Built Environment in Transition: The Significances of Postmodern Residential Designs in Cultural Sustainability

Abstract

In a contemporary context, the potential needs and desires for people’s betterment keep persisting, especially during the transition period. However, metropolitan cities, districts, and entire regions began to experience designs that resulted in cultural tensions. These kinds of cultural conflicts follow the form of design ideas, such as the modern culture of no compromise for cultural expressions. Although, the advent of postmodern architecture creates avenues for settlements to resuscitate their declining culture or any sort of design that will reinstate the original cultural meaning of the historic built environments. Moreover, culture is, and will always be, a tangible asset; it must be sustained at all levels of development—from spiritual to physical and from social to economic issues. This paper highlights and discusses the significances of single-family postmodern residential buildings in cultural sustainability. The study further explores the importance of cultural sustainability and the impacts of cultural development within the context of Northern Nigerian built environments in transition. In accordance with the scope of the paper, critical observations of the architectural plan schemes, physical characteristics of the selected cases and theoretical survey are the methods employed to create a base for the theoretical analysis and evaluations. This paper asks: How does postmodern architecture rescue cultural expressions in residential designs? What are the built elements and features that support culture in Northern Nigerian postmodern residential designs? How do we support this? These questions form the basis of this paper