Owen Hopkins: You’re currently working with the Canadian Centre for Architecture on a project that takes as its starting point the absence of an archive on the first generation of Senegalese architects, and how such an archive might be brought into existence, what form it might take, how it might be used, and by whom. Could you talk about the origins of this project, what you’re finding, and the approaches and methodologies you’re using?
Nzinga Mboup: When I moved back to Senegal seven years ago and began teaching architecture, I realized that the students couldn’t name more than five Senegalese architects. And actually, I myself maybe knew only ten. It was this strange situation of really not knowing what Senegalese architecture was. This was especially the case with regard to the “first generation” of practitioners who had trained at the National School of Architecture, which operated in Dakar between 1973 and 1991. A number of these architects are still practicing today. I knew some of their names, as I say, but not necessarily their work. So the CCA c/o Dakar project has been a kind of quest to try document and understand Senegal’s architectural traditions, particularly related to this generation, and create a repository of knowledge and information. Alongside this, and more directly aligned to my own practice, I am working on mapping construction techniques that have been used across Senegal over time. There’s this amazingly rich heritage that’s often been forgotten, and I’m interested in documenting it because there’s so much we can learn from it in reconnecting with these practical and material relationships to the Earth. From a methodological point of view, the first project has oral histories at its core, conducting interviews with these architects and organizing events where they can reflect on their training and careers. The second project is obviously much more about surveying the terrain, but there are many points of intersection. When they came out of the National School of Architecture, these architects were very interested in earth-based practices, creating an architecture of the place with local materials that reflected Senegalese identities in different ways. Along the line, some things definitely changed, but it’s been fascinating exploring their interactions with these different heritages and traditions.
OH: The absence of an archive is obviously a consequence of the marginalization or simply erasure of certain practices, traditions, and cultures, which was central to the colonial project. I wonder whether now, conversely, there is an extent to which that absence might be liberating? Rather than an archive that’s structured and conceived along Western lines and reflecting Western value systems and cultural hierarchies, if there’s the freedom to determine the grounds from which an archive of Senegalese architecture might emerge, the instrumental role it might have in informing future practice, as well as what we might call its cultural presence or imprint?
NB: Last year I was part of a residency at a local institution where I was exploring the question of heritage. We began to notice how buildings that were built only a few decades ago to signal a kind of future for Senegalese architecture and urbanism were being demolished. No one was noticing, let alone opposing it. So we ended up doing an exhibition focusing on four case studies of these buildings to explore how and why we value particular kinds of buildings—or not, in this case. The buildings were examples of what would probably be described as “regional modernism”: part of the modernist tradition, yet adapted to an extent to local climate and reflecting local materialities, like using local shells, ceramics, and other crafts, or the way concrete columns were sculpted. All we had to go on were photographs, but we were able to remake parts of the buildings at 1:1, allowing us to work with the actual materials and techniques and to document the process of fabrication. The remade building parts thus became the archive, a repository of knowledge about the architecture of a particular era that was still alive and could directly inform architecture produced today. The need to resuscitate these buildings in this way reflects how Senegalese heritage doesn’t exist in the same way it does in the UK or in other countries where legal protections are afforded.
OH: How have you found the absence of the archive, and your subsequent work in establishing one, has shaped your practice?
NM: I’ve always understood architecture to be a kind of traditional profession. As an architect you rarely reinvent the wheel; you respond and react to what has gone before. One of the problems in Senegal is that we tend to borrow models from elsewhere, which we mimic or copy without understanding their repercussions. Most significantly is the very idea of modernity, which of course is not neutral and is underpinned by very particular values and ideologies. I will always remember when I went to Switzerland and understood for the first time in my life what a strip window was all about. We’re used to seeing it as one of the essential components of modernist architecture, as a celebration of the freeing of the facade by the concrete frame. Yet there, I realize that the strip window was all about the Swiss landscape, about framing the views of mountains and lakes; it’s an architectural device that was tied to a very particular geography. Nothing that goes into architectural tradition is neutral. Throughout my childhood, for instance, cooking was always something that would be done sitting down. Today, in Senegal and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, a lot of modern houses are built with countertops, which means that they are conceived around a very different set of domestic habits and rituals. A concrete house, too, is something that people still aspire to have, because of its cultural history and politics. But concrete is terrible from a thermal perspective. In Senegal there are many examples of villages transitioning from earth to concrete construction, and then finding that they can’t sleep because the concrete houses get so hot at night, so everyone sleeps outside. So much of the work that I do is about reflecting critically on the particular ideologies and politics inherent to specific architectural design decisions. So many African cities are products of colonization and the work of international planners, who imposed models at every scale for how to articulate space and the material to shape it. We need to think critically about whether we are simply replicating this or not.
OH: And find ways to pose alternatives?
NM: Yes. My work exploring Indigenous building practices attempts to nourish discourse and create a diversity of expression and practice. I by no means push for one type, because throughout various geographies there are such rich histories and traditions of vernacular architectures. Nor is it simply about looking to precolonial methods and approaches, because there’s lots of vernacular architecture in our cities that dates from the twentieth century. It’s about the intelligences people have derived from working with the materials that they’ve actually found in situ, and understanding connections between architectural and urban form that will allow us to better shape what we build in the future.
OH: So much of the discourse around decarbonization is, in many ways correctly, about materials, about how we might shift from carbon-intensive materials to less carbon intensive, or even carbon-neutral ones. Yet while often well intentioned, there’s a risk of perpetuating one of modernism’s great myths, which was not simply that steel, glass, and concrete were universal materials that could be used in the same way everywhere, but the disconnection of architecture from the realities of material extraction and production. In fact, one way of reading the modernist project is in terms of its distancing of architecture from its geological origins. We urgently need to reverse this, but we’re not going to achieve it by uncritically switching one material for another while leaving the underlying value system intact. We need something far more fundamental and far-reaching: a reconstitution of architecture’s relationship to the earth, which foregrounds rather than obscures how buildings are produced, and the social, political, economic, and material relations from which they emerge and which they sustain. I wondered about the approaches and tactics you use, how you begin to change the kinds of relationships or attachments to materials and ways of making buildings and the meanings and associations they hold. How do you break that cycle?
NM: This disconnection didn’t happen by accident; there are specific reasons why we are building this way. Of course, architecture is not just about shelter; it’s also the way in which we project ourselves to the world. It’s a reflection of our shared value systems and the building traditions they support and enable. Cement is a really interesting material in this regard; it is often seen almost as a consumer product that’s imported and somehow placeless. But in Senegal, it’s the most local material, and the country is very proud of being a net exporter of cement. At the same time, however, it’s a material that was introduced to the country via import. There’s an interesting parallel to this with food, especially rice. Rice is widely consumed in Senegal, but is not produced locally and was introduced through colonization. So, again, the reason we don’t eat our local cereals anymore didn’t happen by accident. It’s vital to know these histories and contexts, but it doesn’t mean that I will never touch cement or I will never eat rice again. Technology allows architects today to build a more holistic picture of what we do. We have used building life-cycle analysis and carbon modeling to explore the impact of biogenic and geogenic materials in housing in Senegal and Ghana. But there’s still plenty of gaps. As architects, we choose the materials, but we still don’t really think about where they come from, how they are produced, the local environmental effects, or the labor conditions of their production—and their disposal. Architects aren’t trained to think about what happens at the end of a building’s life and create as meticulous plans for a building’s disassembly as we do for its construction. The framework in which architects operate is too limited in comparison to the impacts that buildings have in the world. Architects need to have a sense of responsibility over the whole chain of what we produce.
OH: That would be ambitious, daunting, and perhaps impossible if seen in relation to how architecture is currently conceived and practiced. But it would become more achievable if that role changes, particularly as it relates to the distinction between design and building. You often create highly collaborative and reciprocal relationships with the craftspeople involved in the material fabrication and construction of your projects. This gets to the core, or rather takes us beyond the architect’s role. In the Western context, the definition of the architect rests on the distinction between designer and builder. But this only emerged during the Renaissance; it didn’t exist in the medieval period. And then in the seventeenth century, the “artist-architect” became the “scientist-architect,” as architecture repositioned itself as an avowedly intellectual pursuit, as opposed to the manual pursuit of building or even craft. Insofar as architects still used their hands, they did so to make drawings, and it was no coincidence that the conventions of architectural drawing were also codified around this time. But architecture is very far from a universal thing. It is in fact a very particular, and historically and geographically specific way of conceiving buildings (and the world). Your work in a sense evades the fundamental dichotomy between design and building that is intrinsic to architecture, and as such constitutes a kind of “post-architectural” mode of thinking and practice.
LAB, Earth and Clay Mixing, 2024. Credit: Worofila.
NM: The architectural profession is only a few decades old in Senegal, and there are less than 300 registered architects in the entire country. We are the only profession in the built environment that is regulated by law, and there’s a new law stipulating that when it comes to construction defects, architects are jointly liable with the contractors and the engineers. I actually think this is fantastic, because it’s going to help us move more towards becoming builder-architects, invested and involved in the construction process. The context for the profession is changing. But at the same time, we quickly run into technical challenges, because we often find craftspeople who are used to working only in a certain way. The techniques we’re after may not be complicated, but they are not that widely used anymore, and it’s hard to find people to do it. We also have to be a lot more involved in understanding where materials are sourced from and how they are made, because a lot of these supply chains simply don’t exist. But by making architecture in this way, we can begin to revive them. We’ve even started opening small labs where we test and then actually make building components ourselves. I feel that if you want to be an architect that changes building culture, you have no choice but to do this kind of thing and incorporate research into practice. So any shift we are making in the role of the architect is borne out of practice. It’s not really a choice; it’s a reflection of how we achieve our ultimate goal, which is about serving society.
OH: Thinking back to where we started talking about the archive and the idea of decentering the archive, not simply in terms of where it is located or what it holds, but the whole value system that exists around it, it feels like we’re talking about the same thing with regard to what we might call “building knowledge.” The construction industry of course jealously guards its knowledge and expertise, and is always resistant to change. But you seem to decenter building knowledge shifting from something fixed and tightly controlled to something that is open, adaptable, and constantly added to. It’s also interesting to reflect how the kinds of labs you describe are historically not unusual; they’re basically how most buildings were made before materials could be transported long distances with the advent of fossil fuels. This is ultimately what vernaculars are: not some stylistic thing as they are often seen or made to be, but architectures rooted in materials available in a particular place, ultimately in the earth.
NM: We’ve done a lot of work analyzing what type of stone, earths, and aggregates are present in our areas of interventions, particularly in the Dakar region, and how we can use them in our projects with more creative intention. We started by looking at aerial photographs, because brick factories and ceramic factories tend to congregate where there is a lot of clay. And for cement factories, you just need to follow the limestone geological line. I remember visiting one site where clay was extracted and they said that they were going to stop production because a cement factory had just bought it. I always thought that this kind of thing was just to try to eliminate competition, but it was actually because they wanted the clay for cement production. It was one company and one material taking over another because monopolies made it almost impossible to get access to the raw materials used in industrial processes. And then if you want to use an alternative binder to cement like lime, for instance, there’s a Belgian company that has a monopoly of lime production in Senegal. There’s also a lot of basaltic stone in Senegal, which a lot of the colonial-era architecture is built from. I guess the French came with a lot of the stone-cutting knowledge. But it’s been over extracted to use as aggregate for reinforced concrete, and we’re now starting to run out. This has created an opportunity for a different aggregate, a sedimentary rock that’s essentially a waste product of phosphate extraction. But phosphate mining is hugely damaging for the environment and for the health of anyone nearby, so it’s really the last building material that should be used. Access to materials is always codified and regulated by monopolistic powers in order to feed a construction industry that’s built on extraction. And the forces working against any kind of change are very strong. But architecture helped create and sustain this situation. So architects have a responsibility to try to change it.