Regional Modernisms; Tropical Skins
Lagos’s Independence House (1961), designed by Augustine Egbor (all images by Ọlájídé Ayni).
From Islamic influences to Portuguese-cum-Afro-Brazilian imports and the arrival of modernism, Nigeria has seen more than its fair share of architectural styles. Each of these additions to the nation’s built environment has been laden with its own nuances and forerunners, but perhaps the most-discussed has been the tropical style – an offshoot of the international style propagated by European figures such as Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.
Modernism came to African shores following the founding in 1954 of the Department for Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association in London, motivated in part by discussions between Otto Koenigsberger, a leading European figure in the development of tropical architecture, and Adedokun Adeyemi, a Nigerian student at the Manchester School of Architecture. The continent came to be seen as an experimental lab for early pioneers of the international style, as evidenced in the discussions around the CIAM’s (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) 1933 Athens Charter, which labelled buildings from this period as “laboratories for living”. The international style was promoted through CIAM and its growing international reach, while British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew (of Fry, Drew and Partners) led its institutionalisation in Africa, having worked in west Africa under its colonial governments just prior to independence, where they attempted to adapt European tenets of the style for export to the colonies.
Jimoh Buraimoh’s mosaic mural atop Itiku House.
Within Africa, modernism arrived on the back of colonial politics, before developing along a geographic trajectory. In global architectural history, its political origins have been explored and its responses to the climatic conditions in the then-British colonies extensively analysed. The style’s colonial origins and links were critically examined by architect and educator Hannah le Roux in a 2003 paper titled ‘The Networks of Tropical Architecture’, while Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa, an exhibition at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, has investigated the transitional nature of modernism in Africa as nations shifted from colonial rule to independence, with a view to centring African voices in the development of the style. Yet the primary analysis of the tropical style has remained chiefly interested in its geographic adaptations.
In Nigeria, tropical modernism’s formal introduction came in the early 1950s, shortly before the country’s full independence in 1960. As a country coming out of its colonial era, and having discovered oil in the late 1950s, Nigeria had both the will and economics to support efforts to reframe its society, architecture and culture away from colonialism, and towards new meanings as a sovereign nation building its image afresh. The newly independent government’s commitment to building megastructures for both educational institutions and governmental secretariats, such as the University of Lagos and the Nigerian External Telecommunications (NET) building, signalled a turn toward progressive ideals and, in turn, accelerated the development of the style. Wealthy private clients engaged the services of architects for office developments, and a good number of these buildings were also commissioned by British companies who were continuing operations in Nigeria, post-colonisation.
The base of Independence House, covered in grafitti.
This derivative of international architecture continued well into the 1980s, before most of its early practitioners – who were mainly European, bar a few indigenous architects – either returned to their home countries or became inactive in the profession. After about 30 years heralding the post-colonial drive of African nations, the style’s demise was caused by “its ballooning costs, an investment the continent could never really afford,” as architect Ola Uduku writes in her paper ‘Modernist Architecture and “the Tropical” in West Africa’. The style had, however, enjoyed socioeconomic success, inasmuch as it was instrumental to developmental infrastructure in the region, as well as having evinced a form of environmentally responsive design through its use of strategic orientation, double-skin facades, breeze blocks, fair-faced concrete finishes, and brise soleil, among other architectural features. In addition, these material experiments and the successes of the style have hitherto eclipsed modernism’s integration with art in the literature, despite art having been an important anchor of cross-cultural collaboration while attempting to ground modernism within its context.
My first encounter with tropical modernism came in 2015, beyond the walls of the university classroom. As a third-year architecture student, I had been taught Gropius but not Oluwole Olumuyiwa, a central figure in Lagos’s 20th-century architecture. Wandering through the city’s marina, I encountered a series of concrete buildings with distinctive shading features – the interesting mix of planes elicited by the screening elements drew me in, and I was particularly fascinated by the double-skin facade. Perhaps my internship at James Cubitt and Partners’ Lagos office heightened my interest, especially after I discovered the practice’s Elder Dempster building (1964), which has now been remodelled and looks nothing like its old self. Since then, I have spent years researching the style more formally, trying to understand it and its proponents as part of an attempt to re-centre the lost voices of Nigerian architects. Through research and constant engagement with the buildings, the involvement of architecture with art in the tropical modernist period has started to become clear to me – particularly after I encountered a mosaic mural on the top of Itiku House, a 1960s tropical modern building. The mural – framed in between the structural bays formed by the beams that support the cantilevered structure – consists of figurative humans, a mask and an embryo of sorts, all executed in glazed mosaic tiles and set against the muted colours of the building. Featuring a vibrant shade of indigo – an important colour in west Africa –[1] it convinced me of the importance of art’s connection with architecture. Although obscured from the primary views of the building, the mosaic felt like an integral part of the composition, having been created by the artist Jimoh Buraimoh, a member of the Mbari Mbayo group, who worked in collaboration with John Godwin and his partner and fellow architect Gillian Hopwood. Almost lost to the vestiges of the past, the mural – like many other murals and the buildings they adorn – is sadly ill-maintained, either due to ownership tussles or negligence by managing authorities.
Felix Idubor’s 1965 bas-relief sculpture on Independence House.
Art and architecture have an inseparable history, developing along the same trajectory and continually cross-pollinating. In modernist Europe, for instance, art and architecture took on a new meaning and social purpose, reframing a world devastated by war. Modernist architecture developed as a response to postwar reconstruction and followed a clear moral imperative – its goal was to strengthen a collective identity for the inhabitants of cities. This, its early proponents believed, could be successfully achieved by incorporating architecture with art, with the social nature of art capable of creating a sense of community and place. It was an ethos that informed professional development at the Bauhaus, where the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art), led the school’s founder Gropius to call on practitioners to “create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity”. Outside Europe, modernism had to adapt to climatic conditions, leading to regional modernisms, while the cultural limitations of the style also began to be addressed through integrating local art with architectural responses. In Latin America, for example, this idea of cannibalising ideas from colonising countries and asserting local culture against postcolonial cultural domination was termed “anthropophagy” by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 Manifesto Antropófago. Similarly, in Africa, the social and economic ideals of modernism appealed to newly formed governments, suggesting ways to build a new image for cities after the devaluation of our culture due to colonisation. This meant that the newly adapted style, although responding remarkably well to climate, had to further adapt to fit the cultural and emotional life of the people. Art could help with this adaptation.
A major aspect of postcolonisation in Nigeria was adapting European tenets and decolonising leftover systems. In art, this was evident in the pushback against the country’s dated academic curriculum, which still focused on European ideologies of art and neglected local ideals. This led to the 1958 formation of the Zaria Arts Society (popularly known as the Zaria Rebels) at the Technical College in Zaria, a group of artists who sought to localise art to respond contextually to its place and people. Within this framework, art was given a huge role in connecting the newly sovereign nation to its culture, spurred by the deplorable looting and bastardisation of art from the continent by European governments and institutions during colonisation. The nexus between art and architecture in this period was crucial, and simultaneously social, cultural and economic. Together with art, architecture began to transcend functionality and technique, and instead attempt to shape the emotional life of society by rendering the tropical style sensitively within its cultural context to offer a sense of community.
“The art played a bigger role than [just] embellishment, as it was important to translate concepts of decolonisation.”
“Art was a critical aspect of Nigeria’s development post-colonisation,” says Oliver Enwonwu, an artist and gallerist, and the son of Ben Enwonwu, a pioneering African modernist artist whose murals and sculpture adorned significant buildings of the period. Enwonwu describes the social role that art played at the time of independence as being to “direct people in light of postcolonialism through peaceful existence. Following this need, art was explored across different media, currency, music and eventually architecture.” Enwonwu believes that this integration happened seamlessly, with art and architecture having developed along the same social, economic and political lines, and uses the term “independence artists” to describe the social and political characteristics of his father’s work as well as the work of his contemporaries. He includes Sam Ntiro of Tanzania and Kofi Antubam, a Ghanaian artist whose mosaic mural adorns the Fry, Drew and Partners Community Centre in Accra, within this category. Expanding on the idea, he recalls Mbari Mbayo, an art collective in Osogbo, Nigeria, which was active between 1962 and 1966, and which “imbibed art into architecture to give aspiration to the people”. The importance for the artists, it would seem, was to use the buildings which they adorned with murals and sculptures as a canvas for showcasing their work and speaking to society.
Nike Davies-Okundaye is a textile designer who was active within this initial postcolonial period. “The commissions helped artists to get new work,” she explains. “At the time, expertise was mostly spread by word-of-mouth, especially for upcoming artists.” This was especially important because of the lack of dedicated spaces to display artworks from the early 1950s to the 80s. Given this absence, the collaborations between artists and architects rendered buildings as urban galleries. During the peak of the tropical style in Nigeria, there were a significant number of prominent artists who collaborated with architects and were commissioned to produce work that might ground new structures, including Bruce Onobrakpeya, Jimoh Buraimoh, Felix Idubor, Erhabor Emokpae, Francis Idehen, Yusuf Grillo, Susanne Wenger and Paul Mount. These are only a handful of names: there are many others who have yet to be identified, in part due to the demise of the style and its subsequent abandonment, with the situation exacerbated by corruption, Nigeria’s civil war, the widespread demolition of buildings to make way for skyscrapers, and poor documentation. In Lagos, many of these buildings dotting the marina lay abandoned and now play host to street markets.
The 1964 headquarters of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria, designed by Oluwole Olumuyiwa and Watkins Grey.
Until 2022, a significant sculpture, The Drummer Boy by Ben Enwonwu (a large, bronze piece showing a boy beating a drum) still hung at the southeastern corner of the Nickson and Borys-designed NET building, which was completed in 1979. The abandoned 32-storey tower, which sits on a corner with Broad Street to the northeast and Marina Road to the northwest, occupies prime real estate in downtown Lagos, offering views towards the marina. Its spire is conspicuous from all around Lagos Island, and it was described as the city’s emblem of modernity in a 1983 article by Alan Cowell for The New York Times. That same year it was rechristened Necom House in the wake of a fire in the building that was reported to be an attempt to cover up corruption by government officials. It has lain derelict ever since.
Commissioned by Nickson and Borys, The Drummer Boy was a sculptural interpretation of an African mode of communication. Enwonwu, his son Oliver explains, attempted to use the sculpture to explain the purpose of the building, as well as re-centring Nigerian culture in the midst of its mass concrete and steel spire. In a 2017 post by Lasgidipix, a Facebook account dedicated to photos of Lagos,The Drummer Boy’s impact on the architecture was described memorably: “It was iconic and made more so by that famous Drummer Boy sculpture made by none other than the incredible legendary Professor Ben Enwonwu, one of the greatest artists this country and indeed Africa has produced. The Drummer Boy is significant in our culture because we use the drum for communication and celebration. It was such an apt concept for the then Nigerian External Telecommunications, NET.” Today, however, the sculpture has been removed (although it can still be seen on Google Street View), with no one certain of its whereabouts – a confusion sown by the neglect of the building amid legal battles surrounding its dubious acquisition in 2007 by a privately held company. The sale was later revoked by the Nigerian government. Necom House also features other artist collaborations. Around the podium are two resplendent but badly worn murals – the one on the northeastern end shows human figures wielding traditional communication instruments such as a gong and drums, while the mural on the southern end depicts a congregation of people. The authors of the murals are yet to be identified, a situation entrenched by the lack of documentation of the work’s development.
Sango (1964) by Ben Enwonwu, made for the headquarters of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria.
Eight-hundred metres east of Necom House is the Olumuyiwa and Watkins Grey-designed headquarters of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (now Power Holding Company Nigeria), a building fronted by a 1964 figurative sculpture by Ben Enwonwu that was christened Sango after the Yoruba god of lightning and thunder. Cast in bronze, this work was intended to evoke traditional sensibilities, linking the electricity generated by the commission to the cultural context of power. “Integrating these sculptures with the buildings helped ground the buildings in context and were an attempt to decolonise them,” explains his son Oliver. For Enwonwu, who was a modernist, it was important to situate African culture within modern architectural responses. His statement at the first Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, hosted in Paris in 1956, encapsulates his standpoint: “I know that when a country is suppressed by another politically, the native traditions of the art of the suppressed begin to die out.” The criticism of tropical architecture as having neglected African culture – which was advanced by figures such as Ulli Beier, who worked closely with the Mbari Mbayo cultural group – was being addressed through the introduction of art as a way to sensitively engage with context.
Papa Omotayo, a contemporary Lagos-based architect and curator, says the integration of art and architecture was mainly taken on by the more sensitive practitioners of the time. He suspects, however, that the demise of the style limited the development of these collaborations, “not enabling them to resolve [more than] skin-deep issues” – as positive as the integration of art might have been, Omotayo believes that only a few practitioners were able to explore its greater potential. Nevertheless, it is evident that the integration of art in tropical architecture fostered cross-cultural collaborations, allowing practicing architects from the period – who were primarily European – to engage with local artists. More than the architectural product, however, these collaborations helped to foster a pan-African ideology, creating links between Africa and its diaspora. Another of Enwonwu’s bronze sculptures, Knowledge, is at the NIIA (Nigerian Institute of International Affairs), which was designed by Design Group Nigeria in the 1960s, along with Progress, a bas-relief sculpture by the revered Erhabor Emokpae. Another building from the period that features both sculpture and murals is Independence House (1961), also known as Defense House, a gift from the British government that was gutted by fire in 1993 as part of another spate of corruption. The building, designed by Augustine Egbor, the then-director of public buildings for the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, features a bas-relief sculpture by Felix Idubor, depicting the union of three men representing the largest tribes in Nigeria. Laying in a state of disrepair after the fire and ongoing mismanagement, the building also features a mural by Yusuf Grillo, a member of the Zaria Rebels.
Necom House (1979), designed by Nickson and Borys.
Many buildings from the tropical modernist period are being similarly mismanaged, the effect of which is a loss of architectural and art heritage. One such case is the sale of Tafawa Balewa Square, a popular landmark and a Grade I-listed site under Lagos state law, which features sculptures by Ekwere Ebong and British artist Paul Mount among others. The square played host to Nigeria’s independence celebrations, as well as several other important nationwide events, and was originally built in the colonial era as a racecourse. It was rechristened in 1972, having previously been called Lagos Race Course, following design updates by Isaac Fola-Alade, who occupied the same role previously held by Egebor. Recently, however, its gates – which had been a prominent feature of the development for decades – were demolished. The gates had been designed by Mount and built in collaboration with local artists, and the integration of art within the architecture had elevated the character of the square, serving as a marker for the development. As such, the demolition drew attention from many circles, with bodies such as Legacy 1995 – of which Godwin was a founder – issuing letters to dissuade the government from allowing the destruction to go ahead. Yet Tafawa Balewa Square is simply one among a growing list of well-known buildings from our recent postcolonial history that have been altered significantly or face demolition. Our collective heritage is being lost without having been studied extensively within Nigeria, especially given the poor state of archiving within the country and the fact that most of the relevant archives remain abroad. The situation is dire, both culturally and pedagogically.
The crucial role that art played in tropical modernism, especially in Nigeria, has historically been decentred and dismissed as tokenistic in relation to the true advancements of the architecture of the time. But as Bruce Onobrakpeya, a key member of the Zaria Rebels, points out: “The art played a bigger role than [just] embellishment, as it was important to translate concepts of decolonisation,” he says. Onobrakpeya’s own work used art to decolonise prevailing social tenets, as seen in his murals for churches where he represented Black bodies as well as re-interpreting biblical concepts, and he contextualises his argument through the historical development of formal architectural education in Nigeria. “In the past there was no architecture department [at the Technical College in Zaria],” he says, “[so] the architecture students came out of the arts,” citing Demas Nwoko, who won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale as a prime example of this trajectory.
“Concerning ourselves with history is a tool for the future.”
Onobrakpeya points to Nwoko’s work as an exemplar of the integration of art and modernism, while another architect whose work embodied this approach is Alan Vaughan-Richards, who commissioned and worked with several artists including Onobrakpeya while working at Architects Co-Partnership in the 1950s. The evolution of Vaughan-Richards’ work as a solo practitioner within Africa, following Architects Co-Partnership’s withdrawal from Nigeria in 1961, has been described by Ola Uduku in her 2013 paper ‘Other Modernisms: Recording Diversity and Communicating History in Urban West Africa’ as the beginning of “a distinct other, more hybrid Modern style” in Nigeria. In his 1965 Ola-Oluwakitan Cottage, for instance, Vaughan- Richards collaborated with Onobrakpeya and Francis Idehen to develop a sculpted entrance area. And in Ghana, the work of Fry, Drew and Partners evolved to incorporate African art symbols in its breeze-block compositions, which became the poster child for tropical architecture in international media. Hannah le Roux, in an essay published by Bauhaus Imaginista titled ‘Tropical Architecture / Building Skin’, ascribes this integration as “a search for transitional metaphors to indigenize modern design”. The use of the breeze blocks as a skin for architecture has been suggested as having increased the affinity that people felt for the work, because of the history of patterns and art inscriptions in traditional African architecture.
The omission of collaborations between the two fields from discussions around tropical modernism has also impacted negatively on contemporary architecture – these kinds of partnerships are now comparatively rare. Robin Johnston, an architect and the chairman of Design Group Nigeria, suggests that the contemporary downturn in architect-artist collaborations “may be due to economics”, while Onobrakpeya asserts that the lack of dialogue has impoverished the field. Onobrakpeya again references Nwoko and his design of the Onobrak Museum in Agbarha-Otor, Delta State – an example, Onobrakpeya argues, of art and architecture being in synergy to produce “contextual modernism”. It is a feeling shared by contemporary practitioners. The cross-pollination between disciplines that happened in the immediate postcolonial period, Omotayo says, “was important to ground the work then, and is still an important tool if Nigerian architects are to develop sensitive architecture that engages with the emotions and responds to place.” He uses his studio’s collaborations with artist Olu Amoda as an example of the way in which constant engagement with art and artists can be a way of thinking and conceptualising architecture. Chuka Ihonor, an architect who worked with Godwin and Hopwood, agrees with Omotayo. “This might not mean embellishments, although that was a significant aspect of our traditional architecture,” he says, “but constant engagements between artists and architects would foster new ways of thinking and representation that ultimately benefit our architecture.”
Itiku House, designed by Eric Morgan, John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood in the 1960s.
In 2017, Christian Benimana, the senior principal of MASS Design Group, noted that: “If we are to develop solutions unique to us[...] we need a community that will build the design confidence of the next generation of African architects and designers.” Part of this mission is the need to address the dearth of a sense of history that has grown up among many young architects and architecture students across the continent. As such, in 2019 a group of independent researchers (of whom I am one) launched the Nigerian Architects Renaissance Project (Narp). Currently, Narp’s research encompasses digitising tropical architecture and art that is in danger of demolition. We are interpreting, analysing and mapping thousands of images of these buildings in their current state, all in order to generate 3D models that can be used as tools to enable students and practitioners alike to engage closely with buildings that have hitherto been overlooked by Nigeria’s architectural curriculum. In this respect, we follow Uduku’s assertion that “with digital technology, the architectural history of Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa can be recorded and archived”. By employing more accessible, manageable and transferable methods of documenting architecture, we are preserving examples of cross-disciplinary practice for new generations. Concerning ourselves with history is a tool for the future.
[1] See ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour’ by Sheila Chiamaka Chukwulozie in Disegno #19.
Words Olorunfemi Adewuyi
Photographs Ọlájídé Ayni
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.