Barns bring people together. They also bring people closer to nature. Barns provide a multi-purpose system of storage built to accommodate living things. By means of integrating tectonics with building-scale mechanisms that modulate surface and space (e.g., adjustable eaves, structural scaffolding, large sliding doors, windows as portals), they offer an interactive interface to a diffuse but constant back-and-forth, the incessant hum or flow of energy that varies season to season between humans and their environment. Barns are hubs in a flux wherein gradients of vitality in the soil work in concert with bacteria and fungi, plants, insects, and animals; tools, machines, vehicles, and craft; other buildings, materials, and climate; as well as planetary cycles around the Sun, Earth’s moon, and the water, sound, wind, air, carbon, dust, and plasma. Barns are houses for activities that involve humans, but are not built exclusively for them.
In name, barns were originally houses for barley, derived from the Old English words bere- (barley) and ærn- (house). Similarly, in French, grange, a granary or ancillary farm building, stems from the Latin granum, meaning grain, whose extended meaning relates to the gentry, or the “gentle” strata of the noble class. In this sense, the “grange” can also describe the fine country manor of the gentleman farmer, someone who is wealthy enough to own land but not farm it themselves. This etymological link between terms relating grains with the buildings used to cultivate them illustrates the profound importance of food crops to human society.
Symbolically and practically, barns are storehouses that operate as supply infrastructure for crops. Even the word “crop,” meaning “to cut,” comes from the Old High German kropf and Old Norse kroppr, referring to the part of a plant that grows above ground. The annual cycle of grain crop production often entails specific rituals or agricultural rites— procedures that entangle human society with natural cycles and the biome—that enable its reproduction. Hence, valued by weight, taste, color, texture, energy-density, and relative durability over time, grain is a form of bio-wealth, born from the capacity of earth to give life.
Currency gains value the more it can function as a standard token of value while broadening the extent and dynamism of its circulation. When grain seeds can satisfy these criteria—not only uniform in appearance and efficacy, but also maintaining a consistent threshold of use value—they can assume properties similar to historical forms of money, each of which have their own market culture. Unlike other forms of real currency, however, which are typically derived from minerals (as opposed to paper notes or virtual money), seeds are vegetative and can therefore reproduce themselves or even multiply naturally. But at the same time, they are living and therefore must remain alive—indeterminately capable of germination—in order to maintain this value over time.
Seeds can be either husks or tubers that can be planted by “sowing” in an open field. Fruits are the offspring of the plants that grow out of this process. Part of what makes grains, the reproductive seeds of cereal plants, special, is that they are both a fruit and a seed. Such maximal design efficiency bears great benefit, both from the perspective of plants—during growth and reproduction phases, a compact structure requires less energy to generate from source materials in the air and soil—as well as that of human beings, who harvest, store, preserve and use the grains subsequently. It is precisely because grains are dry, energy-dense, and robust seeds, that they do not only exhibit substantial use value, but also exchange value.
Whereas grains are seeds that can yield new cereal crops, yams grow from seed yams: tubers that propagate new, additional yams that are close to identical to the original cultivar lineage. Unlike rhizomes, which reach out and colonize territory by means of new roots and shoots, tubers serve instead as underground reservoirs of nutrients, capable of growing omni-directionally with the recipe for life and the chemical ingredients required to initiate self-replication. In light of this genetic profile (i.e., reproduction by means of self-replication), the process of improving and refining the most prized yams by selective cultivation is referred to as “ennoblement.”1 As a result, amongst Ńdị́ Ìgbò, the Igbo people of present-day Nigeria and neighboring countries, there is a strong relationship between the health of the land for yam cultivation, nobility, rank, and wealth.
According to Igbo cultural tradition, yam farming is a male activity, and notably takes a lot of manual work. Especially in flood-prone regions, yams are generally planted in specially constructed mounds, within which the tubers remain elevated relative to changes in the level of humidity in the soil and surface water. As the rainy season ensues, this ensures that tubers are free to self-reproduce in soil that remains aerated enough so that they can still breathe. Stakes must then be prepared by firmly anchoring them in the soil and the vine-like stalks trained, intermittently but with regular frequency, to follow them.
When the yam crop is first harvested, the tubers must be cured for a period of days up to several weeks. After curing, they are traditionally tied with natural fiber twine or rope around their equator in vertical chains to wooden stick frames. This keeps them away from vermin and dampness at ground-level; facilitates regular inspection of individual tubers to remove any overripe, infected, or otherwise undesirable ones; and visually demonstrates a family’s bio-material wealth—an insurance policy for survival from one season to the next.
Such forms of traditional Igbo yam barns (Ọba Ji, “Ọba,” meaning barn, “Ji,” meaning yam) tend to be less enclosed than their grain barn counterparts. Typically located within a broader agricultural terrain situated in between the home or domestic space and the farm, they are erected less according to the architectonics of building and more as a loose network of “occupiable scaffolding,” consisting primarily of wooden stakes or bamboo poles used to support individual tubers.2
In the neighboring Yorùbá language and culture, the honorific “Oba” can apply when naming kings in Yorubaland and the Benin Kingdom, not unlike “Obi” in Igboland, where it can refer to the central building of a homestead that functions as the “heart” of the living compound. By extension, “Obi” is also the term used to refer to the elder or traditional ruler (chief), the occupant or head of the throne house that is capable of serving as a main or central reception hall for the community.
From Seed Yams to Seed Projects
The Anam people of Nigeria are a group of eight devoutly agricultural Igbo riverine communities. Renowned for their prowess in yam cultivation within the silty-clay alluvial soil of the broader floodplains of the Niger River basin, Anamites supply tubers to the cities of Onitsha, Lagos, and beyond. From 2008 to 2012, members of the Anam community collaborated with the Chife Foundation in an intensive participatory planning, co-design, and cooperative development for a pilot initiative called Anam New City. One outcome of this was the Anam City Master Plan, which sought to prototype hybrid rural and urban (“rurban”) sustainable developments according to the traditional Igbo landscape gradient of Ala Obi (residential or domestic space), Ala Ulo (transitional farmland), and Ala Agu (wild or natural environment).3 In lieu of a static master plan, Anam New City proposed a dynamic model that leveraged seed projects to activate a linear chain of community nodes, including earth ponds for fish farming, a compressed earth block factory, a health clinic, a school, and a community yam barn.
The Anam Yam Barn is a low-tech prototype engineered in collaboration with students from Stanford University and members of Engineers for a Sustainable World who designed and prototyped a mobile solar power stand to support on-demand electrical charging of mobile devices and used building physics to help keep tubers at an optimal temperature through passive cooling, humidity regulation, and optimal levels of light exposure.4 Located in the Ogwuyo neighborhood of Ebenebe-Anam in Anambra State, it is the first community node to be implemented as part of the Anam New City project. It was designed locally on site by the Chife Foundation team and built by the local Anam Development Company on a site that includes an array of housing (ranging from compound housing around a central courtyard to vernacular wattle-and-daub construction and different housing prototypes), a compressed earth block factory, a borehole well for potable water, and earth ponds set among stands of trees, palms, bamboo, and abundant terrestrial and freshwater fauna.
The surrounding landscape is a riverine area prone to seasonal flooding, which required the construction timeline to be organized in relation to the rainy season. As a result, the design of the barn utilized a hybrid fast-build technique, using light steel columns to prop up a roof while walls were under construction. This introduced additional strength and rigidity to the structure while allowing natural ventilation via a clerestory-level air gap between the eaves and sandcrete breezeblock masonry walls. The inclusion of modest roof projections also created low-cost porch conditions capable of buffering the entrance from both the sun and rain while allowing for the entire edge of the building to function as an intermediate zone.
In 2012, responding to the emerging needs and priorities of the community, the Chife Foundation founded the Anam New City School, for which they adapted the earth block production sheds into classroom blocks, and repurposed the erstwhile yam barn as a main hall and reception venue. Generally in keeping with the design strategy for the Ogwuyo neighborhood, the central space in between the buildings additionally serves as a small-scale illo, the Igbo term denoting a commons where the community can come together as one, on the occasion of community gatherings or public-facing school events.
The school is co-funded in part by means of farming yam, cassava, and other crops, the profits from which are shared between supporting administrative costs and the nutritional program for students.5 With a small but dedicated team drawn from the community with local farming experience and expertise, this approach extends traditional knowledge systems into future generations. Without having to serve as a workforce, students can gain insight into how food crops are grown while benefiting from their nutritional value, which is grown in the same environment where they are learning.
This ongoing story of a yam barn growing into a school that is also a farm of climate-adaptive indigenous food crops and food bank demonstrates how the tellurian bond between buildings and the landscapes in which they are situated emerges through the agency of regenerative social bodies.6 The Anam communities are a self-selecting group of people who have actively come together to form agroecological communities over time, maintaining and renewing them from generation to generation. Similarly, certain social clubs, cultural and counter-cultural movements, religious organizations, and civil society all wield customary influence—a regenerative alternative to economic, political, or legal power—to organize cycles of human behavior into patterns of life that mutually foster environmental awareness and harness the synergetic power of cooperation. Here, architecture exists as part of the living landscape and can enable myriad possibilities when free to adapt in dialogue with their place. And not entirely unlike yam species, people also thrive in spaces designed around the regenerative power of life.
At its core, architectural form corresponds to a network of metaphysical relationships: the invisible structure of eco-politics governing how human society and nature interact. Architecture is the apparatus through which we inhabit the Earth. As such, it is a broad class of tellurian technology, which means “design for life” at its core. As storehouses that provide a dynamic equilibrium of stability and flexibility to sustain life, barns offer lessons on the fundamental reciprocity of building. Architecture can become so preoccupied with housing people that it can ignore the houses we build for other lifeforms. Buildings that support the survival of animals and their offspring or plants to live across cycles of seed dormancy, cultivation, and harvest are architectures that themselves live. How we think about architecture, space, consciousness, ourselves, one another, nature, and the universe determines what we build. Design for life demands the co-creation of adaptive systems that can inform growth, not restrict it. This happens when we recognize that both the human environment and architecture for people have life cycles that through our participation can regenerate both in sync and in tune with nature and the cosmos.
“Notes on the Genus Dioscorea in the Belgian Congo” By I. H. Burkill. (Extrait du Bulletin du Jardin botanique de l'Etat, Vol. 15.), 48. (Bruxelles: Jardin botanique de l'Etat, 1939.)” Nature 145, no. 3674 (March 1940): 494–95.
DK Osseo-Asare and Yasmine Abbas, “Occupying Africa: Prototyping a Transformal Makerspace Network,” Architectural Design 91 (2021): 62–69.
Belgin Gümrü, Abena Sackey, DK Osseo-Asare and Stacy Passmore, Anam New City Master Plan (Chife Foundation, 2010); Okechukwu C. Agukoronye, “Landscape Practices in Traditional Igbo Society, Nigeria,” Landscape Research 26, no. 2 (2001): 85–98.
Stanford Anam City Project | Nigeria; Agropolitan Anam, Ball State University Landscape Architecture; “Yams, cassava: The Nigerian free school run from farm produce,” Prime Progress NG, 2024, ➝.
Niyi Osundare, “The Plough and the Pen. Of the Scribbling Hoe and Library of Yams,” Caliban 61 (2019): 35–51.
