Modern Architecture in Post-Colonial Ghana and Nigeria

Abstract

… an architecture and form of urbanism will emerge closely connected with the set of ideas that have international validity but reflecting the conditions of climate, the habits of the people and the aspirations of the countries lying under the cloudy belt of the equatorial world.Max Fry and Jane Drew, architects, 1956The concept of architecture, even in its widest traditional sense, is foreign to Africa.John Lloyd, architect, 1966Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who had been in and out of West Africa since the 1940s as planners and architects, were optimistic about the role of architecture in the tropics on the eve of independence. In the text of Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zones they championed the development in Africa of the tropical modernism they had pioneered in their own work. In sharp contrast, John Lloyd, writing from Ghana just ten years later, conveyed a sense of the discipline’s estrangement from the context.