Eric Chen: You mentioned once in an interview that when you were a child, your father would bring back recordings of children’s programs to Nigeria whenever he visited the UK.1 Watching these programs and advertisements on VHS tapes, you said, opened up your imagination in a way that was critical to your later career as an architect. You also mentioned that as Nigeria’s economy grows and increasingly integrates itself into the global economy, more Nigerians can afford to study abroad, which we are now witnessing as an increasing number of foreign-educated Nigerian architects return to Nigeria with new ideas, methods, and approaches. However, as a result of globalization, people around the world are exposed to the same visual vocabulary of consumerism, most of which is Western. This may make architects feel a sense of despair, convincing them that more locally grounded alternatives are not possible. The homogenization of taste also affects not just architects but also, and perhaps more importantly, clients. The limited leisure time that architects enjoy also means that they are more likely to favor existing and reliable solutions over ones that are unique and uncertain. With this being said, how do you, as an architect, balance the desire to come up with design solutions that are unique to your own culture, while simultaneously embracing modernity in an ever-increasing industrial society that prioritizes efficiency and consistency over quality?
Tosin Oshinowo: First and foremost, I do believe in modernity, in this idea of humanity’s progress. There are several challenges that come about as a result of the process of homogenization that has accompanied it, and its attendant quests for efficiency, speed, and scale. The capitalist system is about always scaling further, which often conflicts with what can be seen as more traditional ways of doing thing. In order to achieve modernity, there has been an almost complete erasure of Indigenous tradition. When we think about the architectures or the urbanisms that existed in prior times, they were working within conditions of scarcity, so there was always a certain limit to the amount of detriment that humankind could do. But today, technology allows us to pick up speed and scale—and consequence. As an attempt to find effective solutions for dealing with this—and, among other things, climate change—there’s been a big quest for sustainability, or zero impact technological advancement. But another narrative is possible, one that looks at the traditions of the past to find solutions for the present. I do not believe that those traditions can completely solve today’s challenges, but there are similar situations that we can learn from. This is what my project Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos (2025) is about. It looks at markets in Lagos, but it is actually about the power of people, the power of systems and structures that don’t rely on heavy infrastructure.
EC: Can you tell me more about these markets?
TO: These markets are actually more like factories that process the waste of the Global North. Most people in Lagos can’t afford the products of modernity. We can’t afford brand new phones, brand new cars. The Nigerian Naira has devalued 700 percent since 2005. But we live in a modern time: we need to get around, we need to have technology, we need to have clothes. We achieve this by appropriating, adapting, and extending the life of the goods we receive from the Global North as waste. Capitalism’s culture of consumerism requires people to continuously buy new things, which means that the wasteful patterns of the Global North are feeding an industry in the Global South. However, Africa is still stuck in the “Malthusian trap,” so to speak, because we do not have the same kind of technological resources as in the Global North. So in the Global South today, there are some very sophisticated practices that are trying to break free from that trap, which all work with the idea of scarcity in new ways. What we see and what can be achieved in the markets of Lagos is a direct representation of that. And beyond simply extending the life of products, a different type of city has emerged, one that does not follow the top-down logic or rules of the nation-state.
EC: How do these markets relate to the formal economy and the structures of the state?
TO: There are specialist markets in many different locations of the city for many different reasons. They usually take up brownfield sites or residential areas that have been converted into places for commercial activity. Our nation-states expect that cities should function in one way. But when you see the strength of informality thrive in markets like these, it becomes impossible to deny that cities can function in another way. I believe that the African city of the future needs to learn to bridge these two worlds—especially when, economically, we cannot sustain formality. But the state needs to understand that the informal, the self-organized, does exists and will continue to exist. I think technology can be useful here, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the informal way of doing things—which it all too often is. Furthermore, the political system in the market of leadership is based on integrity, which is a lot better than what we have at the level of the nation-state, which is very corrupt. So there’s a lot that can be learned from these types of spaces.
EC: Speaking of importing waste from the Global North, do you think that Nigeria is at risk of being portrayed by the media as undesirable?
TO: No I don’t. When producing this work, I was concerned about representing disparity. It was very important to me to not show that as an image. Instead, I wanted to show the collective hardworking population who is getting on tinkering, who is happy to get up in the morning to make a living. I find it ironic that the populations of certain countries in the Global North that have sovereign wealth funds and have so much money also have a lot of depression. People in Lagos don’t wake up and get depressed. When you have things to do, you don’t have time to think about all the things that are not working. You’re more progressive in your thoughts: I need to get this done, I need to get that done, I need to keep moving, I need to improve. People in these markets are upwardly mobile. You have a lot of people working here who earn a decent living, who are able to send their kids to school, who are able to do what they need to do. They have homes. They have cars. Just because the physical entity itself might look chaotic does not mean that there isn’t value.
EC: Have you considered designing projects abroad, even outside of Africa? If so, how would you avoid designing buildings and spaces that fall into typical visual clichés which people associate with your culture, even if doing so may be profitable due to market demand?
TO: All architects have to make clear very early on in their careers where they want to sit within the profession; what kind of architecture and what legacy they want to build. But it’s a challenging question, because what is architectural modernity that comes from “my culture”? There really isn’t any. The architecture from my culture is an architecture of tradition, and we don’t live in that tradition anymore. So much of what exists on the continent of Africa today—its buildings, styles, lifestyles, and spaces—was shaped by imperialism, then by colonialism, and then by the universalist idea of the post-colonial African state. But Africa is made up of so many diverse groups. On the continent today, you have something like over 2,000 languages spoken. In Nigeria alone, we have 250 different languages, which means we have 250 different ethnic groups, and all live in different parts of the country and have different styles of building. So we don’t have an architectural identity so to speak—beyond modernity, that is. The context of my childhood experiences, growing up, of architecture, even my training as an architect, have all been from modernity. So that’s the kind of architecture I produce.
EC: So then what does it mean to you to create “African architecture” today?
TO: Within the idea of modernity, there is opportunity to create representation through spatial use. That is where we’re able to represent African buildings, so to speak: in their spatial configurations, the way space is formed, the layers between public and private space as you move through a building. But I do not think it is possible to think about it as a physical representation, as an identity. The way I approach my practice is to look at cultural representation in relation to its context. What needs to be highlighted? What forms of identity need to be celebrated by the group, clients, or community that is being designed for? It’s not about trying to take a typology and say it is a representation of this or that from this region. It’s about finding a cultural narrative that needs to be represented.
EC: Linguists make the distinction between deep structures (how language is represented in the mind) and surface structures (how language is expressed and articulated). We also find aspects of deep and surface structures in music. For instance, we may describe the chord progression, which takes place at the harmonic level, as the deep structure of music. Similarly, the surface level or the top-line, in which the melody and lyrics are sung, would be the surface structure. In popular music, the harmonic level usually consists of a continuous loop of a four-chord progression. While I-V-vi-IV is the most common chord progression in Western popular music, the use of IVM7-V7-iii7-vi, also known as the “royal road progression,” is widespread throughout Japanese popular music. This is what makes Japanese popular music highly recognizable: they have a unique deep structure. Deep and surface structure are also found in musical experience, where the deep structure is the emotional response elicited by the melody, the surface structure. I would argue that the same may be said with architecture. For example, in Renzo Piano’s Forum building on Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, glass panes don’t intersect at edges, columns extend beyond their normal lengths, and elements don’t line up with each other. All of these conditions defy people’s expectations and create moments of surprise. Do you think that architectural experiences are universal, such that the same experience can be expressed in different architectural forms in different cultures?
TO: I approach architecture like human economics. Take, for instance, how many different cultures have chairs. The way the human body sits—our proportions—is universal. But there are variations: some ethnicities are slightly taller, some are shorter, and even within them, there is a level of diversity, which chairs need to accommodate—as well as different behavioral patterns relating to them. So the chair is a kind of universal idea, but there are differences once that idea becomes materialized and put to use within different cultural and material contexts. In the Renzo Piano building you mentioned, there is a very sophisticated level of detailing that can be achieved in the West. Countries that are more economically challenged might be able to achieve the same supposed look and feel, but with a more reduced approach. But for more traditional cultures, it’s a really tenuous question and argument. It’s probably only relevant in the context of modernity, where there is a notion of universality, and globalization, which means that we all, to some extent, exist in some kind of shared context.
EC: How so? Can you elaborate?
TO: Well, if you asked that question 100 or 300 years ago, the answer you would get would be very different. Back then, we were working with a more robust diversity of materials, one that grounded architecture in the context of place. Those materials, which were used to create space, also created very specific forms due to their technical ability. For example, historical buildings in China or Japan are very different from those in Europe. One of the reasons for this is that in China and Japan, you have to consider earthquakes. That added constraint informed the way architecture has been constructed over the years. What we get at the end is an image that we start to associate with tradition. But this is not because someone decided that tradition should look like that. Instead, it is because context required it to look like that. In a modern context, where we’re working with modern materials, irrespective of the region that you live in, that exercise is now much more dependent on cost. And with the movement and standardization of goods around the world—concrete, steel, and glass—the sophistication or complexity of a building is more a question of economic strength than anything.
EC: What, for you, are some of the most pressing issues facing the future of architecture on the African continent?
TO: Globalization has given us some level of universality in terms of how we live, the way we use our spaces, and all architecture is formed by function. The 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of African postcolonial states. This period also created a unification of architectural styles and global culture, where spaces became standardized based on global trends and requirements. This is the architecture that brought us into modernity. So then, how do we celebrate differences across continents and regions when everywhere looks the same? It is so important to look at modernity in relation to tradition, because what was lost is a lot more diverse than what we have today.
Julia Gamolina, "Culture and Identity: Oshinowo Studio's Tosin Oshinowo on Calculated Risks, Apprenticeship, and Moving Forward," Madame Architect, January 31, 2024, ➝.