ArchiAfrika-April-Magazine-English-final-v2

Above: Kunlé Adeyemi and Nat Nuno-Amertefio in conversation at The Milan Design Week, 2013.
Previous Page: Inset: Makoko Floating School.
Image Courtesy of NLÉ, Shaping the Architecture of Developing Cities
The Milan Design Week hosted designers,
inventors and thinkers from around the world
and enabled them to explore their work and
ideas to their contemporaries. It took place
in April when the city draws in breadth after
the winter and watches the trees break into
the first hopeful buds of spring. Events and
exhibitions were displayed in venues across
the metropolis. This gave participants the
opportunity to explore Milan’s incomparable
architectural heritage as well as enjoy its
remarkable transportation infrastructure. This
includes gaily painted trams that look vaguely
familiar until you notice their similarity to
the trams of San Francisco. Indeed the trams
of Milan furnished the prototype for those
in San Francisco. Another engaging urban
feature of the city is the presence of hundreds
of motorcycles and bicycles parked at different
spots and available to residents for a nominal
fee.
The Afrofuture exposition convened
exports from the continent to consider the
impact on African cities of some of the key
questions from various disciplines including
architecture, politics and technology. Using
images from different cities we illustrated
how these questions and issues are shaped in
our discourse and the solutions that emerge.
Presentations were from Lagos, Accra,
Luanda, Nairobi and Dakar.
One topic that provoked animated discussion
was new designs coming from the continent.
This followed the presentation by Kunlé
Adeyemi, a young Nigerian architect
practicing in Amsterdam and Lagos. He
gave an illustrated talk on a school project
he created for an aquatic village called
Makoko in Lagos. Adeyemi belongs to a
new and stimulating generation of African
architects whose works are shaping the
unfolding narrative of contemporary African
architecture. Other practitioners are Joe Osae-
Addo of Ghana and Francis Kéré of Burkina
Faso. These artists, who have arrived at the
apex of their profession, come equipped with
profound understanding of post-modernist
design concepts. They were also educated
in an era when environmental sustainability
was a serious issue. The combination of these
factors and others such as unfair economic
arrangement of international trade has
given them the confidence to examine the
fundaments of design theories in our time. They
have drawn valuable lessons from traditional
African architecture including the social
organization of construction. The application
of these insights gives their projects a fresh
neo-Bantu stamp that is remarkably free of
atavistic posturing. Adeyemi’s presentation
was a welcome introduction of promising new
design from the continent.
Below: Platform prototype. Image Courtesy of NLÉ, Shaping the Architecture of Developing Cities
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