"Building Africa"

From the XV Quito Architectural Bienniale, an exhibit on the work of Alero Olympio. Ruti Talmor writes:

If Latin American cities are underrepresented in the global domain of architecture and design, African cities are even further off the map, further out on the margins of the world’s periphery. African cities are invisible outside of Africa, except as settings for civil war, corruption and violence, poverty and disease. Yet African cities are ever-growing, bustling places, and architects on the continent are merging local aesthetic traditions with global styles—transforming these into relevant built forms for contemporary life.

This exhibition is about the work of Alero Olympio. Olympio worked primarily in Accra (Ghana’s capital) and its environs. As an architect, she exploredissues of urban life in the setting of a particular city she knew well in a country in which she was deeply invested. Despite this “locality,” (unpack this term) the ideology underlying Olympio’s work seeks solutions relevant to the rest of Africa and to many other parts of the developing world. Olympio viewed architecture as a profoundly functional art. Through the concrete transformations of an environmentally, culturally, and economically friendly architecture, she addressed some of Africa’s largest problems, its postcolonial legacy and its contemporary underdevelopment.

“My main concern about Ghana is that it is an economy coming out of poverty, a recession, so it has all the characteristics of a nouveau-riche, petit bourgeois notions of how they see themselves living in Ghana. Also, they want icons of prosperity around them to distinguish them from poor people. And I don't think there is really anything wrong with that, but what I'm concerned about is their dependency on imports in every way. I mean not just building materials… Every part of their life has a heavy import-dependency.” Thus Olympio frames her architectural project within the larger context of contemporary Ghana.

More here

image courtesy of Alero Olympio