Research

History of The Architecture Profession in Ghana

Research Project toward a book on the the development of the building design and architecture professions in Ghana from before the 14th Century to the 21st Century.

This project charts the histories of the architecture profession in Ghana from before it was the Gold Coast to the present-day. It is based on archival research (with sources that include a collection of endangered archives that I digitised with a grant from the British Library), and field research.

Building Nations, Building Classes

The Architecture of Education in Ghana

Book in progress

This book is an account of the making of, and being and belonging in modern Ghana through the lens of secondary school architecture.

It is based on my PhD study which explores nation-building, social class, and modernity in Ghana through a study of the sociopolitical and physical architectures of secondary schools. Drawing on extensive archival and field research, and utilising theoretical and analytical frameworks that encompass school buildings (the products), the building of schools (the processes), and schooling (the experiences), I make two connected arguments.

The first argument is that nation-building through the building of secondary schools in Ghana was not a unidirectional, top-down process but also occurred through the activities of various excluded peoples in what I term nation-building from the ground up. I have found that secondary schools, as sites of nation-building and the making of modern Ghanaians, were and still are imbued with social status, hierarchies, civilisation, discipline, and perceptions of modernness, among others. Thus secondly, I argue that people in Ghana use the sociopolitical and physical architectures of secondary schools to find and place themselves and others in sociopolitical hierarchies and sociocultural attitudes within and beyond the nation. These two dynamics – nation-building from the ground up and finding and placing through secondary schools – play an important role in defining the sociopolitical identities of Ghanaians.

Together, these arguments and insights advance knowledge about the linkages between schools, nation-building, modernity, modernness, and social class; and reframe (hi)stories of formal Western-style education in Africa. In so doing, my dissertation makes empirical, theoretical, epistemological and methodological contributions to the study of politics, architecture, and the politics of architecture.

School Building(s) in West Africa

Constructions of Nation, Citizenship and Modernity

Research towards a PhD in Political Science and International Studies at SOAS, University of London

Completed

KEYWORDS: Politics of Architecture, West African History, Education, Nation-Building + Citizenship, Modernity, Architectural Modernism, African State Architecture, African Architecture

This study analyses citizenship and modernity in light of nation-building though a study of the architecture of state schools in West Africa.

States often use physical structures to signal ideals, to project power and to communicate messages - some of them subliminal or unintended - and where these structures manifest in the form of functional architecture, an additional element comes into play. Buildings no longer function mainly as symbols, but also as sites for control, behavioural modification, regulation, ceremony and more. Educational institutions in particular present unique opportunities as sites of control, for the projection of state power and for the transmission of national norms and values. This is why colonial and post-colonial state authorities in Africa alike used state schools for the making and unmaking of citizens according to the aspirations of the ruling classes and their visions of society.

Empirically, I examine selected schools as sites of nation-building, and for the making of citizens through architectural analysis, archival research and ethnographic studies towards make empirical and conceptual contributions to the study of nation-building, citizenship and modernity in Africa.

Ghana Studies Conference Presentation, 2019

Kuukuwa Manful talks about the African State Architecture Project

The (Un)formalisation of Architectural Design in Ghana

Ongoing Research based on my Accra Architectural Archive Digitisation Project

KEYWORDS: Politics of Architecture, Ghanaian Architecture, Ghanaian Architectural History, Formality, Informality, Formalisation, African Architecture, Colonisation, Decoloniality

This is ongoing research around the formalisation, formality, and informality of architecture and the people who build, through a concept that I term unformalisation.

I have begun exploring this concept by way of an article commissioned by the Hamburg Triennale of Photography titled “On the (Un)formalisation of Architectural Design in Ghana” and in a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume Architecture and Politics in Africa. I put forward the idea that just as the formalisation and regulation of the built environment – a process initiated by colonial authorities and continued by post-independence governments – is a process of state and institutional power, so is unformalisation. By unformalisation, I refer to the diminishing and othering of knowledge, activities, and objects by states and other organisations of authority. It differs from informality and the informal, which are generally conceptualised as residual categories of formalisation and formality, in that unformalisation is a deliberate technology of state, elite, and institutional exclusion.

Most of the actual architectural production in Africa is unformalised – that is, it is excluded by formal institutions and the state and not considered “real” architecture. Yet, research disproportionately focuses on the small section of the built environment in Africa that is formalised. Scholarship needs to reflect what architecture on the continent is now, rather than solely what it ought to be or used to be, and this is precisely what my work on unformalisation seeks to address.

Building Identity

Ghanaian Architects and Tropical Modernism

Dissertation for an MSc in African Studies

at University of Oxford

KEYWORDS: Politics of Architecture, Ghanaian History, Tropical Modernism, Professionalisation, Architectural Modernism, Modernity, Architectural Identity

Tropical Modernist buildings are a vital part of what is thought of as modern West African architectural identity. And yet the story of the style has been told solely through the lens of the European architects involved in designing those buildings, though during this period there was an increasing number of African architects beginning to practice in West Africa.

Very little is known about these African architects and their relationship to Tropical Modernism.

This dissertation addresses this gap by examining where, why and how indigenous Ghanaian building design professionals placed themselves in the context of the Tropical Modernism movement between 1962, when the first Tropical Modernist building was designed by a Ghanaian, and 1972, the year of Ghana’s second coup d’état which marked the beginning of economic decline and a corresponding halt in construction activity.

An African Renaissance

Towards the Design of an Urban Arena in Bantama, Kumasi

Thesis for a Master of Architecture

at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

KEYWORDS: Architectural Identity, Asante History, Tropical Modernism, Professionalisation, Architectural Modernism, Modernity, Architectural Identity

This thesis explored the concept of a regional architectural identity towards the design of an Urban Arena in Bantama, Kumasi.

Examples of indigenous Asante Architecture were studied and analysed with the aim of extracting characteristics that form the essence of Asante Architecture. These characteristics were used as points of departure in the design of an Urban Arena in Bantama, Kumasi.

I developed a style of architecture for this design based on Critical Regionalist philosophy, which is not an attempt to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular but rather a “dialectical expression” (Frampton, 1983) attempting to combine the principles of modernism with a respect for zeitgeist (spirit of the time) and genius loci (spirit of the place).

Cultural references for the zeitgeist and genius loci were drawn from the results of the observation studies of the instances of traditional and contemporary Asante architecture.