Ake Palace: A Reflection of Culture and Architecture in South-West, Nigeria

Abstract

Yorùbá indigenous architecture is not haphazard. It results from an organized cultural and religious system. Family, community, and belief were given top priority while designing every part of the building, including the material choice, architectural style, and construction method. Culture needs a useful location where it can express and manifest its actions in order to fulfill its purpose. Therefore, the area in which this activity and lifestyle can be practiced must be provided through architectural design. Although it is true that both architecture and culture are dynamic and will change for the better, culture must not be readily changed yield to the demands of architecture and its allure. Authors have noted that socio-political, cultural, and religious ideas are expressed in art forms and emanate from them within the majority of societies and throughout time. This suggests that the building embodies and portrays the culture in terms of homage, food, hospitality, education, and sociopolitical ideas. Generally speaking, architecture offers, suggests, or demonstrates the direction of cultural values; it identifies or shows cultural identities. Ake palace in this study denote a series of techniques that establish the city’s identity plans and concepts of the town image as a whole into an integrative city which is based on communal relationships of an urban fabrics. The gap in this study is the disregard for the natural and architectural environments, prior cultural expressions that weakened cultural identity. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between culture and architecture using Ake palace in south-west Nigeria as a reflection of it. A qualitative approach was used, and focus groups made up of custodian leaders from Ake Palace was used to conduct in-depth interviews. Nvivo word trees and place theory was used to analyze the data. Description of Ake palace design concept was gathered from the custodian leaders. This study demonstrated how the architecture of squares reveals important information about the built environment of the current urban fabric, past historical accounts, cultural practices, and the traditional identity of the Ake people.