Introductory Essay


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 explored issues 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, 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,” Olympio explained, “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, and 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 that their dependency on imports in every way, I mean not just building materials… Every part of their life has a heavy import-dependency.”

 

Colonialism did not succeed in fully alienating people from their ways of life, as can be seen by the thriving continuity of many forms and institutions. It did however have an enormous negative impact. One of its manifestations, still operative today, was the formation of tastes for things Western, and a concomitant devaluation of local ways of doing. These processes were both ideologically and practically driven. They went hand in hand with the main goal of the colonial enterprise: economic expansion. Such expansion was achieved through the extraction of Africa’s rich natural resources in raw form on the one hand, and the flooding of African markets with European finished goods on the other. Despite colonialism’s official demise (in Ghana, the first African country to achieve independence, this took place in 1957), the well-known economic elements of the neocolonial project were already in place. Africa would continue to have underdeveloped industries, to provide raw materials to the Western world, and to consume Western (and increasingly Eastern) goods and commodities.

 

Regardless of these erasures, environmental and cultural forces continued to impose specifically Ghanaian social and environmental demands upon the built environment. Colonialism did not change the weather; moreover, the way Ghanaians use space to cook, sleep, and spend time in, and to share with other people remained culturally and historically specific.


Most contemporary Ghanaian architecture is not ideal for Ghana: it manifests the problems of the colonial legacy and current economic conditions; indeed, its styles, designs, materials, and building techniques are imported. It depends on expensive imported materials rather than utilizing locally available ones and thus developing local industry. It is rather conservative: it does not take advantage of the many energy alternatives contemporary sustainable architecture offers. It emulates styles developed for a very different climatic and cultural setting, which also materialize someone else’s history. Emerging from another history, it does not build on Ghana’s strengths—its rich natural materials, so valued in the West; the local knowledge of design and building that have developed over time (cultural heritage). These are not utilized, taken advantage of, or transformed for contemporary use.

 

The idea that cultural heritage should be celebrated may seem very abstract, idealistic, and rather irrelevant to contemporary economic survival. But Alero Olympio was a very practical architect—architecture appealed to her in part because it is an art of problem-solving, an art of how things work, or how to make them work. She believed that building things in the world could change the world in material ways.

Double-vision

Olympio is part of a larger moment in Ghanaian, and African history. Due to combination of political and economic factors too complex to go into here, in the mid-1990s many Ghanaian professionals and intellectuals who had studied and lived in Europe began to return to Ghana, bringing new skills and perspectives on the local scene from their sojourns abroad. Olympio, who went to Scotland to attend university and then remained there, returned to Ghana in the late 1980s wanting to change things.

 

She had the double-vision that her contemporary returnees shared, combined with the ideological and political elements of her personal trajectory. Together these created a view of the relation between architecture and larger socio-politico-economic change unique to her. When Olympio looked at Ghana with eyes trained in the West, she saw unused, unappreciated elements of which she now knew the value. When she looked at Ghana through Ghanaian eyes, she understood the specific needs and limitations to which architecture must respond.

 

Olympio was born in Ghana in the hopeful, promising era of independence. From her father’s family, she inherited a strong entrepreneurial skill and orientation, and a deep political commitment to Africa (her grandfather, Silvanus Olympio, was the first president of neighboring Togo, and her uncle, Gilchrist Olympio, is an active, central actor in Togo’s contemporary political scene). Her mother, Cecile McHardy, came to Ghana from Jamaica via Nigeria to join Kwame Nkrumah’s government as it led the country in its early Independence. McHardy’s socialist, Pan-Africanist orientation also politicized Olympio at a very young age: throughout her life, Olympio had a profoundly globalist orientation, a sense of membership in the developing world and its project of development. Olympio’s schooling at Achimota Secondary School in Accra was meaningful as well—arguably Ghana’s most prestigious school, it boasts various presidents among its graduates, who excel in all of Ghana’s fields of production, from politics to business to the arts. Achimota thus placed Olympio within a crucial network of power in Ghana, but also, its pedagogic orientation shaped her belief that she was capable of creating change, and responsible for doing so.

 

Like many members of Ghana’s elite, Olympio received her higher education in the West. Her B.Sc. and postgraduate degrees in architecture were done in Scotland, and she worked as an architect there and in France. But like many African intellectuals, training in the West only strengthened her orientation towards home. Europe, she said, had had centuries to work things out. There wasn’t much she could contribute. But Africa—how to take the past into the future? And not the existing future, but an alternate one, in which Africa found and celebrated itself?

 

“I think the West was actually responsible for making me look elsewhere, because I realized that in the Western world everything had already been done. And I realized that they had a whole history of developing their art and architecture that has resulted in quite a variety of really extraordinary technologies and forms and spaces and light, and I thought that it would be a great challenge to try and pursue that in Africa and try and also develop an architecture, and create a studio—a Bauhaus equivalent—where you explore developing a vernacular for Africa.

 

“But then I also, since I've been here [in Europe], realized there are issues with resources, conservation which is big here, you know. Conserving heat, keeping a building cool, and these were aspects that are not incorporated into any architecture in Ghana, and I realized how important that was – some kind of sustainable, environmental aspect that could be incorporated into building.

 

“Also I realized here that architects were remote from the actual building process, that they just produced drawings, and then these drawings were passed on to another skilled area, and then you were removed from it. So the construction process really didn't inform your design. …And I didn't feel satisfied that I was so removed from the actual construction, I thought that would be a very such an important part. You need to be informed about that before you can design properly. And I liked the idea of building, I wanted to become a builder. And I couldn't do that here, easily. So I decided to go back to Ghana to do it.

 

“[In Britain] there was no need to build with natural materials. They're not import-dependent; they produce all their building materials. Anyway, there's not a lot of building going on here, all the buildings have been built. I was only doing conservation work here. You know, I was not going to be offering them any new ideas; everything's already been done. This is the Western world, they've had, you know, eight hundred years of developing their own building techniques, without an African woman from Ghana teach them how to do something else. So, no, I had never had any inclination to work permanently in Britain. I wanted to be able to do experiments and try things that people hadn't done before in Ghana, and I think I wanted to devise a form of construction that would be labor-intensive, and that would develop handcrafting skills and use natural materials and produce a real contemporary African style of architecture.”

 

When Olympio looked at the built world that was Ghana, she saw dependency and unsustainability materialized in its built environment. She saw an architecture which worsened existing problems: the scarcity and expense of urban space, energy, and imported materials, the underdevelopment of local industry, the celebration of foreign skills and styles and the denigration of local ones. Olympio’s goal was to create a sustainable architecture for contemporary Africa, in her words, “to find an ‘African’ architectural vocabulary.” But this version of sustainability was broad, and viewed ideology, economy, aesthetics, lifestyle, ecology, climate, and the feeling of being-in-space as indivisible. Olympio wanted Ghanaians to live in buildings made specifically for them. For their lifestyle, the way they inhabited space, their weather, the availability and efficiency of energy sources their locally available, accessible materials and skills.

 

But Olympio’s world was large. After her training in Europe, she traveled extensively throughout Asia, learning from other tropical countries where locally pertinent architecture had developed. Standing on one of her sites often produced a bizarre cascade of architectural-historical references. It was like a journey through world architecture, and at the same time, the building made sense in a way that few Ghanaian buildings did. It grew organically from the land, and divided space in an inexplicably local way.

An African architecture for development

“I went to India and I went to see earth being used in a very contemporary way for large-budget building programs, and I was very, very impressed. India was a huge inspiration for me, because it's also a developing country which I think was very appropriate for me to investigate. They have cheap labor, like Ghana. So I discovered this Center for Scientific Research in Tamil Nadu, and they develop all kinds of technology: solar, water-mills, conservation technologies for forests, energy, alternative energies. They have small production of all kinds of things, they make soap, they make candles, they make machines, they have a building research, and they produce machines that compressed earth…. Tamil Nadu has a tropical climate, and the same kind of humidity levels. They have the same kind of laterite earth, red earth, everywhere… And what impressed me most in India is that they're the opposite of Ghana. They import nothing. They make everything themselves.”

 

For Olympio, India provided a model for development, and a role for architecture. She returned to Ghana with tools, knowledge, and as vision of how to transplant the Indian model to the Ghanaian setting. So what was the nature of this project? Below, I briefly outline the different aspects of Olympio’s architecture, describing them, when possible, in her own words. It involved the creation of a local-while-global architecture, citing multiple styles across space and time, benefiting from the knowledge production of the developed and the developing world, but was simultaneously completely local. Its goal was a reorientation of Ghanaian tastes (across class lines) away from a stylistic celebration of the West toward a celebration of African past and future. Olympio wanted to educate Africans to appreciate what they have, and think little of: natural outside space versus large, air-conditioned interiors and concrete-covered exteriors, natural, local materials versus imported, synthetic products.

 

“Africans have to learn to see prestige in what they already have, see it as a sign of prosperity. One of the things that I have always told my masons when we're building with stone is that really rich people in Britain can build with stone. In the western world stone is a very prestigious material. Banks are built with stone. Only the very wealthy can actually afford stone. They found that absolutely astounding. I told them that the general variety of materials that they're importing from the western world were actually very cheap and were considered to be low grade, low status materials. So I tried to instill some kind of real pride in them, about the materials that were local.”

Materials: earth, stone, and wood

“I had an interest in natural materials, so even in Scotland, where stone and quarries are prevalent. I had already had an interest in stone work and I had always been interested in adobe. I had a fascination for Santa Fe and adobe buildings in Arizona, and I was aware of the fact that adobe has reached quite a sophisticated stage. …So I started in that vein, exploring African materials. And earth was the biggest one. That was in abundance and nobody was using it and I had not met anybody in Ghana who was doing earth-building.”

 

Olympio became an expert in earth construction. She studied earthbuilding in India, and worked closely with the Building Research Establishment in Britain, testing the qualities and potentials of Ghanaian laterite. Prior to her interest in laterite, Olympio had already worked intensively with stone.

 

“[In Ghana], stone is used mainly as an aggregate for mixing into concrete—it’s crushed into little chips and then it's also used mainly for road building. Nobody really uses the stone for building. It's really just for what they call civil engineering work. But the stones are obviously different shapes, and I wasn’t machining the stones so they're all the same shape as is done here in Scotland. And so the technique of building is actually quite different. You can't just use an ordinary mason. You have to train them to select stones into specific shapes and that was quite a learning curve, took them quite a long time to master it. We broke quite a few walls so that we could get the look and the finish that we wanted.”

 

Olympio was also highly educated in timber. Prior to setting up her construction company in Ghana, she had worked in the timber industry. Working solely with “secondary hardwoods”, she set out to create high-, added-value items for export to develop the local industry. Ghana has the largest variety of hardwoods in the world, many undocumented, their properties unknown, and thus not exported, underused, and very inexpensive. Therefore, when she focused her attention on building with local materials, wood, so highly valued in many parts of the world and so underutilized in Ghana, became a central part of her project.

Skills and techniques

“I wanted to be able to do experiments and try things that people hadn't done before in Ghana, and I think I wanted to devise a form of construction that would be labor-intensive and that would develop handcrafting skills and produce a real contemporary African style of architecture.”

 

In a country where material always costs a great deal more than labor, you could use local craft and skill to create a look that in the west was highly desirable—the rustic. Moreover, Olympio set out to design specifically for local skills.

 

“I also realized that the skills they had were what we call here 'wet trades' – casting, plaster. These are all wet items. And I think that that comes from the mud tradition.… The thing about wet trade is it's dirty and it's very labor-intensive, but because it's wet it allows to adjust it while you're doing it, because it takes some time to set so you can always adjust it. They're much better at achieving a good rustic look. They're not good at rectilinear forms. I think you can actually get a better building if you can bear that in mind, if you can just look at the skills that are there and then design for those skills, rather than do what I did originally, which was to design a building and just hope that I could find the skills to execute it. Now, I certainly design for the skills that are available. And the other thing is that there is a lot of art in the ordinary person, a lot of creativity and I thought it was essential to try and incorporate that.”

 

One of Olympio’s goals was to empower Ghanaians by finding uses for the skills they had, and by reorienting their attitudes toward those skills. She used local fishermen and women as builders, developed production of earth bricks, showed village masons how the stone they were accustomed to setting in village architecture could be appropriated, transformed, for high status construction.

Style, taste, and social space

Olympio didn’t have a romantic engagement with the African past. A pragmatist, and an African, her vision was of the continent’s future. “Developing an architectural vernacular that is African is another aspect and that is a difficult one: what is African architecture?” Olympio asked me. Answering her own question, she said, “I would look for incorporating aspects of our culture into it, the way we live. We live differently from Europeans. We spend most of our time outside, for instance. So there would be more outside cupboard spaces than a regular building, and there are other aspects—cooking is also different in an African household. And also, I mean, developing an African architecture isn't easy, I mean you have to look at the traditional forms to work out how people live, but people are living differently now, because they have televisions, and telephones, and satellite dishes, you know. They're bringing more and more indoor living into their culture, and so you have to kind of bear that in mind.”

Climate, ecology, and sustainability

A sustainable African future had to be ecologically sound and economically affordable. Olympio’s architecture responds to the tropical climate (heat and rain), to the increasing lack of land in Ghana’s capital, and to the difficulty infrastructure has in catching up to Accra’s incredible urban growth. It was an easy formula, she said.

 

“If you go anywhere in the world, you will find that most tropical buildings actually look the same. And there’s a good, good reason for it. The depth of the building ensures cross-ventilation. A steep roof, a big overhang, the pavilion 'Louisiana plantation house' type of architecture. There are no myths as to why those work better. The old Ridge buildings that were built in the colonial days are invariably cooler buildings…That is the type of architecture I like to emulate and most of my buildings have that kind of imagery.”

 

So her buildings always had high ceilings to cool the air; roofs with big overhangs to keep both sun and rain off the walls; many intermediate spaces that benefited from both shade and breeze, and kept the walls of the house cool; vegetation to keep the sun off the ground, to create a microclimate. They used solar energy, well- and rain-water, and biogas tanks to alleviate the strain on public services, resolve their lack in certain areas, and lower cost of energy consumption. These approaches counteracted Ghanaian scarcities and took advantage of under-utilized surpluses: a constant shortage of water and so much rain, blackouts, and so much sun, a sewage system that does not cover the city, and the high cost of gas.

Conclusion

Alero Olympio always saw architecture as a material process, and above all as a problem-solving one. It was her nature—a highly positive, pragmatic one—to look at the situation of her much beloved country and to focus on what she could do to change it. She had the ability to turn problems into their own solutions.

 

I asked her once why she became an architect. She said carpentry was not an option (due to her gender and class), and anyway, “I could draw.” Of interest is the way Alero’s work sits at the intersection between design and development in terms of its conceptualization, to speak of it as sustainable architecture covers one crucial aspect but negates another, which is that aesthetics were key, the element of architecture which is about beauty, about response to client needs, was central. Alero’s architecture was what architecture is supposed to be: a functional art. Beauty, with a specific context for its creation.