Blueprints of Paradise

Jury Report
November 2010

Jury: Manthia Diawara/Filmmaker

Lesley Lokko/Architect & Writer
Joe Osae-Addo/Architect
Femke van Zeijl/Journalist & Writer

Venue: Afrika Museum, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Hosts: Irene Hübner/Afrika Museum

Siebe Rossel/Afrika Museum
Berend van der Lans/African Architecture Matters

General Comments

Judging for this innovative competition took place over three consecutive
days, from 29 October to 31st October, 2010, at the Afrika Museum,
Nijmegen, Netherlands. The jury was hosted by Irene Hübner and Siebe
Rossel (Museum), together with Berend van der Lans (African Architecture
Matters), who jointly conceived and ran the competition. This was a very
successful, first-time exercise for both organisations – as a result, a number
of recommendations are put forward for future and continued collaboration
which are contained in the summary section of this report.

For ease of reference, the report is broken down as follows:-

The Competition
1.1 General overview
1.2 List of entries
1.3 Themes and emerging issues
1.4 Exhibition choices
1.5 Jurors’ prizes
1.6 Special mentions

The Exhibition
2.1 Recommendations for exhibition design and content
2.2 Contacts and useful resources for exhibition

Summary
3.1 Conclusion: criticism/comment/recommendations

The Competition

1.1 General Overview

In total, forty two entries were received in a mixture of digital and printed
format, together with several video-format entries which prompted an
 interesting debate around the relationship between the subject matter (an
African architectural future) and the media through which the issues might
be explored. There was a wide range of media – from poetry to video –
although the underlying rationale behind individual projects was by and
large under-developed or described. Although a number of major issues
arising from the competition entries as a whole are discussed in the
Themes & Emerging Issues section of this report, it is worth mentioning
here that one issue in particular that the jury immediately identified was
the way in which almost all the entrants assumed an urban environment as
the natural ‘home’ for their explorations, despite calls for a non site-specific
‘future of Africa’. In part this may be due to the natural tendencies of most
architects/urban planners to work within the urban framework unless
otherwise directed, but it may also reflect the growing importance of urban
environments within Africa (and, to a larger extent, the ‘developing world’)
as a whole. Recent statistics1 show sub-Saharan Africa as having the
highest rates of urbanisation as millions flock to cities in search of work,
better opportunities and better lives and nowhere on the planet are the
issues of urbanisation (in both a problematic and a positive, creative sense)
more urgent than on the African continent. In this context, therefore, the
report follows the overall pattern of assumption that the city (with all its
attendant complexities) is the most appropriate site for exploration.
It was understood that the competition has two aims, and, to a
certain extent, two audiences. On the one hand, in-line with the Museum’s
general remit, there is the desire to complement the Museum’s existing
programme of events with an exhibition featuring issues pertinent to
contemporary African cities. This exhibition will address the Museum’s
visitors, who are largely local in nature, and who may have little prior
knowledge of either the issues, or African cities in general. On the other
hand, addressing a more global, specialised audience of architects, urban
planners, social and cultural anthropologists, artists, etc., the exhibition can
also be seen as an initiator of a longer-term debate in which the Museum
and AAM play an important role.
With this dual audience (one local, one global) in mind,
therefore, the jury attempted to deliver remarks and recommendations that
will serve both, negotiating the fine line between alienation and inclusion
and were mindful of the need to maintain an appropriate level of
sophistication and critical thinking in its comments without remaining
closed in its language and approach. The fact that the jury consisted of
persons with multiple backgrounds, diverse cultural and professional
interests and affiliations was, on balance, extremely useful in this regard. It
was a pleasure to hear varied and different interpretations of the various
entries from a number of different disciplinary perspectives. The diversity
of readings also bolstered the overall position of the competition initiators
that the future of African cities is a complex, multi-layered challenge and
the best results do not necessarily lie in the hands of the more usual
disciplinary suspects (architects and urban planners).

1.2 List of entries

(entries highlighted in red are Jury Choices; entries highlighted
in green are Exhibition Choices and are expanded upon in the
next section)

1
See http://www/un.org/esa/population/publications/WUP2009wup.htm. Retrieved 11 November,
07:24 GMT.
 010 I Love The West and the West Loves Me
011 Changing Places
012 Kgoro Central in Johannesburg, South Africa
013 A New Wilderness (also includes entries 014/015/108)
016 Extreme Makeover
017 Sedar Hall of Residence (also includes 047)
019 Blueprints of Paradise
020 Togolese Residential Area (also includes 021/027/028)
022 Hairdresser’s Premises (also includes 024)
025 Small is Beauty-full
026 Replicable Multi Storey in Africa
029 Re-designing the Temporal Spaces
030 Garden City Park (also includes 053)
031 Cultural and Nautical Centres, Brazzaville, Congo (also includes
048)
032 Suburban Slipstream & Grow-a-Garage
033 Africa Omwagalwa: the African Ideal
034 Catalyst – Environment for Change
035 Living Kiosk
036 The Street
037 La Case Ameliorée
038 Songhai 5.0 Agropolis
039 The African Agora as Generator
040 Africanatomie
041 Building an Identity for Fiamah
042 A Daydream for Africa (also includes 044)
043 SLUM-UP
044 Planning Interventions for Africa’s Future
046 An Active Co-habitation
049 Adapting
050 SSPA
051 Baobab City
052 Innonativ
054 New Typologies of Town Houses
055 Vernacular Homesteading
056 Tangible Future (also includes 057)
058 Africa on Fire
059 Indigenous Meets Contemporary
060 I Am Africa
061 Workondo
062 Faster, Harder, Smarter

1.3 Themes and Emerging Issues

The competition call-for-entries painted an extremely wide picture in terms

of requirements and the entries reflected this, both in terms of scale (i.e.,
entries dealing with cities as a whole, or parts of cities) and in terms of
output. Some entries were confined to a single line (either as a proposition,
or quite literally), others covered several boards/pages. A number of clear
themes were identified which were useful in terms of broadening the
discussion, but may also be useful in terms of planning the exhibition (i.e.,
thematically). Amongst those were:-
The Street (as generator for an African city)
The urban/rural divide
Agriculture (urban allotments, for example)
Suburbia (mainly South African urban investigations)
Utopias
Translation (from concept to form, history to the contemporary)

Perhaps the single common thread running through almost all the entries
was the difficulty (and need) in articulating exactly what it is about African
cities that makes them so complex/challenging/special. There appears to be
an underlying tension between what exists, with all its attendant
problematics (traffic, chaos, rapid growth, over-densification, lack of
planning, etc) and what African cities would like to be. The majority of
entries alluded, either directly or indirectly, to an African quality of urban
space, materials, forms, etc., but were rarely able to accurately describe
this. As a result, those entries that stood out were those that had identified
something specific – a place (030 The Garden City); a form (035 The Living
Kiosk); a concept (039 The African Agora) – and worked with it to produce
alternative visions/propositions. To a certain extent, the vagueness in
entries (and the difficulties it produced) was a result of the wide-ranging
nature of the competition itself. The most successful schemes were able to
translate the open-ended nature of the brief into a tight, specific set of
criteria which they were then able to manipulate and expand.
In terms of emerging issues arising from the entries, several
key themes were clear. First of all, it was refreshing to see notions of
‘pleasure’ and ‘leisure’ emerging as primary considerations in terms of
design. So much of the existing discourse around African cities has its roots
in concepts of ‘lack’ – lack of resources, lack of planning, lack of progress. It
was inspiring to see a project that took ‘pleasure’ and ‘leisure’ as its
starting point (030 The Garden City). It is easy to forget that cities must
also be enjoyable places to live in, and that pleasure in the public realm
(parks, leisure facilities, cultural centres) isn’t only confined to cities in the
North, or outside the African continent. It was also refreshing to see scale
emerging as a key idea – in other words, the notion that change and
development may lie equally in small-scale proposals (035 The Living Kiosk
and 029 Re-designing the Temporal Spaces) as in large-scale
developments. A number of (unselected) entries made the common
mistake of thinking larger-scale propositions are de facto better or more
interesting – it was a nice departure to see something as ubiquitously
African and everyday as the kiosk getting a carefully considered make-
over, pushing the envelope of the familiar to reach new forms and
materials – which, after all, is the very nature and ‘stuff’ of design. Another
interesting phenomenon that emerged was the way in which different
entries handled the supposed dichotomy between the ‘informal’ and the
‘formal’ in African cities. The most powerful entries embraced the so-called
‘informality’ of African urban environments, accepting it as fact and/or point
of departure for further exploration, and did not fall into the usual trap of
eradicating it and starting all over again. Entries that did try and erase or
formalise said spaces tended to have an estranging effect, most notably in
058 Africa on Fire, the solar project entry that seemed to have no basis in
urban reality anywhere on the planet. A key issue the jury identified in the
thinking of urban futures in Africa is the ability to do so without
problematising existing urban structures/spaces, however un-planned or
informal they appear to be. Often the key to finding solutions lies buried in
the so-called ‘problem’ and more careful and sensitive analysis reveals
 mechanisms that may be useful as part of the tools designers (in the
broadest sense of the word) bring to the table. As a result, solutions and
design challenges may be able to move beyond simply formalising the
‘informal’ and the upgrade of settlements but may reveal other ways of
organising, inhabiting and using space that go far beyond the current
contemporary binaries.
The question of translation also arose in several projects,
perhaps most interestingly exemplified by 017 Sedar Hall of Residence.
Here, a building located in Europe (Paris) with deep political and historical
ties to Africa had been allowed to fall into neglect. The more obvious
proposal (i.e., the restoration of the building) was less interesting than the
concept used – to look at traditional West African fabrics as the point of
departure for a new envelope for the building. Again, the literal-ness of the
translation somewhat failed the entry – the result was one-dimensional and
too simplistic to fully carry the promise of its initial architectural gesture,
but the project initiated a lively debate around representation (drawing vs
film); appropriation (history vs the contemporary); disciplinary boundaries
(architecture vs fashion), etc, all of which point to the richness of ideas that
the competition inspired. A few key questions remained: when looking at
African ‘space’, what is the most appropriate medium in terms of
architectural investigation? Are there qualities in film, song, fashion, etc.,
that the traditional means of architectural representation (plan, section,
elevation) have failed to capture or adequately explore? What is/are the
appropriate scales of such investigations? Is ‘Africa’ too large a concept to
be useful in terms of individual explorations?
It isn’t often that one is able to quote Jacques Derrida in a jury
report, but his oft-repeated aphorism, ‘there is a formless desire for another
form, the desire for a new location, new arcades, new corridors, new ways
of living and thinking,2’ seems highly appropriate in the context of this
competition. Is the challenge set out by the competition not just about
Africa, in all its potent complexity, but about the ‘formless desire for
another form . . . new ways of living and thinking’ that Africa may present
to the world. In other words, in trying to re-imagine new civic and urban
futures for Africa, might one not imagine new futures for the rest of the
world?

1.4 Exhibition choices

After much discussion, the following twelve choices were selected as main
entrants in the exhibition. However, despite the narrowing down of the
entries to twelve main choices (for the exhibition) it was also decided that
all entries should feature, in some format or another, in the overall display.
The jury felt it important to showcase the entire spectrum of entries, in part
to highlight the diverse responses to the question of ‘the future of Africa’
but also to encourage future participation in the discourse, however
tentative. Whilst the precise nature and layout of the exhibition is a
decision to be taken by the Museum, its curators and exhibition designers
and AAM, the jury felt a separate consultation process for the exhibition
might be useful and as such, are, in principle, very open to the idea of
further collaboration on the exhibition itself.

2
‘Where the Desire May Live’, Derrida, J., quoted in Rethinking Architecture: a Reader in Cultural
Theory, Leach, N, (ed), Routledge, London/New York, 1997, pp319-323.
017 Sedar Hall of Residence (also includes 047)
022 Hairdresser’s Premises (also includes 024)
029 Re-designing the Temporal Spaces
030 Garden City Park (also includes 053)
032 Suburban Slipstream & Grow-a-Garage
034 Catalyst – Environment for Change
035 Living Kiosk
037 La Case Ameliorée
039 The African Agora as Generator
041 Building an Identity for Fiamah
042 A Daydream for Africa (also includes 044)
059 Indigenous Meets Contemporary

Although there were forty two entries in all, the jury unanimously agreed
that it was better to focus on the best entries and possibly work further
with the entrants to refine and expand on their entries, than to simply show
everything in the exact manner in which entries were received. There were
twelve projects of exceptional depth and sophistication, and the
competition organisers agreed to contact the entrants to provide more
work, if necessary. Mindful of the multiple audiences that this competition
and exhibition seek to address, the jurors selected projects not only on the
basis or their architectural or urban design content, but also on their wider
observations about African ‘space’, however they conceived it, and their
success in representing the issues they identified. A wide range of scales
and locales resulted, from rural Liberia to suburban Johannesburg, and
accurately depicts the immense diversity to be found across the continent.
In 042 A Daydream for Africa, for example, whilst the level of
representation left something to be desired, the idea behind the entry was
both powerful and persuasive – a network of public spaces across the
continent, linked by the various cultural practices (praying, selling, talking)
that are specific to the regions identified, but that are united by a greater
cultural phenomena, the idea of a continent-wide, easily recognisable
(through certain common elements – water, shade, clearings) and utilised
by all. The jury were keen to look beyond flashy graphics (or in some cases,
the lack thereof) to the ideas behind the presentations, and to find ways to
draw out what were essentially challenging and interesting propositions but
often without the appropriate language of graphic and visual representation
to showcase them to their best advantage. To that end, a fair amount of
time was spent in the interpretation of what was seen, allowing, of course,
for the individual juror’s own projections into and onto the entries.

1.5 Jurors’ prizes

After much discussion, the following prizes were awarded:-

Joint First Prize

029 Re-designing the Temporal Spaces
030 The Garden City

Third Prize
039 The African Agora

Jurors’ Special Mentions

032 Slipstream Magazine or Grow-a-Garage and 035 The Living
Kiosk

Projects 029 Re-designing the Temporal Spaces and 030 The Garden City
were chosen as joint first-prize winners specifically because they addressed
the issues set out in the competition brief in innovative, beautifully
described and conceived ways. At one level, Project 029 is a small-scale,
extremely modest proposal which lacks the drama of a large-scale, city-
wide proposition yet it tackles one of Africa’s most recurrent urban issues –
traffic – head-on. It is light on its feet and light on the environment, easily
assembled and manufactured (from local materials) and its form is both
adaptive and reactive. It was easily imaginable in all sorts of cities and
contexts, from Lagos to Lubumbashi, and could be used for all manner of
things, from advertising to shelter, thus impacting a vast audience and a
potentially endless site. Adaptability and accommodation (in the sense of
accommodating a wide range of issues) are key characteristics of African
urban environments and the beauty of this project lies in its ability to
capture that essence, yet remaining contemporary and well-crafted in its
execution. The jury were unanimous in their appreciation of this project.
At the other end of the scale, Project 030 The Garden City,
followed a more traditional competition trajectory by proposing a large-
scale urban development in Kumasi, Ghana’s second city, and the home of
the Ashanti nation. Like Rome, Kumasi is built on hills and has a lush, green
aspect that recent decades of urban development have done little to
protect or explore. This project, described through virtual reality, draws on
a number of classic urban design generators – transportation links, leisure
facilities, sports facilities, etc., but does so in innovative and culturally-
specific ways. The canopied market structure, reminiscent of the patterns
of kente-cloth, serves as a visual reminder of the rich cultural heritage of
the area whilst providing the shade that trees once did, enabling that most
African of phenomena, the market, to take place in a setting that is both
connected to its past, but very much of its contemporary, urban present.
The jury were also impressed by the seamless way in which this scheme
‘knitted together’ different aspects of the entrant’s concerns – from
transport to tree-planting – and presented an image of an urban
environment that was at once landscape and retail space, leisure and
sporting facilities, families and individuals at both the public and private
level. It draws on the everyday preoccupations and activities of Kumasi’s
citizens but brings these together in carefully considered, carefully
executed ways.
The third prize, Project 039 The African Agora, was an
exceptional project in terms of its execution and evocation. The short video
piece was extremely well-made and warranted several viewings in order to
fully grasp its complexities and many-layered meanings. The piece
generated a long and at times heated discussion (which the best projects
should do) about the merits of expression over proposition – for the most
part, whilst the piece was exceptional in terms of its evocation of the
historical move from rural to urban and the unique nature of African public
space, the jury felt it lacked a sufficiently engaging proposition in its
current form. The relationship between the ‘agora’, with its roots in
Classical antiquity, and the uniquely ‘African’ nature of the environment
that the entrants chose to portray was also somewhat under-developed – in
what way is the ‘agora’ in the video uniquely ‘African? – although the jury
was again unanimous in its appreciation of the way the piece perfectly
captured the space and ‘feel’ of many African cities, particularly those of
the south of the continent.

1.6 Special mentions

Finally, although there was no specific mention of a category of special

interest or recommendation in the competition brief, the jury felt moved to
include 032 Slipstream Magazine or Grow-a-Garage and 035 The Living
Kiosk in a category of their own. 035 The Living Kiosk, was similar to the
joint first prize winner, 029 Re-designing the Temporal Spaces, in terms of
its scale and use-ability. The jury were impressed with the choice of the
everyday, ubiquitous kiosk (whose linguistic and architectural roots lie in
Persian, Turkish and Swahili) as the point of departure for design. Its
malleability, and the fact that a kiosk can be made from almost any
material going, makes it a perfect site of design exploration. The multi-
faceted proposals in the entry – from retail to residential – are exemplary of
what happens to kiosks across the continent (when does a kiosk stop being
a kiosk and become a house, for example, or a permanent shop?), although
the jury would have liked to see more exploration of the kiosk (in its many
reincarnations) in context. The entry focused its energies on the tectonics
of re-building and re-configuring the humble kiosk and somewhat neglected
its placement, which is often of equal interest.
Equally, whilst the concerns of 032 Slipstream Magazine or
Grow-a-Garage are perhaps too narrowly specific to South Africa, there was
real wit and innovation in the way the entrants tackled the brief and the
result – a magazine – was as powerful for its presentation and innovation,
as for the issues it identified. The jury found the subtlety of thought, design
intention and representation impressive.
In summary, therefore, the jury were unanimous in their
thinking that both projects were marvellous examples of thinking both
inside and outside the box, and as such, deserve special recognition.

The Exhibition

2.1 Recommendations for exhibition design and content

For ease of thinking and the appropriate division of labour, it was agreed
that the competition should really be thought of as two inter-connected, but
separate projects – the competition on the one hand, and the exhibition on
the other.
In terms of the exhibition, the jury agreed that it, too,
might be split into two parts – one, which deals with the winning entries (all
twelve) and two, which deals with external information about African cities
(some of which the Museum already possesses), to which the remaining
competition entries may contribute. The exact nature of the second part
(the context for the exhibition, in other words) has yet to be decided, but
the jury felt that some combination of film, still images (at a large enough
size and scale that the special feeling of many African cities can be easily
grasped and experienced by an audience who have never seen or visited
Africa before) and text would be very useful. There was also some
discussion about physically building one or a portion of the entries (i.e., the
Living Kiosk), and for that to be placed in the courtyard, or adjacent to the
exhibition as a way of show-casing not only a winning entrant, but some
tangible aspect of the competition and the continent’s architecture as a
whole. Although the end results of some entries did not live up to
expectations or initial promise (as discussed earlier), some of the imagery
contained in the various African urban settings was riveting and would
amply serve the purpose of portraying the African city for an audience
virtually unfamiliar with it. The exhibition would therefore have two parts
and two audiences – the physical exhibition in the museum, more
specifically targeted at its visitors and patrons, and the virtual exhibition,
on the website, which might have clips from the jury process, external links
to other organisations, contacts, resources and wider discourses, for
example, aimed at a much wider audience, but also one already versed in
some of the literature and issues surrounding African cities. In terms of the
physical exhibition in April 2011, some suggestions were put forward in
terms of threading content through the city of Nijmegen, linking the city
with the Museum, but also perhaps with cities on the African continent,
thus paving the way for future collaboration and exchange.
 Summary

3.1 Conclusion: criticism/comment/recommendation

For many of the reasons outlined above, this was a unique and wonderful
opportunity to bring together a number of like-minded individuals, both in
Holland, at the competition jury specifically, and globally, through the
website, to shed and share their experiences, insights and aspirations for
this growing body of knowledge around the contemporary African city.
Perhaps more importantly, given the extensive existing discourse around
African urbanity, this competition (and the subsequent exhibition) also
made room for an important aspect of the discourse which is often left out –
the future. Architecture, unlike many other disciplines which deal with the
creative spirit, is, by its very nature, propositional in intent. It is not enough
to analyse and criticise, however important those two aspects of
engagement may be. The very act of committing oneself to paper in the
form of a drawing, a model, a plan, etc., is a propositional act, a staking out
of territory, form, space, material, etc., with the intention to build, and
therefore, make a change. What separates this competition from many
others is the open-ended, futuristic, no-holds-barred aspect of its brief – it
asked, quite simply, for entrants to dream an alternative future for Africa.
That this future could take the shape of words, drawings, photographs,
models, films, manifestos, etc., is a fitting testament to the richness of the
question under debate (Africa’s future). Having said that, however, the
diversity of means of representation presented a particular ‘problem’ for
the jurors – could a poem accurately be judged alongside a video of an
entire city? How is it possible to weight the effort and imagination involved
in the production of a hydro-electric, solar-powered, water-recycling city
against the image of a woman’s body sheathed in traditional cloth? At one
level, this is the task of the jurors to negotiate, but at another, it sets the
stage for a series of future competitions that might take one or more of the
themes that emerged out of this one, and spin them in both traditional and
innovative ways.
One might look at a recent Israeli entry for a competition
(http://www.natanelelfassy.com/index.php?page=29)3, as an example of a
specific site, building typology, set of concerns, etc., that make use of an
over-arching narrative (the formless desire for new forms), or at the more
recent House in Luanda competition (www.architectafrica.com/house-in-
luanda-competition-2010)4 for a very specific response to a specific set of
conditions, site and scale. In both these competitions, however, the in-built
filter through which Africa is usually viewed often precludes the more
explorative nature of some of the responses that were seen in the
Blueprints of Paradise competition, without which the competition
discussion would have been much poorer.
The jury’s conclusion, therefore, is that the competition as it
stands is the first part of what is hopefully an on-going series of
competitions/seminars/lectures/events that take as their starting point, an
African future, and allow a range of responses to develop, some of which
may be more expansive and open-ended than others, and some which may
require a much narrower focus and intensity. At present there are literally
hundreds of different organisations, from the global scale of governments,
3
See www.natanelelfassy.com. Retrieved 5 November, 2010 at 12:05GMT
4
See www.architectafrica.com. Retrieved 5 November, 2020 at 11:13GMT
 NGOs, the UN, multi-nationals, etc., to the tiny, micro-financed, grass-roots
initiatives (not to mention the intellectual input of site unspecific work on
African cities) that grapple, in some way or another, with the very same
questions the competition identified. The pairing of AAM and the Afrika
Museum seems at first somewhat contradictory – one organisation
dedicated to future, as-yet-un-built projects, and the other, to the
preservation of tradition and, by extension, the past. However, the
enthusiasm and willingness of both parties to share and learn from each
other’s fields of expertise is unusual, and cannot be more highly
recommended. The jury found an intellectual curiosity and level of
engagement on the parts of all participants that is both unique and rare,
and it is hoped that the competition will not be seen as a one-off, once-in-a-
while exercise, but that a commitment to bringing the full range and
experience of contemporary African life (not just in its cities) to a wider
audience through the traditional means (i.e., the Museum and its
exhibitions/events), and through the use of newer technologies, that allow
for different experiences, voices and networks to be formed.
As a final note, it may be worth mentioning that a recent
newsworthy item (www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11694599)5 centred around
efforts to more accurately develop an index by which living standards
across the globe might be measured. In the UN Quality of Life Index,
researchers track and analyze more than economic activity as indicators of
general well-being. Access to leisure facilities, the strength of community,
the distance a person might travel to visit one’s relatives and the length of
time it takes, availability of telecommunications and the reliability and cost
of service, etc, are all seen as viable indices by which ‘happiness’ and
‘progress’ may be measured. Seen in this light, projects like 042 A
Daydream for Africa, 032 Slipstream Magazine or 031 Cultural and Nautical
Centres for Brazzaville, Congo, are very much ‘of-the-moment,’ capturing
perfectly the zeitgeist that argues for a wider range of issues to be taken
into account when planning an ideal urban future.

Lesley Lokko (Editor), Johannesburg, South Africa

(Commentator), Utrecht, the Netherlands
Joe Osae-Addo, Accra, Ghana
Manthia Diawara, New York, USA

5
See www.bbc.com. Retrieved 5 November, 2010 at 12:18GMT