Dr Christopher Turner co-curator of the exhibition watching film featuring Ola Uduku
Press Cuttings:
“La Biennale di Venezia and the V&A present Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa. Organised in collaboration with the Architectural Association (AA), London, and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, this presentation at the Biennale Architettura 2023 critically reflects on the imperial history of Tropical Modernism through an analysis of the work of the Department of Tropical Architecture and a dozen key projects. It explores the ways in which this distinctive architectural style was initially developed and employed as a tool to support colonial rule before being adapted by West African architects to promote the excitement and possibilities of the period that followed Ghana becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957.
Curated by Dr Christopher Turner (V&A) with Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed (AA), the Venice presentation in the Applied Arts Pavilion is centred around a multi-channel film installation featuring interviews with surviving protagonists and footage of remaining buildings. Responding to the theme of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition conceived by Director Lesley Lokko, who writes ‘Africa is the laboratory of the future’ in her curatorial statement for the Biennale Architettura 2023, the presentation also lays the groundwork for a larger exhibition scheduled to take place at the V&A in London in 2024.”
Venice architecture biennale: how pioneering Ghanaian architects reckoned with tropical modernism by Kuukuwa Manful
Owusu Addo Residence by John Owusu Addo.
Kuukuwa Manful, CC BY-NC-NDKuukuwa Manful, SOAS, University of London
But as well as looking at the future of architecture on the continent, visitors will also be able to explore its history, through an exhibition at the Arsenale, entitled Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa.
Early 20th-century modernism in Europe saw architects using large expanses of unshaded glass and flat roofs. Practitioners in warmer, humid climates, such as in Africa and Asia, meanwhile, had to adapt their designs to withstand heavier rainfall and warmer temperatures. In late colonial Africa and during the independence era, this style became known as “tropical modernism” or “tropical architecture”.
In the African context, this is possibly the best researched and well-documented architectural movement. When people discuss it further afield, however, it is mostly through a white lens. The focus is on what European architects practising in these regions were doing – African architects of the same era are largely overlooked.
Putting Europe at the centre of African stories is a choice that echoes the very colonial histories it seeks to elucidate, where European architects operated as though the continent were a blank slate, devoid of pre-existing architecture worthy of note.
My research shows how architects in Ghana in particular aligned with, adapted, or rejected Western colonial ideas. They created modernist buildings that reflected their visions for their nation, their experiences and their global outlook.
Ghanaian expertise
John Owusu Addo, the first black head of department of Ghana’s first architecture school, and Samuel Opare Larbi, another prominent educator and architect, embodied what I term the dominant Ghanaian tropical modernism. Their practice was most similar to, and aligned with, the practice of the white British tropical modernists.
The former Department of Tropical Architecture was established at the Architectural Association (AA) in London in 1954 by the British wife and husband duo Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, and James Cubbitt. Although Fry described the city of Kano, in present day Nigeria, as a “complete realisation of urban harmony”, he and Drew nonetheless declared having “invented” architecture in West Africa. Their work was coloured by the imperial, racist and sexist notions of the time.
Owusu Addo and Larbi both trained at the AA. They counted among their contemporaries the German architect Otto Koenisberger and the Australian-born British architect Kenneth Mackensie Scott. Although they faced racial discrimination in Europe and back home, their UK education put them in a position of relative privilege in Ghana.
From the outside, many of the institutional and corporate buildings they designed, including Cedi House in Accra (a high-rise tower that now houses the Ghana Stock Exchange) featured elements of tropical modernism: solar shading devices, rhythmic facades, breeze blocks, cross ventilation and east-west orientation.
But it is in the interiors of their domestic architecture that their keen understanding of the people for whom they were designing becomes most apparent. When I interviewed Owusu Addo and Larbi in 2015, they recounted how they took Ghanaian societies into account. And they spoke of the pride they felt at being African architects.
For the Unity Hall student accommodation at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Owusu Addo created shaded outdoor space, with courtyards and verandas. As he put it: “Rarely do we stay in our rooms in the daytime. If in the daytime anyone was in the room, then he was sick.”
Unity Hall, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi.Łukasz Stanek, CC BY-NC-ND
Creative dissent
Other architects sought to establish an aesthetic that was visually distinct from European-driven tropical modernism. They accepted the climatic control and other technological and material aspects of the style. However, in the aesthetics they pursued, they were decidedly expressive.
Anyako-born architect Daniel Sydney Kpodo-Tay’s confidence was grounded in his centuries-long family history of building design and construction. Together with his anti-colonial politics and a desire for recognition, this informed an approach that the Ghana Institute of Architects termed “revolutionary”, upon his death in 2018.
Kpodo-Tay was fascinated by symbolism. His designs rejected ornamentation. Instead, he sought to make the buildings themselves sculptural. His projects that were built were often not as bold as his proposals – a compromise he put down to the limited finances and conservatism of clients in Ghana.
When a competition was held, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to design the headquarters for the Economic Community of West African States organisation, Kpodo-Tay’s proposal drew on the form of a bowl as symbolic of communality and unity. His design for the complex, which was to house offices, a bank and a conference venue, featured bold inverted conical forms with internal spaces arrayed radially.
Daniel Sydney Kpodo-Tay’s proposal for the ECOWAS headquarters.Kuukuwa Manful, Author provided
Owusu Addo, Kpodo-Tay, and Larbi are not the only Ghanaian architects of their generations whose practice was informed by tropical modernism. Many stories are yet to be brought to light, especially those of the women.
Only a few women were trained at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science’s architecture school. Sexism in the industry saw some leave. But others, including the late Alero Olympio who designed Accra’s Kokrobitey Institute, struck out in bold new ways. These visionaries challenged the Euro-centric assumptions of what tropical modernism was, in particular through their use of materials.
As scholars, practitioners and visitors from around the world turn to architecture on the African continent, they must be careful not to treat it as a blank slate in the way previous generations did. Africans have been creating, studying, teaching, and documenting architecture in Africa since time immemorial. Their work matters.
The Transnational Architecture Group is 10 year’s old this year. Thank you for supporting the blog and to all of our excellent contributors over the years for enriching the content and generously sharing their work. We’d also like to thank the communities in the places in which we work, the archivists and librarians for making material available to us and sharing their expertise, our respective institutions for supporting our research, and to the research funders who make travel, time, and resources available to us.
The blog started as a means to share our work-in-progress ideas and to promote events – and that is still at the core of what we do. We continue to add updates from our ventures into the archives, travel reports, and to share interesting events and innovative papers. These small reports and updates have compounded into something of a large resource and repository, and we’re delighted so many people have been able to make good use of (and to correct and expand upon) our work and attempts at writing these histories.
To celebrate the 10 year anniversary we held a small gathering at the Liverpool School of Architecture on Wednesday 8th March, curated and organised by Dr Alistair Cartwright. Our speakers were all PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and research associates at the school. You may watch the proceedings here:
The speakers and titles of the presentations are below, with timings if you’d like to skip to a particular talk:
Rixt Woudstra, “Sapele and Samreboi: Building Company Towns in British West Africa” 5:25
Excy Hansda, “Indigenous Modernities in the Twentieth Century Architecture of Bombay” 20:00
Adefola Toye, “Tropical Modernism in Nigeria’s First Universities: Accessing Sources Beyond the Archives.” 37:00
Ewan Harrison, “Planning for Post/Neo Coloniality: the Paramount Hotel in Freetown” 1:11
Iain Jackson, “Erhabor Emokae and the curious case of the UAC Mural: tropical modernism and decorative arts” 1:31
Daneel Starr, “How and why has the vernacular architecture and intangible cultural heritage of the Akha people changed in the face of globalization: Using the village of A Lu Lao Zhai, Xishuangbanna (sipsongpanna) China, as a case study.” 1:50
Paul Robinson, “Freetown, the UAC and urban design” 2:20
Alistair Cartwright, “Ecologies of Vulnerability: Post-Cyclone Reconstruction in Mauritius, c. 1945” 2:35
We also heard an excellent paper from Razan Simbawa, “The Effects of Demolish-based Urban Regeneration on Displaced Residents in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia” – which cannot be shared on the video recording at the moment.
Thank you again to all of the speakers for their wonderful talks, presentations, and work-in-progress. There was such variety and richness in the topics and methods, and at the same time numerous connections and cross-overs between the work.
Please do get in touch if you’d like to know more, or to share your work on the blog.
Indeed the city of a million hills, the views, wherever one looks show the hilly topography as 360 degree panorama all around. This is an efficient, exceptionally clean and organised African city, words that rarely roll off the tongue in relation to the continent.
For Kigali this however is happily true. Approaching this city of 3 million from its friendly and speedy immigration formalities at its small airport, one meets with Kigali’s symbolic moniker, the lit up Kigali Conference centre globe, set on one of the city’s highest hills, it acts as a waymarker into Kigali city.
Unsurprising for a hilly city, poor drainage and standing water is not a problem, a usual feature in large urban areas of Africa. Kigali’s arteries are its well-designed and maintained, roads and its taxi and motorcycle public transport network. Yellow motorcycles, with red-helmeted drivers and their pillion passengers swarm the roads like bees, dodging in and out of traffic including the Yego taxicabs which are ubiquitous forms of transport for more well-off Kigalites.
Meanwhile the roads are designed with both clearly marked out zebra crossings which drivers observe. This includes well-defined cycle lanes despite bicycles being rather rare, they have clearly been planned for. The central pedestrianised area also has had detailed attention to planting and urban infrastructure such as seating areas and shelters. This attention to city thoroughfares by Kigali’s planners gives the city its deserved moniker as Africa’s most well-planned city.
A visit to the University of Rwanda also gave an interesting view of the different architectural and design influences to be found in Rwanda. The striking Rwanda School of Architecture displayed its vibrant colours and materiality in its external form, whilst the volumetric flexibility of these spaces internally was demonstrated as we held successful if slightly challenged acoustically, talks and workshops, concluding with an informal review session in two of these spaces.
Central Kigali has a distinct historic colonial – mission informed central spine. A Catholic convent, a church, and a school complex delivering kindergarten and primary education feature on one axis. The characteristic use of locally made clay bricks and historical clay tiling give these buildings their historic identity. Whilst the 20th century designed embassies of Belgium and France, with their national flags flying, dominate nearby.
Colonial Kigali then blends into an interesting newly repurposed space, courtesy of MASS design. The old Belgian school in downtown Kigali has now become home for the first Norskka startup campus. Classrooms have been recreated as meetings spaces, and the brand new central entrance meeting space doubles as free to walk into café certainly serving the best coffee this side of Africa.
The MASS Design-landscape team collaboration in design has resulted in a totally new and climatologically excellent marriage of landscape with environment. A successful contemporary case study on how this can be achieved for all working in sub-tropical environments such as Kigali. The third and final phase of this development is just going on site involving a local Architecture practice this has got to be a project to watch.
Downtown commercial Kigali, which formed the centre of the historic commercial town, comprises the usual mix of trading units, former mercantile company warehouses and post and telecommunications infrastructure. A pedestrian mall which features Kigali’s new post-modern banking office towers, connects to this downtown area.
A visit to the Kigali Cricket Pavilion, the result of Peter Rich and Michael Ramage’s 2017 architecture-engineering collaboration, was pure visual joy to behold. The eight mile drive out of Kigali to find the pavilion was an adventure in itself as there were few signposts or digital map directions to follow. A well-judged turn off the main road, however resulted in an initial view of the structure. Built in 2017 it has weathered extremely well, with the quaternary arch form clearly expressed internally, and the local material cladding in superb condition. The three domes amply fulfil their basic programme of shelter and a viewing space for members of the Rwandan Cricket Association.
At our visit we were also able to drink great Ugandan coffee and access fast internet access as we sat down to admire the structure and the pavilion view. Unfortunately, no games were being played nor was there any cricket practice on our Saturday trip out to the pavilion, however the grounds were in perfect condition and we were informed that the Rwanda girls cricket team had recently beat their Ugandan counterparts in a regional match, having a home pavilion like Kigali’s must be a source of inspiration for Kigali’s youth cricketers.
Back into the leafy former colonial government suburbs of Kigali, only one hill away from Kigali’s commercial hub a visit to the Kandt house took us straight back to colonial times,. This is the preserved home of Kigali’s first German governor now provides an extensive history of Kigali and Rwanda’s early mission and colonial history and heritage. A reptile zoo complete with crocodile was the bonus attraction to view.
Back into the leafy former colonial government suburbs of Kigali, only one hill away from Kigali’s commercial hub a visit to the Kandt house took us straight back to colonial times,. This is the preserved home of Kigali’s first German governor now provides an extensive history of Kigali and Rwanda’s early mission and colonial history and heritage. A reptile zoo complete with crocodile was the bonus attraction to view.
No trip to Kigali, should omit a visit to the genocide museum, this is a deeply emotional and heart-breaking site, which comprises both burial grounds and a landscaped garden of remembrance and also the Genocide memorial now connected to a genocide archive which may be visited on week days. The landscaping of the memorial garden allows for quiet contemplation and reflection, whilst the museum, assisted by the Aegis Trust, to the people of Rwanda tells the story of the 1994 genocide to the world, in the hope that we may all strive for peace and reconciliation. It was masterplanned by John McAslan and partners, and completed in 2014. Kigali Genocide Memorial Amphitheatre in a circular void, by WALL Corporation / Selim Senin remains unbuilt, and is still work in progress.
You might also catch a view of the remains of Rwanda’s central prison in Kigali, which is on another hill nearby. It is a large colonial jail which unfortunately is scheduled for erasure if future plans are put in place. Currently however with some persistence you can get in and view the structure which only closed in the early 2010s.
Finally, a visit to the now called ‘Hotel Milles Collines’, the true site of the Hotel Rwanda, takes one back to halcyon days of the modern intercontinental tropical hotel. Copies of this hotel style grace most of the globe’s tropical locations, with the swimming pool, bar area and tennis courts to view. This is a definite contrast to the boutique hotel we stayed in with its contemporary reinterpretation of space, complete with mosquito nets, and open-air dining.
A great way to end a trip would be to have dinner at Kigali’s latest dining venue, just opened in time for the Commonwealth Governors and Heads of state meeting (CHOGUM) that took place in Kigali last autumn. It’s fine dining, interior decoration, and panoramic view of this city of hills is a great way to conclude a trip.
As the posters across this city proclaim, “Visit Rwanda”!
Amongst the palms and mango trees is a K6 telephone box and the ruins of former trading stores and warehouses overlooking the quayside. This is Bonthe, a small town on the island of Sherbro located just off the West African Guinea coast. The remote tropical location is six hours drive from Sierra Leone’s Freetown and 45 minutes speedboat through a maze of mangrove lined coastline.
Bonthe was once a major trading post rivalling the port of Freetown. Conveniently located at the mouth of the Sherbro River it was perfectly positioned for trade. Along with the many other islands in the estuary it was initially a slaving post, occupied by Portuguese, French, and British slavers. After emancipation in 1807 the island was used to supress the now illicit trade, and also became a place for returning Krio – former slaves from the Caribbean, Canada and UK.
The Island stretches about 30 miles long with Bonthe its largest settlement. Set out on a grid plan like Freetown, but on a much smaller scale, the town rapidly became a place for trade, especially after a treaty was formed with the British in 1861, and around 4500 people lived there by the 1890s.
The linear harbour overlooking the river was once lined with trading houses, merchant stores, and warehouses, offering the latest goods and merchandise from Europe. Cast-iron standpipes imported from Liverpool tapped into the fresh water supply and by the early 20thC street lighting and power was available.
Behind the trading stores grew a community of Krio houses – many adopting features from the Americas blended with European style bungalows. The active missionary population competed for converts and a vast array of churches catered for nearly every flavour of Christian denomination.
Whilst the tropical island and profitable trading created something of a paradisical, if remote setting, it wasn’t always a utopian settlement. In 1895 five African agents of Paterson Zochonis were killed in a period of unrest that started as protest to a poll tax known as the ‘hut tax’. The violence quickly spread exposing the lack of security on the island and the difficulty in defending the tributaries and mangrove lined swamps. 13 people were hanged there in 1898 after the murder of several American missionaries following ongoing conflict.
Sherbro in 1895: The Graphic Newspaper
Conditions were eventually restored to calm and the bustling trade of exporting raw materials from the interior mainland and the import of manufactured goods from Britain continued. The old premises of Paterson Zochonis still survives, with the company name proudly stated above the store’s portico. Patterson Zochonis set up shop here in 1884, and their trading empire spread across West Africa.
The origin of the firm dates to the 1870s when George Henry Paterson (from Scotland) worked with George Basil Zochonis (from Greece) at Fisher and Randall in Freetown. There’s still a Fisher Street in Freetown, just around the corner PZ roundabout – named after the firm. They initially traded calico and wax cotton prints from Manchester before moving into soap after the Second World War. A soap factory was acquired by the firm in Nigeria and by 1975 they’d bought out Cussons (and their famous Imperial Leather soap brand).
Other rival trading firms such as the United Africa Company and CFAO also set up businesses at Bonthe, building large stores along the waterfront and housing behind. There’s also the ubiquitous colonial clocktower and unearthed canons littered about the place, although most of the trading stores are now dilapidated shells being reclaimed by the tropical flora and humid climate.
A landing strip was built here by the Allies during Second World War – complete with its own miniature terminal building – but the silting up of the river and the construction of new harbour facilities at the Queen Elizabeth II Dock in Freetown had a severe impact on the future prospects at Sherbro Island. There was a period of high-end holiday resorts catering for international visitors with a focus on nature lovers, birdwatchers, and fishing fanatics. A helicopter service even conveyed tourists to the Island from Freetown until about 2008.
Now it’s very much an overlooked backwater, but there are attempts to reverse its fortunes.
A new power plant is being built to restore mains power to the island and a few guest houses continue to give a warm welcome to all visitors. It’s a fascinating and beautiful place with such a rich history.
We’ve photographed most of the major structures that survive in Bonthe and will continue to investigate the archival material to uncover more of its past.
This edited collection of essays and image-driven pieces by anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, and historians examines the legacies of African architecture from around the time of independence through examples from different countries. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, and careful observation of buildings, remains, and people, the case studies seek to connect the colonial and postcolonial origins of modernist architecture, the historical processes they underwent, and their present use and habitation, adaptation, and decay.
Deriving from a workshop in connection with the 2015 exhibition “Forms of Freedom” at the National Museum in Oslo and the Venice Biennale, the volume combines recent developments in architectural history, the anthropology of modernism and of material culture, and contemporary archaeology to move beyond the admiration or preservation of prized architectural “heritage” and to complicate the contemplation—or critique—of “ruins” and “ruination.”
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-20th 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 OfficesMunicipal Offices, FreetownGPO, Freetown
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 labsSierra Leone Grammar School, by Nickson and Borys: Assembly Hall with science labs Sierra Leone Grammar School, by Nickson and Borys: staircaseSierra Leone Grammar School, by Nickson and Borys
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…
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.
Bungalow at Hill Station
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.
Covered staircase entrance
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 rightView from Hill station over FreetownHill StationOne of the surviving 12 original Hill Station houses – with modifications to base
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.
Professor Ken Ndomhina picked us up in his SUV and we drove through Fourah Bay College, Freetown to the Faculty of Architecture building of the University of Sierra Leone. My colleague, Iain Jackson, had been invited to give a lecture on the architecture of Fry and Drew in Western Africa. We parked up outside a two storey, white and green building with interesting post-modern ornament that included fluted ionic columns which captured swirling red dust in their profiles.
Iain Jackson giving a lecture to staff and students at Fourah Bay CollegeFourah Bay College: School of Architecture
When this Architecture School opened four years ago, twenty-one students enrolled, and the first cohort is about to graduate. The school now boasts around 150 students across four year groups.
Creating a new School of Architecture is a wonderful opportunity – the chance to ‘start again’ and to develop a new programme from scratch is very special. Equally the challenges are great – not least recruiting staff as there are only 25 accredited architects in the whole country.
Student Models: Fourah Bay CollegeSchool of Architecture at Fourah Bay College
Yet progress is being made. Once the lecture was complete, we enjoyed light refreshments and conversation with local staff who had been trained far and wide in Cyprus, Morocco and England. They had returned ‘home’ to be involved with this exciting and growing project. The School is preparing for Commonwealth Association of Architects accreditation. It has a hands-on approach to teaching with many 1:1 scale building experiments and model-making, supplemented by history, environmental design, and building technology.
Student Representative: Rose Imah Paul giving a vote of thanks.Ken Ndomhina and Faculty with Paul Robinson, Ewan Harrison, and Iain JacksonStaff and Students in the Courtyard
Although change is slow the University of Sierra Leone architectural department vision is strong: to see men and women from Sierra Leone, trained as architects to positively impact the developing built environment of the nation. And to establish the role of architect within their communities. Knowing this, it made it a thrilling privilege to pose with this next generation for a celebratory photograph once the event ended.
Transnational Architecture Group 
