulk of the reported projects. Facilities for telecommunications, transport and healthcare were also mentioned. 

The WABA journal served as a reference for the purchase and sale of building supplies and services through advert placements, advertisers index and buyers’ guides. Advertisements in volumes 1 and 2 of the journal reflect the state of the construction industry in the early 1960s independent West Africa. As the region’s manufacturing industry was in its cradle, building supplies and equipment were primarily imported and distributed by West African-based agents. Most of the distributors’ advertisements in the journal were from multinational corporations that were at the forefront of trade in colonial West Africa such as United Africa Company, GBO (G.B. Ollivant) and CFAO (Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale). GBO Building Department for example was a former subsidiary of British merchant GB Ollivant and had been operating in Nigeria since the late 19th century. Vivian, Younger & Bond Ltd and John Holt Technical were among more well-known suppliers with numerous locations throughout West Africa.

By constructing new facilities and forming partnerships with public and private organisations, foreign manufacturers also expanded their presence in West Africa. In their various local factories, International Paints (West Africa) Ltd., Dorman Long (Ghana) Ltd., and Nigerite (in Nigeria) produced paint, steel, and asbestos sheets respectively. The headlines of these corporations’ advertisements in WABA highlighted the launch of new plants and their support of the local economy. Additionally, advertisements for locally produced goods included the clause “made in Ghana” or “made in Nigeria.”. There was a minimal presence of indigenous manufacturing companies. NIGERCEM-Nigeria’s first locally owned cement factory was the only producer to include this feat in its advertisement.

Some organizations used their advertisements to highlight their importance and reputation in the sector. Advertisements for general contractors and subcontractors were designed to appear as portfolios of completed and continuing projects. The advertisement pages for the metal component company Henry Hope & Sons Ltd always showed an image of a brand-new building fitted with their curtainwalls and/or sun breakers.  This was displayed alongside a brief overview of the building including its location and architect’s name.

The journal adverts reflected companies’ recognition of their role in nation-building. Multinational corporations boasted of their delight and pride in partaking in the “progress” and “growth” of the economy and the future of new countries. Was this marketing approach merely chosen to appeal to the development-oriented nature of the new market, or was it implemented to emulate previous advertisements by foreign businesses (like UAC) in response to criticism of neo-colonialism? ^iv

Companies targeted their advertisements not only at professionals but also at citizens in West Africa. These advertisements directed at building occupants first appeared in the 1962 issues and frequently alluded to modernity. Adverts for flooring, sanitary fittings, and appliances included large texts with phrases like “gracefully modern” and “modern living.” This contrasted with building supplies adverts-directed at professionals-which hardly referenced modern living. The late colonial era’s ‘africanization’ programmes aided the growth of the middle class by giving priority to the education and employment of Africans by public and private sector organisations. Likewise, housing initiatives launched by government agencies like the Ghana Housing Corporation and the Nigerian LEDB (Lagos Executive Development Board) in the 1950s attracted this demographic. They were characterised by their higher economic and educational status, as well as a household lifestyle distinct from the traditional communal family structure.^v Was the reference to a modern lifestyle a marketing strategy to attract the West African middle class who had adopted a western-oriented lifestyle?

The WABA journal provides an account of the building sector’s development in independent West Africa. The journal advertising demonstrated how companies promoted their products to appeal to both individual and national ideals of growth while navigating the shifting socio-political landscape.

ⁱ See Hannah le Roux and Ola Uduku, ‘The Media and the Modern Movement in Nigeria and the Gold Coast’, NKA (Brooklyn, N.Y.), 2004.19 (2004), 46–49.

ⁱⁱ ‘Introduction’, The West African Builder and Architect, 1:1 (1961), 1.

ⁱⁱⁱ In 1961, the Nigerian office of Fry, Drew and Partners became Fry, Drew, Atkinson Architects Nigeria under the leadership of Robin Atkinson. ‘Nigeria Developments’, The West African Builder and Architect, 1.4 (1961), 108.

^iv Bianca Murillo, ‘“The Devil We Know”: Gold Coast Consumers, Local Employees, and the United Africa Company, 1940–1960’, Enterprise & Society, 12.2 (2011), 317–55

^v Daniel Immerwahr, ‘The Politics of Architecture and Urbanism in Postcolonial Lagos, 1960-1986’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 19.2 (2007), 165–86 (p.175)

An update from the archives: “My dearest, darling Jane”: unfolding Fry and Drew Papers

By jacksoniain

August 12, 2022

Fry & Drew, Ghana, Historiography, India, Tropical Architecture

1 Comment

Inês Nunes is a PhD student at University of Coimbra, Portugal and is investigating, “The Social Within the Tropical: Jane Drew and Minnette de Silva designing an inclusive modernism in the tropics”. Here’s an update on a recent visit to the RIBA archive.

“My dearest, darling Jane”: unfolding Fry and Drew Papers

In a conversational tone, Maxwell Fry addresses Jane Drew from the ‘remote’ mid-1940s Accra. “Darling Max”, she replicates. Their correspondence, a lively itinerary from West Africa, India, Iran, or Mauritius, belongs to a treasure chest named Fry and Drew Papers. It is accessible, along with unrivaled archival material, in the RIBA Architecture Study Rooms of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London).

Love notes handwritten on hotel letterheads, diaries displaying candid reflections about life, and memoirs manuscripted on paper bags are entangled with professional-wise material. Included are lectures and articles revealing narratives about architecture, extraordinarily illustrated with colourful drawings or sharp pencil sketches. Both are complemented by miscellaneous data: postcards, press cuttings, administrative files, address books… The characters gain life in every opened box. Their voices echo through calligraphies, signatures, ideas.

In its uniqueness, Fry and Drew Papers are an overwhelming resource regarding the life and work of both architects and an efficient record of the dynamic of their global scope partnership. Even so, it excels. Flexible and embracing enough to accommodate diverse interests and aims, unpublished personal letters, diaries, and autobiographies provide captivating details to any enthusiast – for instance, Fry’s diary was only made accessible in 2021. Furthermore, the archive is a source of knowledge about British historiography and significant architectural thematics: the MARS Group, the Modern Movement, Tropical Architecture, and Chandigarh are noteworthy.

Overall, the research was a privilege and the expectations were exceeded. My deep gratitude to Dr. Shireen Mahdavi for supporting this endeavour. The wealth of these primary sources allows an experience that couldn’t have been more rewarding. By immersing in Fry and Drew’s universe, how inspiring becomes their lifetime of respect and companionship, the robustness of their practice, and the profound vow to “produce towns and housing that will be loved, lived in and cared for” (Drew, F&D/27/2).

In Trust for the People: Community Centres in 1950s Ghana

By jacksoniain

August 8, 2022

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company

“Invented Modernisms: Getting to Grips with Modernity in Three African State Buildings” by Kuukuwa Manful, Innocent Batsani-Ncube, Julia Gallagher in Curator: The Museum Journal

By jacksoniain

July 12, 2022

Africa, European Transnational, Ghana, Global Architecture, Heritage, Tropical Architecture

1 Comment

Invented Modernisms: Getting to Grips with Modernity in Three African State Buildings
Kuukuwa Manful, Innocent Batsani-Ncube, Julia Gallagher

Jubilee House, Accra, Ghana. Source: Julia Gallagher, March 2019

This article examines recent attempts to create specifically African forms of modernist political architecture that draw on ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-colonial’ aesthetic forms and ideas. Taking examples of three prestigious structures – the presidential palace in Ghana, the parliament in Malawi and the Northern Cape regional parliament in South Africa – the article shows how vernacular ideas have been incorporated into state-of-the-art political architecture, producing new or explicitly ‘African’ forms of modernism. It explores how such buildings, which draw on ‘invented traditions’, are used alongside conventional, monolithic representations of the state to produce ‘invented modernisms’ that both uphold and question the African state as a project of modernity.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12505

The George Padmore Library: A Potential Attribution

By jacksoniain

June 28, 2022

Ghana, Historiography, Tropical Architecture

2 Comments

The George Padmore Library: A Potential Attribution

Text by Dr Ewan Harrison

The George Padmore Library in Accra is a dynamic composition. Its principal block houses a fan-shaped reading room that extends from an apsidal end wall. This is raised up on pilotis, and is entered via a delicately wrought cantilevered staircase that itself springs from a fan-shaped expanse of terrazzo floating above a reflective pool. Externally, the facades are defined by horizontals of louvred glazing which allow for free air circulation, keeping the reading room at a comfortable temperature, and a strongly modelled canopy with sculpturally expressed rain water outflows. The building was established by the first president of the republic of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, in memory of the pan-Africanist writer, journalist and activist George Padmore. Padmore, who was born in Trinidiad, Nkrumah during the 5^th Pan Africanist Conference, held in Manchester in 1945, and on Ghana’s independence, Padmore moved to Ghana to work for Nkrumah’s government as a diplomatic adviser. Sometime following Padmore’s death, Nkrumah’s government built the library in his memory, to house Padmore’s archive and a growing African studies library collection. The Library continues to function as Ghana’s primary deposit library to this day.

Reflecting Pool and staircase of George Padmore Library

Before visiting, I had assumed that the building was likely designed by Nickson & Borys. Responsible for the design of both the Accra Central Library complex and the nearby Ghana National Archives building in the late 1950s, the practice might have seemed the natural fit for a commission to design a bespoke library in Accra at this date. However, on visiting the George Padmore Memorial Library, after having recently spent time in both of Nickson & Borys libraries in the city, the manifest differences in both spatial planning and design between those and the George Padmore Memorial Library became clear. Whilst both the Accra Central Library and the National Library are simple, cubic buildings, the architect of the George Padmore seems to have rejected the rectilinear in their handling of the main reading room. The Nickson & Borys buildings use brise-soliel and pierced concrete walls to dissolve the wall plane: creating lightweight buildings. In contrast, the George Padmore is a heavier, starker, more sculptural composition: much of its drama comes from strongly modelled canopies and sculptural concrete rainwater outflows, and its main facades feature long planes of unbroken concrete.

Curved gable and reflecting pool of George Padmore Library

This points to another possible attribution, a design by Max Bond Jnr (1935-2009). The scion of a prominent African-American family, Bond studied architecture at the Harvard School of Design before working at Le Corbusier’s Paris atelier (1958-61) and the New York practice Pedersen and Tiley (1961-64). Bond believed that African-American culture should ‘hark back to Africa,’^[1] and thus in 1963 wrote to Nkrumah asking for a job. By 1964 Bond was established in Accra as an employee of the Ghana National Contracting Corporation, the state’s contractor, working on designs for buildings at the government complex at Flagstaff House. Two of the precepts he outlined as central to his practice in Ghana were a ‘responsiveness to climate,’ and ‘modern buildings for new institutions.’^[2] Bond’s most famous commission for the GNCC, the design of a public library at Bolgatanga, in the country’s arid northern region, strongly evidences these concerns. The Bolgatanga library project, which features four discrete volumes – two library reading rooms, a lecture hall and an administration block – under a free-standing roof designed to maximise cooling air circulation throughout the complex, is very different in its massing to the George Padmore Memorial Library. But there is something in Bond’s heavy roof at the Bolgatanga Library, in his handling of the oval wall of the Lecture Hall, and the sculptural treatment of the rainwater goods which show clear affinities with the George Padmore Memorial Library. And there are reasons beyond the stylistic to suggest Bond’s authorship of the building. Padmore’s intellectual project, and, it can be argued, much of Kwame Nkrumah’s political one, resolved around drawing attention to the shared heritage and struggles of Africans and the African diaspora throughout the Atlantic world. In this context, a design by an African-American architect, resident in Ghana, might have seemed especially suitable.

Image of Bolgatanga Library: https://www.davisbrodybond.com/bolgatanga

Neither the Accra Town Planning archives, the papers of the Ghana Library Board or the archive of the Padmore Memorial Library itself shed much light on the building’s authorship, although a letter in the National Archives of Accra politely rebuffing an offer from Nickson & Borys to fund a memorial plaque to Padmore is certainly suggestive that the building’s patrons didn’t think a practice headed by European emigres a suitable one to design a memorial to a titan of Pan-Africanism (dated 1961, this letter makes no mention of the project for the Library, suggesting that it predates the library’s construction). Questions remain, however. The Bolgatanga Library was extensively published, if the Padmore is by Bond, why wouldn’t he have seen that it too received attention in architectural publications? Why wouldn’t he accord it a central place in his Ghanian oeuvre? Was this perhaps a collaborative job, an awkward collaboration with one of the expatriate architectural practices that Nkrumah wished to side-line, practices like Nickson & Borys? Or with Eastern European or Yugoslavian architects employed by the GNCC? The last might be the most likely, given Ghana’s political culture in the early 1960s, and Padmore’s own long, if increasingly fractious, association with the Communist Party. Conclusive answer may well lie in the collections of the Avery Library at Columbia, which holds Max Bond Jnr’s archives, or in the private papers of Kwame Nkrumah. For now, a tentative attribution will have to suffice.

George Padmore Library Interior: Photo Iain Jackson

^[1] J, Max Bond Jnr and the Approproation of Modernism in a Library Design in Ghana

^[2] J, Max Bond Jnr and the Approproation of Modernism in a Library Design in Ghana

—Transnational Architecture Group

Archive

Tropical Architecture

Nickson & Borys in Freetown, Sierra Leone

Hill Station: Colonial Period Housing in Freetown, Sierra Leone

Freetown: Stores, Banks, and Municipal Buildings

New Research Centre Launch: AHUWA

Kingsway Stores, Sekondi: 20th Century Society Building of the Month

The West African Builder and Architect (WABA)

An update from the archives: “My dearest, darling Jane”: unfolding Fry and Drew Papers

In Trust for the People: Community Centres in 1950s Ghana

“Invented Modernisms: Getting to Grips with Modernity in Three African State Buildings” by Kuukuwa Manful, Innocent Batsani-Ncube, Julia Gallagher in Curator: The Museum Journal

The George Padmore Library: A Potential Attribution