Mariam Issoufou speaks to ETH Zurich News

In a recent interview with Christoph Elhardt from ETH Zurich news, Mariam Issoufou spoke about her career and how growing up in the Sahara desert influenced her appreciation of architecture: “Back then, it wasn’t unusual to walk home from school in temperatures of up to 45 degrees. I’ll never forget the feeling of stepping inside our cool mud house.” Elhardt adds that unlike people who grow up in the West, Mariam Issoufou wasn’t surrounded by houses made of concrete or wood during an important phase of her childhood. For centuries, clay was the standard building material used in Niger to insulate houses against the heat. This feel for the architectural heritage of her homeland is a major part of Issoufou’s work to this day. Not least in her lectures, in which she teaches her students about forgotten building cultures. She wants to show that beyond the modernist mainstream in America and Europe, there are traditions from which Western students can learn a lot. To do so, however, they must first abandon modernism’s blinkered view of architecture. “It’s not as if things only got going in the first half of the 20th century with a few gods of modern architecture such as Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright…”