What is it to be a fresh architecture graduate faced with a world filled to the brim with imbalances, uncertainty and questionable realities? Surviving architecture school was no easy task. We all know what it took to survive it. Feeding into the often problematic and demanding work culture of architecture schools, I spent countless sleepless nights glued to my files adjusting my drawings. When sleep visited me, the work that remained would intrude my dreams; beckoning me to return to it. I doused my aches in copious amounts of caffeine, sped between prints and re-prints upon discovery of flaws. I used the most delicate of touch, concentrating all my focus, on my models during their assembly... the list goes on. Despite how I dealt with it, surviving architecture school was no easy task and it demanded much of myself to endure and excel.

It’s completion was not with the fanfare we all deserved and longed for. Graduation, a day we had spent years striving towards, amounted to a nod of acknowledgment in a hastened online ceremony at its most, and an online transcript at its least. My achievements paled in grievous comparison to the current state of the world in the sphere of health, politics, and race relations. With our current reality growing more complex by the day, it is all too easy for those of us fortuitous enough to be members of the “Class of 2020” to slip into a mournful and depreciative state: interrogating our place in this world, and our significance as we seek to begin our journeys as architects in our respective societies.

What is it to desire to fill the role of builders in society when we can see so many of its cracks begin to chip and crumble?

I want to become a space-maker. One that will create the physical realities of the world I wish to inhabit: the schools and libraries where great minds will be nurtured, the museums and cultural centers where the traditions of a people will be preserved and celebrated, the many houses that loving families might one day build lives in and call homes... I want to be the kind of architect who amplifies the lived experiences of the people I make spaces for. These prospects are what drew me to architecture and are what I cling to, now more than ever.What is it to have the added dimension of being a young “African” architect?

Honestly, I am trying to come to an answer to this question myself.

I, like many others, did not receive my architectural education on the continent. But I possessed a deep desire to return and have a part, no matter how small, in constructing its future.

I found myself in one of many architectural institutions that bases its curricula on Western and European models. I was lectured on the many virtues and the architectural significance of the Acropolis in Athens and taught to commit to memory the Roman orders. But I was taught nothing about the Great City of Benin and the precision of its walls. One of the greatest capitals in precolonial West Africa, with possession of a wall that surpassed the Great Wall of China in length (four times over), with a dexterity and finesse in its city planning worthy of global admiration; formed no part of my syllabi.

My professors presented the architectural champions and heroes to me. I dedicated myself to dutifully memorizing their names and that of their works: Le Corbusier and his Villa Savoye, Mies Van der Rohe and his Barcelona Pavilion, Frank Lloyd Wright and his Fallingwater.

This was to be my canon.

This was to be my “well of inspiration” as I sought to design my own projects. In many ways it is and forms the foundation of the things I have come to know about architecture. But this canon did not root itself in the realities of the Global South, nor did it make much efforts to seek and cherish the parts of the continent I held dear.

Seeking “wells of inspiration” as a young architect.

This “well of inspiration” is one that I knew that I had to consider deeply.

The one I was presented with would not suffice alone nor would it meet the lofty demands of my vested interests. I knew that I had to dedicate myself to consistently work to incorporate knowledge of the continent that I hoped to one day return to and build for. This reservoir of admiration would have to be constructed on my own, brick by brick.

It started first with engaging with as many stories from the continent I could manage. I had always believed that architects had a strange and beautiful role in choreographing the stories of our lives. I remember tearing through Penguin’s African Writer’s series all through my adolescence. Learning the dance of the lives I wished to choreograph. I commit much time and interest to learning as many corners of the continent as I can through novels, films, articles, histories, and music.

Visits to my father’s village, Amdallai (which is located at the border of Senegal and The Gambia) sparked interest into learning more about vernacular architectural practices of the region and beyond. We would cross the river on ferryboat, the capital with its mid-rise building and aging infrastructure slipping further into the distance and drive the rest of the way down. The narrow tarmac road was the only thread connecting the small towns and villages gleaming in corrugate and concrete, along the way. With a large expanse of farmland in between, earthen structures dotting their fringes. The air was always lighter here and I grew curious of it all hearing my uncles beam at their preference of concrete walls that left them hot and sweaty during the raining season over the earthen walls that kept them cool on their farmlands during that same time.

And so, I grew in admiration of the purveyors of vernacular traditions: the masons, carpenters, and artisans; often nameless entities that posses a deep understanding of the very marrow of what is at the built culture’s core.

I then began to seek out my own architectural champions and heroes. Those who were doing the work that I admired on the continent and across the world. I taught myself their names and that of their works: Diébédo Francis Kéré and his Gando Primary School, Sir David Adjaye and his Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Mariam Kamara and Yasaman Esmaili’s Hikma- Religious and Secular Complex.

I married what lessons I could to the work I did in school.

The urgency to fill in the gaps of my education and add depth and dimension to my “well of inspiration” is one I think many young African architects can relate to.

As young African architects, we are acutely aware that the future for our cities and countries are often presented as faceless non-specific utopias. Adorned with glass towers gilded in steel, with high speed highways and overpasses that loop across the landscape like tar ribbons, that could find itself in any industrialized city of the world. 

It is deemed “modern” by politicians, developers, or wealthy men and drapes itself in imported aesthetics, begging to be called by the name “progress.”

To be a young African architect, I believe, is to question this and seek out threads and instances where we can identify and remember ourselves; and think towards tailored and responsive architecture that considers our nuanced cultural realities.

In our collective journey of “becoming,” it might be time to engage in an unyielding investment of time and education to cultivate an intricate understanding of the unique complexities of our individual pasts, intertwined present realities, and projected futures.

I would like us to consistently strive to take ownership of our “wells of inspiration,” to construct and perpetually expand them —brick by brick—so we may one day build a new present reality in our own image, and no one else’s.