#91: A West African Perspective on Sustainable Architecture, with James Inedu-George (HTL Africa)

James is founding partner of HTL Africa, a research-driven architectural firm dedicated to addressing the specific challenges of West African environments. He joined me to discuss what we can learn from traditional west African architecture and urbanism to apply to current challenges of climate change and housing shortages.

Learn more about James and his projects: https://www.htlafrica.com/

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Transcript

Note: The transcript was created by software and likely contains errors. The timestamps are not accurate.

James Inedu-George (00:11.269)
Alright, I'm James Inedo George. I'm an architect from West Africa, specifically from Nigeria, with ambitions to practice globally. Ambitions that we've been meeting as a team over the last few years. We have a unique view on sustainability in architecture that comes from our native understanding of what architecture is that has actually not been well captured by conventional media. And we use this understanding to make buildings that are a little bit different from the norm, but at the same time perform very well for their environment.

Ross (00:57.709)
Awesome, okay, that's great. And that sets us up really well to talk about what we want to talk about on the podcast. I think the first thing I wanted to ask you was about, you know, what have you learned about traditional African architecture and urbanism that you want to start bringing into your work and sort of modern contemporary African design?

James Inedu-George (01:21.055)
Well, I wouldn't even say contemporary African design like global design. The thing is, we've seen that the world is suffering from this menace of global warming, which we look at from a daunting position in the sense that the world can't seem to survive with global warming. if you look at it quite carefully, it's problems that Africans unknowingly to themselves had solved with their traditional practices in architecture especially over the millennia. So our goal is to be able to kind of bring these, which I'll talk about in a short while, bring these understandings that we've had, that our ancestry has had, which we're unearthing.

James Inedu-George (02:10.119)
into mainstream technological discourse to help to at least alleviate to a certain degree global warming as a problem. For instance, we have this issue of energy and heat exchange. Now in traditional African architecture, especially

with the houses in Northern Nigeria and that architecture cascades over the desert areas up to North Africa. So it takes a good quarter of Africa as its canvas of operation. With the houses, the architecture is designed to invert the temperature of the ambient temperature. So it's cold inside when it's hot outside. Those things have been attributed to the use of mud.

which is something that you see the entire world trying to catch up with. Conversely, for us, it's more of a geometrical attribute. our thesis is if you build house architecture in any other material, it will most likely work the same way because of the understandings of how space is planned. So the houses have inverted the idea of the courtyard.

Ross (03:26.798)
Mm.

James Inedu-George (03:26.973)
So the courtyard in traditional normal architectural discourse is an extracted volume from a solid, right? So it's an inverse in negative volume. In the houses architectural language, on the other hand, the house is in the courtyard.

The courtyard is not in the house. What's important in architecture is to build the courtyard, not to build the house. So they de -emphasize the prominence of the volumes that make up the house and emphasize the negative volume of the courtyard because, very importantly, house architecture is a machine for amplifying outside living. And outside living...

Ross (04:16.898)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (04:18.139)
is what helps to reduce the dependence on foreign means of cooling and lighting, etc. etc. Especially in a place like ours, the temperature, the weather is not that bad and easy to live outside. So what the traditional architectural thinking that we learnt in school and is being built is...

Ross (04:26.349)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (04:42.707)
is that the house is a container of activity like Corbusier says, a machine for living. So your goal is to trap yourself inside that volume. Hence you hermetically seal it, et cetera, et cetera, and cool it as much as you can. The house has said the inverse. Your house is a canvas for living outside, a series of environments that are connected by pavilions that you spend the night in.

Ross (04:57.41)
Mm.

James Inedu-George (05:11.623)
So it amplifies the performance of the environment by virtue of its design. And this is kind of revolutionary in terms of how architecture is seen today. So that's one of the major things that we're trying to bring back into the lexicon of architecture. That architecture is a series of environments that in totality amplify the performance of the environment in total. So you'd see that a house or city would be cooler naturally than any other city. In North African city, we're cooler. Traditionally built, we're cooler than any other city. The houses perform better. The people are happier, et cetera, et cetera. So is this kind of little knowledge is not a nuggets of knowledge that we're trying to bring into the architectural lexicon in terms of form, the use of form and construction.

Ross (06:13.736)
really fascinating and is that only existing really in historical sites now or do people still build with it in traditional ways?

James Inedu-George (06:22.951)
You know, our history is little bit, not a little bit, is truncated. So what we are today and what we were supposed to be are kind of not on the same page. So we've been taught over time, and this is a non -architectural point, but we've been taught over time that what is African is bad.

Ross (06:28.525)
Hmm.

Ross (06:41.869)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (06:45.437)
What is made by us isn't good and our ancestry has no nuggets of wisdom that can help in the world. But we've seen that that's not quite the point. When the British came to Nigeria, instance, let's even invert it. Let's assume that Nigerians went to Britain.

The first thing that you do when you conquer a place is to distance the people from what they understand and recognize. When you do that, then you can put your force over the people. So it's not, while it's not a good thing, it's not something that is surprising to understand if you've read a little bit of history. So when the British came,

Ross (07:17.279)
you

James Inedu-George (07:36.871)
They couldn't have understood what they were seeing. They came from a place where the best you have as communication with the outside is a balcony or a bay window. That was the best communication that you had. And those things were legislated mostly by law. They weren't facts. were kind of...

Ross (07:48.856)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (08:04.919)
there's a word for it. are justifications. They were in fact. But African architecture is built on facts. So justification leads you towards creating detail to make the justification as beautiful as possible. When you build facts, you build canon. the final polishing of that form is not as important. It's that it works in a certain way and produces a certain rhythm. That's what's important.

Ross (08:07.863)
Hmm

James Inedu-George (08:33.673)
This was the 15th century. I don't see how anybody would understand that in the 15th century. So when the British came, added with the fact that there was the fear of us as a people, right? If you add all those things together, they developed what is called tropical modernism today that in our office we simply call an architecture of fear, right? So to deal with our environment and our spirit, they created a...

Ross (08:57.378)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (09:02.419)
buffering system between us and them, between what we find interesting and good for our living and them. And it makes sense if you have a low, hanging roof, for instance, to block out the sun. The sun is good for me to a certain degree, not very good for you.

Ross (09:25.271)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (09:25.576)
is neither here nor there, right? So you protect yourself from it. But in the same way, if you make a veranda that is a zero space between the people on the outside and you on the inside, it gives you a defensible space to run into your space if there's any trouble, right? We didn't need that, we just put a fence.

Ross (09:46.402)
You

James Inedu-George (09:46.679)
So it's those kind of things. We've read history wrong because we only have one way of reading it. Your architecture wasn't good. These are the ways that architecture can be good. Your architecture wasn't good. wasn't built to this amount of detail. Therefore, your architecture...

Ross (10:04.696)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (10:06.803)
was you were savages and we had to bring in new architecture. So that refusal of those two worlds to meet has caused this schism that has made it difficult for us as Africans to actually build what we believe is good for us. And when we do that, we have to fight our people to make them understand that these things are good for them. And I would say this as a closing to that point that

Ross (10:24.769)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (10:34.777)
Using mod to build is not one of those things. Using mod to build is simply just nostalgia.

If you look at African architecture from a technological standpoint, see that the mud is a moot point. Because in places where there was no mud, they built in stone. In places where there was no stone, they built in wood. So mud is just a way of asserting something that doesn't really belong to us. Mud is not an African thing. There are mud buildings in Europe. You might call it rammed earth, whatever.

The essential tool of building mud, for instance, in the north of Nigeria wasn't even developed by Nigerians. It was developed by a Spaniard who brought it through Islamic pilgrimage by virtue of Mansa Musa to us. So mud is a moot point. But today, that's seemingly wants to color our cities.

Ross (11:26.719)
you

James Inedu-George (11:32.828)
Everything is built in brown, in shades of brown and that's where the successful architecture is, which is a problem if you look at it from the right lens and perspective.

Ross (11:45.767)
That's just so well said and you really appreciate that sort of historical background. I think I really do sometimes just wonder how much we lost with colonialism around the world and not only in Africa but also the Americas and Asia and that there's in in in our you know as you said in our current predicament with climate change those are the local

really localised knowledge and responses that we should be drawing on rather than a more sort globalised, westernised perspective. So I'm really glad you're doing this work and trying to sort of bring this to light. Yeah. Can you share anything, any other sort of aspects of the architecture and urbanism?

James Inedu-George (12:33.408)
To a certain degree, For instance, the first thing that you learn as an architect, learning from Nigeria to practising the world, is that what we built were mud huts. Of course, it's big thing. They built those round mud huts. So two things. First thing is first, the round mud hut was also a symbol.

Ross (12:50.674)
Mmm.

James Inedu-George (13:01.085)
we take for granted because what is spiritual in architecture is usually more like these kind of esoteric looking spaces. But to the African mind, that round heart is a symbol of the universe. It's a very simple concept. Something is in the middle and we surround it. So it's a very simple concept. It's not a big highfalutin concept that needs several pages, but to the houses,

What was the house? Was the city block, right, that was fenced and the family would live in. When the world saw it, they said the rooms, which were those pavilions that are floating in the courtyard, those rooms, they called them architecture. And because they had no flesh, they couldn't be architecture. Therefore, it meant that the people who made it had not yet discovered architecture.

Ross (13:58.318)
Mm

James Inedu-George (13:59.783)
But on the other hand, they had. But they just discovered another lane in the architectural discourse. So it's that. we've been writing and saying that it's a house, not a compound house. It looks like a very simple distinction between things. But if you look at it critically, if the compound as designed is looked at as a house,

You see that what the house has built as a city is a continuous city block so that one house relates perfectly with the other and instead of building spaces, they built these negative spaces so that they amplified airflow around the city. The roads were built with that same kind of knowledge because there was this kind of filmic, because of how these pavilions were placed in this free space, there was a filmic way that people walked around.

Ross (14:40.334)
you

James Inedu-George (14:56.401)
and air moved around. It didn't move in straight paths, which is how air flows. So the city street was built based on that knowledge. So you would walk on a street and suddenly it bulges out and reduces the space, compresses the space, or it bulges in and expands the space and creates this mini plaza. Right? So it's those kind of things. There's another very important part of that lexicon to that.

We didn't understand, but one of my lecturers in school, a German, he wrote a book, his name was F .W. Swechefeger. So he wrote a book, which we didn't read in school, I read after school, about Hausa traditional architecture. So my second year in school, we were asked to, we were made to understand Hausa architecture from the basis of how the family trees grew.

So I mean, people died and then other people were born and this compound house kept on growing. So it would grow and die. But it was just trying to justify the architecture. But as I've grown older and I've looked at it from a more deeper perspective and had conversations with my people, what I see is some kind of adaptive transformation.

Ross (15:57.217)
right.

James Inedu-George (16:17.533)
Right? So the house itself is allowed to die and resurrect and resurrect in new forms. Right? So it's adaptive. It transforms itself in an adaptive fashion. If I died and I had a son and that son had a son, by the time that son's son is growing, he would build over me. So I become fertilizer for him to grow. Right? Which is what you're seeing in our cities today.

Ross (16:41.752)
Whoa.

James Inedu-George (16:44.275)
that there's been a layer of city built by the classical people or in our country, for instance, by the 60s and 70s that we don't use anymore. And instead of breaking that layer down, we are colonizing it and transforming it in an adaptive fashion. This thing is a way of doing architecture. It's a way of growth. It says that buildings never really die.

Ross (17:05.078)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (17:14.227)
but they're allowed to go mute for a while and resurrect themselves in new forms. Western architecture doesn't provide for that. It's either here or it's not. all those kind of understandings are transforming how we see space, but most importantly, the theoretical underpinnings of how we make form.

Ross (17:17.41)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (17:42.749)
That's most important for now. Then we can then think about the soft parts of how we actually make space. But as you see, I've talked about how we can make a city, how we can make a house, and then how we can make a room. So it's how to understand how those geometries work. And then we can then put, because all the look and feel is really just a layer over that kind of understanding.

Ross (17:51.02)
Hmm.

Ross (18:07.671)
Hmm.

Ross (18:11.181)
Yeah, yeah. there was also, I mean, stuff, kind of stuff that was lost in Nigeria and West Africa, you huge cities. I remember reading recently about Benin, Benin city or Edo, which was, I mean, a huge, basically capital city until, until the British came along. Is there, is there lessons from that as well? Is that, is that a similar sort of urbanism that you were just speaking about?

James Inedu-George (18:39.216)
The people in Benin have a different kind of organism but there's a lot of similarities between... I mean, again, I'll say this disclaimer, forget the mud. The mud is a minstrel and it wasn't an end in itself. But there's a lot of similarities in how things were planned. If you broke down even the architecture of the Yorubas and the Benin people,

Ross (19:00.236)
Mm.

James Inedu-George (19:07.739)
and you look at the Impluvium in the center of the houses because they are built around the courtyard, right? And that courtyard in Benin traps and collects water into a central well. That's the entire concept, which is kind of like the Romans would have done. But in the case of the Romans, it's a solidly built space. In the case of the Benin people, it's a porously built space. So while the courtyard is delineated,

Ross (19:17.367)
Hmm.

Ross (19:22.594)
Mmm.

James Inedu-George (19:37.705)
There's also a porosity around the courtyard that makes it a little bit less of a courtyard and more of these kind of pavilions floating in space but in a more rectilinear fashion. So that idea of pavilions floating in space is something that runs at least the gamut of Nigeria.

Ross (19:58.72)
Mmm.

James Inedu-George (19:58.941)
It's just that it's been done differently in different ways. So the Benin people have done it in a way like how we would do it today. Because we use this rectilinear grid to plan, right? The houses on the other hand, were it using a rectilinear grid, Benin had less space. So things had to be more compact. The houses had more space so they could do whatever they wanted. So again, I think that I think...

Ross (20:23.362)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (20:27.539)
And I can be wrong here, but I think that there's a similar theory in play in the creation of traditional West African buildings, especially in Nigeria, and it's that pavilions in free space. If you remove yourself from that rigid understanding of a courtyard as an excision.

Ross (20:51.842)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (20:52.327)
And you look at the spaces as how they operate and the porosity between those spaces. You see the house architecture is not much different from the architecture in Benin. The forms are different. The position is different. And I can argue also that that might be an airflow problem. But again, I don't have the proof for these things. But I think that it's in that line of understanding.

Ross (21:08.878)
Mm.

Ross (21:15.971)
Yeah, no, it's so fascinating. And I think what I'll have to do is get some images of these things and put together just a blog post so people can see a visual as they're listening to this. think that would be really useful. So what I suppose sort of gathering up this understanding and maybe these lost, you know, lessons that can be learned. What how is this then informing like a different perspective on sustainability from from the mainstream?

James Inedu-George (21:23.985)
Yeah. Yeah.

James Inedu-George (21:43.72)
Okay, if you put all of this together, if you did a summation of all of this, it would add to something almost like a slogan that says that a building is a citizen, right? And that every building that is built, because of the fact that it's built, it must pay a certain amount of tax to the city and to the inhabitants.

Ross (21:58.275)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (22:09.151)
That tax might be economic, it might be energy, it might be amplifying the performance of the environment, it might be any number of things. But if a city is treated, if a building is treated as a citizen is treated, then it's forced by virtue of its existence to be sustainable. Because part of the ways of making payments to a city is...

is being a citizen and that's what sustains a city. So if we look at sustainability from the position of sustaining human life in perpetuity, right, then you see that it's a payment system. Again, they've turned it into carbon credits, et cetera, et cetera, but it's a payment system that we today pay a bit so that the guys coming behind us can have a bed to sleep on.

Like you went to hotel and paid for somebody who was coming later. Right? So if a building is a citizen, it too pays its way for being here. It's not about, I don't think it's too much about all these carbon credits and carbon reductions. Those things are quite complex and abstract. I think for me, because architecture, sustainability is not a kind of architecture.

It's very important for us to say that sustainability is something that must be done in architecture in the sense that you can't build a building without a way to make the air leave non -mechanically. It's not sensible. But we have to build buildings like that to get ourselves into the position we are today, technologically.

Ross (23:39.96)
Mm.

James Inedu-George (23:51.539)
So it's the chicken and the egg argument. There was no way that we'll be able to build these cities for these millions of people, right? If we didn't build those hermetically sealed buildings in the 1920s to a couple of years ago. But those buildings are not buildings, they're machines. We must accept that and start to make humans now, right? The building is a citizen.

Ross (24:04.599)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (24:18.225)
and it must connect to the city on the scale that a citizen connects to the city. If you attribute those kind of connections to a building, then we make better cities. Sustainability stops being this thing. You know there's a look, there's a sustainable look with trees on the facade, you know, sustainable look and all sorts of certifications, right, to tell you that your building can breathe.

Ross (24:39.536)
Yes.

James Inedu-George (24:46.591)
But if your building can't breathe, it can't breathe. There's a level of responsibility that is needed by virtue of your being alive, that if you're doing a building, certain things, our buildings live for 100 years at least. In England, for instance, you have buildings from the 15th century on the streets. If those buildings had solar panels and were ripping energy, then you have a street of power stations.

Ross (25:00.493)
Mm.

James Inedu-George (25:10.109)
You wouldn't need the grid. You wouldn't need to use coal in the countries that use coal or excessive nuclear in the countries that use nuclear. Then we've killed a large part because a building that lasts that long should be a power station. It should pay its way.

It should be part of the point. It must be a good citizen. It must shake the hands of the community. That's it. For me, that's what sustainability is.

Ross (25:33.507)
Hmm, it's...

Ross (25:37.634)
Yeah, it's not about, I mean, think the, to bring it back to like a contrast with how we typically talk about sustainability, at least in, I guess, Europe and North America is very much about, it's a technical exercise, first of all. There's not much philosophy or sort of spirits attached to it. It's very much about the technicalities of doing it. And it's a lot about reduction and it's about reducing energy use, reducing materials, reducing driving, reducing flying. It's very much a process of,

James Inedu-George (25:55.25)
Yeah.

Ross (26:07.713)
of trying to scale things back. I think within that, haven't really left room in the conversation for often for what kind of life can you live? You what kind of place is this? What? How are how are people going to be healthy and happy as part of this? So it's not just that, you know, I think what you're saying is it comes from a much more.

Ross (26:31.649)
a place of, it's not just about you, it's about serving the wider city and the wider society in what you're building, what you're living in, which to me sounds like a pretty good starting point.

James Inedu-George (26:43.177)
Yeah, because I don't understand why we must take away from life. Humanity has only thrived when it progresses. Once you take away progress from humanity, wars happen. Take for instance these water wars that are happening now, because we cannot give everybody equality and everybody can progress at the same rate.

there will be immigration problems, water wars, Africans coming to Europe. It's a simple thing. It's because the rate of progress in Africa doesn't seem to match the rate of progress in Europe. If you equate it to nobody crosses the seas. These problems aren't as difficult as we say they are. But of course there are systems that make them difficult. But realistically, I think we should look at the problems as what they are, not as these kind of complexities that we built into them.

Ross (27:27.17)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (27:35.325)
Because why shouldn't I drive a car, for instance? A car takes me to my destination faster. The idea is to make the car safer, more sustainable, and of more use to the environment. The idea is not to take away the car. Why shouldn't I take a one -hour shower? Why? Why not? Can't we make it possible that that one -hour shower is doing something positive for the environment? Why take away the shower? Right? We found the sweet spot in humanity.

We like to drive cars. We love our trains. We love to fly, right? We love to live in certain scales and sizes of houses. We love the city, right? We love to take long hot showers. We love to socialize in parks. We love to go to night clubs. We found the sweet spot of what humanity actually is. Why are we trying to take away from it now?

I think forward, amplification, forward progress, that's it. But how to make that progress responsible? That's where people like I come in.

Ross (28:39.374)
So think this, you know, a discussion of traditional architecture, doesn't, you know, how do you tie that in with a sort of more modern lifestyle? And do you think there's changes in lifestyles that can be facilitated through the architecture in a positive way?

James Inedu-George (28:56.887)
I think there's amplifications in present lifestyles that can be created through understanding the lives of our ancestry. But I think the major takeaway for me from studying traditional architecture is that the buildings we're underutilizing are built mass, generally.

Ross (29:06.926)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (29:19.391)
Well, it takes a Herculean effort to build a city or build a building. Imagine building a bridge. And then you build that bridge and it's just a bridge. It doesn't make any sense. We can't continue to think like that. You build a building, it's a high -rise building, 40 floors high. It took you 10 years to put together. Then it's just a building with a twisting facade. Who cares about that?

Who cares about that? It has to be responsible, has to fit into the things. It has to make it possible that I can take a one hour bath. If not, why is it there?

James Inedu-George (30:02.173)
And these things are possible. They are not difficult, they are not far away from us. Traditional architecture didn't make us live bad lives. It made people live at the top of the lives that were acceptable and accessible at that point in time. When there were horses, it allowed for horses to birth. When they could farm with holes, it allowed for the farm to come to the house.

When the toilets weren't indoor, they put the toilets in a way that it didn't smell and stink up the rest of the house. When there was no indoor kitchen, they put the kitchen in way that, the smell of the kitchen, the good smells go in a certain way, the bad smells go in a certain way, but the fire doesn't burn down the house. So what we've lost is that ability to make architecture adaptable on the highest level. And instead of making adaptable, we've...

It's the same argument with this running back to build buildings in mud. Okay, we've got a problem. Concrete is an energy guzzler, so is steel. Yes, I understand that. So are cars. Right? So now the idea is to build in mud. It doesn't make any sense. We got to concrete not by going back to Rome. We understood Rome and amplified the performance of concrete.

Ross (31:06.254)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (31:31.448)
The most important religion in humanity is progress. The day it stops, end of humanity. And that's what we're trying to accelerate ourselves towards, the way we're going. Because we're going back to the worst aspects of our tradition. Not the best aspects of it.

Ross (31:46.658)
Hmm.

Ross (31:50.67)
So you say in a sense that the materials are kind of irrelevant and that it's more the initial concept and that is more important. So when you're sort of moving this stuff into today and trying to sort of build things with these principles, obviously you're not building it with mud. Made that clear. But do you think there's a role for rethinking the materials we use? Or can we sort of?

James Inedu-George (32:10.355)
Auf Wiedersehen!

Ross (32:18.132)
make use of modern materials, steel, concrete, etc. in better ways.

James Inedu-George (32:23.359)
I think we can make use of materials in better ways. think, look, until we got to steel and concrete, architecture wasn't democratic. Most of us would have lived and died and never ever been able to build a shack for ourselves. Steel and concrete and glass liberated architecture. Why? Because they are industrialized products and because they are industrialized, they are semi -accessible to the world.

Ross (32:53.464)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (32:53.907)
We haven't found a replacement to them. We can't keep lying to ourselves. We find all these niche materials every now and then. This net that does this, this kind of hemp concrete. We do, we find a lot of stuff, but they're not on the scale of the revolution of reinforced concrete, steel and glass. We're still in that revolution. We've not been able to find any roots out of it. And I don't think it's a bad revolution. I think it's just not well used.

Ross (33:10.636)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (33:23.079)
Right? think that, of course, usage of materials, for instance, is the forte of the architect. You want to some kind of stone in some place that has a perfect kind of stone. Like, for instance, in Greece, you'd want to use marble, because marble is a ubiquitous material in Greece and reminds you of the ancient buildings in Greece. of course, do that. But I'm saying that...

It doesn't mean that now we all build all our buildings in marble. Senseless. It's senseless. There's architecture that is specific and there's architecture that is ubiquitous for everybody. I'm not talking about the specific architecture. You can do whatever you want because when architecture is specific, it means that the client wants to create a certain kind of sound. So if you want to use limestone from...

Ross (33:56.656)
Yeah.

James Inedu-George (34:18.951)
underneath of Israel is fine. But the architecture of every day, the houses we live in, our schools, our churches, etc. We have to think it as rationally as possible. And that's what we're losing out. is not a rational material. You can't be using computers and driving Teslas and be living in a mod house. It's a senseless proposition.

Ross (34:45.855)
I think also, I guess, where you're coming from, which is very different to maybe a European perspective, how quickly Nigerian cities are urbanizing and the incredible growth of somewhere like Lagos, where it's presumably millions of buildings every year being constructed very quickly to meet this demand. And I don't know what the...

population statistics are like at the moment in terms of if that's leveling out or if that's still still happening. But from what I've seen, yeah, you're still doing a hell of a lot of building. So yeah, it has to be systematized and we need to find a way of like delivering that at scale in a sensible way. Yeah.

James Inedu-George (35:27.807)
Lagos is, last I read it says 16 million. When you're in Lagos, it doesn't feel like 16 million. It's 16 that feels like 20. So it's a lot of people. It's a lot of people and Africa is the new world.

You can say whatever you want to say, but the world is going to back, invert itself back into Africa. So Africa must be prepared for the world. I mean, it will be stupid not to prepare ourselves for the world by... Look, even in Europe, because I'm in Europe a lot, right? Even in Europe, it's... People need homes. People give birth to children. People need homes. Right? And not everybody can afford this kind of one -offs.

Ross (35:49.112)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (36:10.535)
that we want to, I mean, yeah, we can make all those noises. To get a building LEED certified in Europe or America is a peculiar task. Imagine that task in a place like Africa where every year a city grows by million people. It's irresponsible. It's irresponsible.

Ross (36:12.003)
Yeah.

Ross (36:29.816)
Mmm.

Hmm.

James Inedu-George (36:35.859)
What our concerns should be, even globally, is to reduce the construction time of buildings and to build them in a more systematized fashion. That's what our concerns should be. Not on cities, on city scale. Less of the one -off, one -museum. An architect, a conventional architect doesn't build a museum in his lifetime.

Ross (37:01.614)
Mm -hmm.

James Inedu-George (37:03.095)
You know what I'm saying, conventional urban planner doesn't plan a city in his lifetime. So let's stick with the facts, and the numbers and the realities of it. What do we build mostly? We build houses and housing, right? Okay, let's do that at the best level we can, giving people the best quality of life they can get without stacking them together like termites.

Ross (37:04.195)
Yeah.

Ross (37:27.086)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (37:28.696)
So these things are very important and it's very urgent too. But I think that every generation of architects wants to make a revolution. Sometimes the revolution is going backwards.

Ross (37:45.132)
You

Ross (37:48.758)
Can you give us a sense of what sort of form the urbanization of Nigerian cities is taking at the moment and what a different form might look like if we learn from traditional architecture?

James Inedu-George (38:03.389)
Okay, wait, you know, you know, you know there's this need in the world generally for everything to look alike.

Ross (38:10.359)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (38:12.275)
Singapore looks a little bit like Dubai, Dubai looks like Singapore, Singapore looks like Manhattan. Manhattan was the model. Central London is becoming Manhattanized because when you stand at the Tate and you look over the things, it's the same what they call it, the same skyline of Manhattan to a certain degree, right? Can't find yourself in it. So Africans are feeling left out of that.

Ross (38:16.002)
Yeah.

Ross (38:24.588)
Yeah, yeah.

Ross (38:34.126)
Sure.

James Inedu-George (38:41.479)
And so we're trying to westernize our cities by planning in this intense grid system, which is fine. The grid is the most important invention in architecture. It's very good. But what we are failing to do is to create a legible city network. So our cities, they don't have a legible form. We've not been able to scrape and put together a legible form.

Ross (38:53.582)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (39:10.181)
upon which we can then make these excessive grid -like road networks. That's the difference between traditional planning and every traditional Afghan city that you see a map of. If you know the form of the cities, you know that this city is this place and that city is that place. So it's legible from the palace to the market. It spreads out. Then when you add layers on top, you now make it more connected.

Ross (39:28.59)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (39:38.089)
Connectivity is important, but it's not as important as legibility. What we're losing in African cities today, trying to become like Dubai, which in itself is not a very legible city, very beautiful, not legible, right? We're losing the ability to make a city that speaks to what we are and what we're trying to be. Lagos is never going to become the financial capital of the world.

I don't think Lagos should even aspire for that. Lagos is so many things and there's so many other spots, right, that London and New York can't fill. But it won't be the financial capital of the world. So why are we trying to make it like Manhattan?

Ross (40:21.677)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (40:23.773)
So we have to discover the form of Lego. So I think that there's a lot that must be learned from our traditional architecture, because we've always lived in clusters, but those clusters are within other clusters. it was intensity, reduction of intensity, another intense, almost like hamlets. So it was intense zones and locations connected by movement and greens, Our cities have to go back to that.

Ross (40:43.607)
Mmm.

James Inedu-George (40:54.099)
But somehow we are ashamed of living like that. We want to live intensely in the highest buildings. I love to design the highest buildings, but our cities are conjoined in another way, traditionally. And until we can figure out how to conjoin our cities again, like I've just described, we're going to struggle badly. Because the things that mean a lot to the European city planner doesn't mean a lot to the guy who lives in Lagos.

Ross (41:05.571)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (41:22.557)
The view to the sea is not an important thing in Lagos. The view from your window is not important. So, Bobo Assites are built to try and conserve the view to the sea. Conserve the view from your windows. We don't have a St. Paul's Cathedral to look out to. Nobody looks out of his windows. Most people don't stay on their balconies. They put washing on their balconies.

So if you make your city based on those views, then what city are you making?

Ross (41:54.68)
Yeah, I want to give you a chance as we're getting to the end of the conversation, I wanted to hear a bit about your work and if you want to highlight any projects in particular, I'd be really interested to hear and I can point people towards it in the episode description.

James Inedu-George (42:13.395)
Okay, we're presently creating the groundwork of what will be another type of architecture. So our work is in flux, but we're also, the process of making the work is also in flux. It used to be to have a great idea or what looked like a great idea and then everybody jumps on that idea and splits it out.

Ross (42:29.646)
Hmm.

James Inedu-George (42:42.323)
we make something out of it. But it's more collaborative now because we're thinking deeper about the situations and trying to ensure that there's a bigger worldview. So our architecture is becoming more introspective.

The architecture used be quite flashy before. It to always have a change of wow, right? But it's less like that now. We're doing this 5 ,000 -seater event and performance space, which is completing this year in Abuja, in Nigeria.

which is an adaptive transformation of a disused warehouse, a decommissioned warehouse that we were called to compete to. So we kind of created this engineering and wedged it from collapse, then created something that looked like a bird in flight, but that was created so that air could flow out of the center of the building. So it's being built now. It's going to be a beautiful building.

Ross (43:44.93)
wow.

James Inedu-George (43:50.231)
because the inside speaks to what I was saying about Hausa traditional architecture is a series of different environments that are marked by their ceiling designs. some designs are curved, some have a cathedral feel, some are flat, some are wavy. They designed to amplify the performance of that space, but at the same time to also create these individual walls.

that are connected by passages, etc. So again, it seems like we're putting our thoughts to practice the best we can. We're also doing a preservation in Accra right now, in Ghana, in Chibi, which is a 200 -year -old Presbyterian church that was built by the Basel mission when they first came to Chibi.

Ross (44:28.237)
Yeah.

James Inedu-George (44:45.567)
in Accra. was the first land that the chief gave them. they brought the windows, the wood for the windows was brought from Europe. They had wanted to use stained glass but they couldn't do it in Accra at that time. 200 years ago is a long time. So the walls are built in a mixture of mud and stone. The roof was timber shingles etc. So what we did was to study the files and

kind of regenerate the work back to what it was supposed to be. First we, when we met the church, the roof was now covered in this GI zinc roofing sheets that had rusted. So we took that off, took off the old shingles, and then we, by virtue of what we had, we reignited a dying industry in Ghana that made wood shingles for roofs, right? We also designed,

Ross (45:38.731)
wow.

James Inedu-George (45:41.839)
stained glass for the church, insides and the outsides and the windows and also produce that stained glass with a lot of pain and struggle in Ghana. the stained glass windows are up. So we've taken off all the old windows and doors and now we're creating this glass pyramid, this pooled pyramid at the front of the church where we're going to make a museum for

for all the kind of saints that have used the church and all the doors and windows and all the things that were removed from the church which we've tagged and cataloged that's almost that's about 90 95 percent done now that's coming coming up stream very soon so i mean those are two projects that are dear to me now there are other things on the border on site that are also just as important