Tropical Modernism in Africa Today

# Tropical Modernism in Africa Today *By TropMod Editorial* --- The story of tropical Modernism in Africa is not, as the conventional narrative once suggested, a story about British architects building for grateful colonies. It is a far richer and more challenging account: one of appropriation, neglect, rediscovery, and a contemporary renaissance that is producing some of the most important architecture on the continent. ## The Post-Colonial Legacy When Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence in 1957, its built environment already contained significant modernist structures — the legacy of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew's work for the colonial administration, but also the work of Ghanaian architects like **John Owusu Addo**, who had trained at the AA and returned to contribute to the national project. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first prime minister, understood architecture as a tool of statecraft. The Black Star Square in Accra, with its Independence Arch, was conceived in modernist language as a deliberate repudiation of the colonial architectural vocabulary of pitched roofs and verandahs. Modernism announced arrival, capability, seriousness. But independence architecture in Africa has not had an easy decades since. The story of many of the best mid-century buildings is one of decline. In Accra, the concrete structures of the 1950s and 1960s — schools, ministries, the University of Ghana campus at Legon — have suffered from tropical weathering, inadequate maintenance budgets, and the overwhelming preference of subsequent governments for speculative glass towers over the stewardship of existing stock. The Kumasi College of Technology, a Fry and Drew campus once considered a model for tropical institutional architecture, has been partially obscured by unsympathetic additions. The brise-soleils that once shaded classrooms now shade empty shells, or have been removed altogether. Lagos tells a similar story with greater intensity. Nigeria's oil-fuelled building boom of the 1970s produced a wave of modernist architecture — the National Theatre (1976), the Western State Secretariat in Ibadan, the campus of the University of Ibadan — much of it designed by Nigerian architects who had studied abroad and returned. **Demas Nwoko**, trained in Zaria and Paris, produced a distinctively Nigerian modernism that drew on indigenous forms and craft techniques. His Dominican Chapel in Ibadan (1970) fuses the structural logic of reinforced concrete with the spatial sensibility of the Yoruba courtyard compound. Yet many of these buildings are now threatened. The National Theatre in Lagos sat derelict for years before a recent renovation; others have been lost entirely. Senegal tells a more hopeful story. Dakar's modernist heritage — the International Fair of Dakar (1975), the train station, the residential towers of the Medina — remains largely intact, and there is a nascent preservation movement. But the pattern across West Africa has been consistent: the post-independence generation built ambitiously, and the subsequent two generations were largely indifferent to that inheritance. ## The Museum Boom and the Adjaye Moment The past decade has seen a dramatic shift, driven in part by the global museum boom. **David Adjaye** — Ghanaian-British, knighted, a star architect by any measure — has become the most prominent figure. His Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) in Washington, D.C., while not in Africa, established him as the pre-eminent architect of the African diasporic experience. His subsequent African commissions have been closely watched: the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, a major new cultural institution that draws on the courtyard traditions of the Benin Kingdom even as it deploys the material palette and spatial ambition of contemporary architecture. Adjaye's other African projects include the mixed-use development at Mole House in Accra and the planned District Hospitals in Ghana. His aesthetic — a sculptural modernism rooted in materiality, pattern, and what he calls "the language of light" — has been enormously influential. Yet his practice also illustrates the structural challenges of architecture in contemporary Africa: projects stall, funding vanishes, political winds shift. MOWAA, designed and partially constructed, has faced delays and funding disputes that are depressingly familiar across the continent. ## The Kéré Revolution If Adjaye represents the globalised, starchitect model, **Diébédo Francis Kéré** represents something else entirely: a practice rooted in village-scale, community-engaged building that has progressively scaled up to international prominence. Kéré, born in Gando, Burkina Faso, in 1965, was the first child from his village to attend school. He later studied architecture in Berlin, and in 2001 completed his first building: the Gando Primary School, constructed by the village community using local earth bricks and a floating corrugated metal roof. The school is an object lesson in climate-responsive design. The brick walls, raised on a plinth, absorb heat during the day and release it at night. The metal roof hovers above the masonry volume, separated by a ventilated gap that draws hot air upward and outward. No air conditioning is required, despite temperatures that routinely exceed 40 degrees Celsius. The form is modernist in its clarity and vernacular in its materiality. It is, in effect, a tropical modernist building made by and for the people who use it. Kéré's subsequent projects — the Gando School Library (2016), the Léo Surgical Clinic (2014), the Lycée Schorge in Koudougou (2016) — have refined this language. His 2017 Serpentine Pavilion in London translated the principles of his Burkinabe practice into a temporary structure: a latticed timber canopy, open at the centre to collect rainwater, with walls that could pivot to adjust light and breeze. It was the first Serpentine Pavilion designed by an African architect. His 2022 Pritzker Prize — the first awarded to a Black architect and the first to an architect whose practice is centred in Africa — was a landmark moment for the profession and for the continent. ## The Niger Movement **Mariam Kamara**, a Nigerien architect who studied with Kéré before founding her practice Atelier Masomi in Niamey, has emerged as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. Her Niamey 2000 Housing project (2016) addressed a perennial problem of African urbanism — the developer apartment block that ignores climate — by rethinking the typology from first principles. Her proposed design uses cross-ventilation cores, shaded courtyards, and locally fabricated cement-mud hybrid bricks to produce dignified, comfortable housing at modest cost. Kamara's Cultural Centre in Dandaji (2018), a conversion of a derelict mosque into a library and community space, demonstrates an approach that is at once preservationist and progressive. Rather than demolish the old structure, she encased it within a new envelope that respects the original volumes while adding contemporary spatial arrangements and vastly improved environmental performance. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and she is increasingly seen as the intellectual successor to the Kéré approach — rigorous, social, grounded in material and community. ## The Swahili Coast and Mombasa School East Africa presents a different architectural tradition. **Urko Sánchez**, a Madrid-born architect based in Nairobi, has produced a remarkable body of work along the Kenyan coast, particularly on Lamu Island. His Red Pepper House (2009) and Swahili Dreams Apartments (2014) translate the principles of Swahili vernacular architecture — thick coral-stone walls, shaded courtyards, carved timber screens, flat roofs with parapets — into a contemporary idiom that is both luxurious and climatically intelligent. What distinguishes Sánchez's work from the hotel-oriented tropical modernism of Southeast Asia is its genuine dialogue with the building tradition of the Swahili coast, a tradition that itself represents centuries of cultural exchange between Africa, Arabia, and the Indian Ocean world. His buildings are not pastiche; they are a continuation, in modern materials, of a living building culture that happened to have solved the problems of tropical coastal living long before Fry and Drew published their manuals. ## MASS Design Group and the Ethics of Building The Boston-based but Africa-focused practice **MASS Design Group** has pioneered an approach that foregrounds the social and health impacts of buildings. Their work in Rwanda — the Butaro District Hospital (2011), the University of Global Health Equity campus (2019) — uses local materials (volcanic stone, bamboo, earth brick) and passive ventilation strategies to create health-care environments that are beautiful as well as functional. The Butaro Hospital, set on a hilltop with panoramic views, reorients patients' beds toward windows and landscape, rejecting the standardised, inward-facing hospital typology. MASS's work extends to Liberia, Sierra Leone, and beyond. Their design philosophy — "architecture that heals" — is both literal (their buildings are hospitals) and metaphorical (their construction processes aim to build local capacity and dignity). This represents a significant evolution of tropical Modernism's social promise: from architecture as symbol of national modernity to architecture as instrument of public health. ## Climate as Tradition What unites these contemporary practitioners — Kéré, Kamara, Sánchez, MASS — is a recognition that climate-responsive design is not a technical supplement to architecture but its foundation. And that foundation, in Africa, has always existed. The Dogon cliff dwellings of Mali, the Swahili courtyard houses of Lamu, the Yoruba compounds of Nigeria, the Ashanti courtyard palaces of Ghana: each represents a refined, centuries-old technology of thermal comfort that Modernism, at its best, rediscovered rather than invented. The most important African architects working today understand this. They are not importing a foreign style and adapting it to local conditions. They are extending indigenous building traditions into the present, using the tools of modern construction to continue a project that has been underway for centuries: how to live well in a hot place. The Ghanaian architect **Joe Osae-Addo**, whose Inno-native House in Accra (2005) uses raised volumes, louvred facades, and passive cross-ventilation to eliminate air conditioning in a humid climate, has articulated this position explicitly: "The idea," he has said, "is to build what belongs here." That, in the end, is the most concise definition of tropical Modernism in Africa today: not an imported style, not a colonial residue, but architecture that belongs here — dignified, comfortable, modern, and fully African. --- *This article will appear in TropMod Quarterly, Issue 01, Spring 2026.*