On Thursday 27th November I was invited by Professor of Appiah to give a lecture to the second year Architecture students at KNUST, which was an indelible experience especially because both the students and the Professor showed interest in the issues I raised. One of the most important issues addressed during the lecture in relation to the community-driven project in Abetenim was the need to understand the local context in order to come up with solutions which could contribute to longer-term sustainable adaptation.
Moreover, other themes discussed entailed: the significance of collaborations and institutional support in the implementation of the project; architecture as a process of unlearning and listening (with reference to Boano’s paper at the Development Planning Unit, UCL conference in July 2014); the implications of the choice of building materials; the notion of materials as fundamental element in architecture; the duty of architectural education and its relation to practising architecture in that context; the role of the architect/designer and participatory design methods in this context; the meanings of sustainability and participation in architecture, both now necessary parts of most public planning processes; the role of training masons and artisans and working with their existing skills; the role of training in relation to enhancing the existing local building skills; the review of existing indigenous knowledge/building skills in coping with adverse climatic conditions and poverty, as well as reflection on the possibilities of enhancement of existing building skills; the relationship between masons and architects/designers; the physical and cultural forces as determinants of form, materials, and building methods; the gap between the larger narrative and the ‘on the ground’ experience through direct involvement in community architecture and building; how the NGO’s prescriptive narrative of using local materials like earth, in the construction of new projects can be adapted and translated into the local reality; the need to integrate social, physical and cultural change in order to effect broader changes in the community. I also touched upon the need to embody informality in designing and practising.
Additionally, I introduced the students to the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale titled, ‘Fundamentals’ curated by Rem Koolhaas, which I had visited just before travelling to Ghana. I specifically referred to two of its exhibitions, namely the ‘Elements of
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Architecture’ and ‘Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014’. The former explored the universally familiar components of architecture used by any architect in order to unravel their histories, whereas the latter considered the history of the modernisation of the sixty six participant countries with a view to unveiling the role of architecture within different narratives. A similar event to the Venice Biennale but in the African continent is Senegal’s major biennale of contemporary art, namely the Dak’Art31 to which Professor Appiah had taken his students the year before.
What’s more, there was an interesting conversation about alternative roofing materials to corrugated tin during the ‘questions and answers’ session after the lecture, as some of the students had proposed a traditional thatched roof for their projects. Professor Appiah prompted them to reconsider the materiality of the roof according to the context they were designing for and generally to be more perceptive to environmental issues. In ‘Sustainable Design in Ghana: An Ethical Reflection’ Rogers and Jensen (2012) describe a design project which focused on the construction of a house in a small village in the Upper East region of Ghana, undertaken by engineering students at Santa Clara University. The paper draws on the fact that ‘rural Ghanaians no longer have access to the timber needed for their traditional thatched roofs’ because of deforestation. As a result a ‘Western’ design had been implemented using zinc roofing sheets whose framing and installation required skilled and costly carpentry, and the ‘roofs were prone to blowing off in high winds.' The materials and design for roofing, as suggested in the Nka Foundation narrative, ‘could be of vault, fired mud roof, or corrugated zinc sheets, which is the conventional roofing materials because zinc roofing stands the heavy rainfall better.’ It also affirms that ‘modern materials that are not simply expensive but thermally and acoustically problematic.’ Corrugated tin roofs, which would often be considered to be a ‘traditional’ roofing material nowadays, were ubiquitous not only in Abetenim but in most villages and towns around Kumasi despite the fact that tin is both thermally and acoustically problematic. Metal roofing sheets are also prone to corrosion32 as most people, especially in rural areas where there is more poverty, try to cut them themselves in order to save money.
In addition, we spoke about John Turner’s ‘Housing is a Verb’ and his research on informal settlements in Peru, as that to engage with and include informality as part of
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Dak’Art transformed into a pan-African biennale in 1996.
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the design and build process in that context would be unavoidable. We agreed that much of the developed world struggle to allow space for informality. As Ortiz Flores stated at the DPU conference held at UCL in July 2014, ‘there is too much regulation, the new regulation should be less regulation.’
As soon as the lecture was over Professor Appiah and I had a conversation about possibilities of future collaboration which could take the shape of co-authoring a paper, and he also suggested that it would have been beneficial if I could have stayed longer so I could give a lecture to the rest of the architecture students. He explained that most architecture students had probably never been to a village like Abetenim and that ‘they are a particular crowd and it would be very useful to sensitise them to these issues.’ Professor Appiah was disconcerted to hear that initially we had been asked by the Nka Foundation to design a traditional compound house. Inasmuch as compound houses are unique incremental creations involving many centuries’ traditions and other dynamic and ever-changing processes, Professor Appiah considered it almost insulting that a group of foreign designers had presumed that the ‘replication’ of one of these structures would be possible in this context. We would be unaware of the real complexity inherent in the development of a compound house. Here, it is worth mentioning that compound houses, both the single-storey traditional compound house and the multi-storey compound house, constitute the traditional house type in Ghana and are usually built by accretion according to Afram (2009: 77). Single-storey traditional compound houses are ‘made up of an unroofed courtyard surrounded by a series of rooms with a simple
pitched roof’ (Afram, 2009: 75). Each of these rooms are occupied by either different
individuals or households (see Figures 4.55 & 4.56). Both Afram (2009) and the research architect at the BRRI argue that the compound house typology can be a solution to the housing needs of the urban poor in Ghana. In his paper titled, ‘The traditional Ashanti compound house: A forgotten resource for home ownership of the urban poor’ (2009: 77), Afram writes that:
“The sharing of services and utility spaces by occupant households,
although may have its problems, creates a condition which invariably lowers the cost of construction per unit of accommodation. This is in turn experienced in the low rent charges, which makes this house type so popular with the low income class.”
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Sketch of a typical medium-sized compound house showing the room arrangement around the internal courtyard.
Diagram of a typical town composed of compound houses in the Ashanti region. Figure 4.55
Figure 4.56 Diagram of
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Although the compound house typology presents an indigenous and viable solution to the precarious housing circumstances of the urban poor, there are significant challenges in aspiring to build a compound house in an urban setting like Accra, where it is
actually discouraged. This is an issue broached by the research architect at the BRRI, as he argues:
“Nowadays people can’t even build compound houses in urban settings.
They don’t necessarily tell you that you can’t build a compound house but they have imposed such restrictions that they have made it impossible for anyone to build one. Unless you employ a rather expensive architect who goes and talks to the people at the city board then you can do it. There’s always a way, isn’t there?”
All the above information regarding the compound house typology would not be able to form part of this debate if I had not been in Ghana. Neither Professor Appiah, the research architect at the BRRI nor Afram’s paper (2009) would be part of this thesis if I had not been there. With reference to Afram’s paper (ibid.), among other papers, it is worth noting that it is published by the BRRI and is available only at the BRRI onsite library as a hard copy. Thus access to information becomes fundamentally important in determining where one is looking from and at.