DW Transtel | 364982
English
2 x 30 min
Worldwide

“We are the youngest continent, urbanizing at the fastest rate”. Lesley Lokko, curator of the highly acclaimed 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, is absolutely sure: “Africa is the laboratory of the future”. And nowhere is this future unfolding more clearly than along the coast of West Africa, between Dakar and Lagos. This is where the world’s largest urban centers will emerge over the coming decades. More than 80 per cent of all buildings in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to be built by 2050 – using cement, steel and aluminum – materials that already account for almost a quarter of global emissions. Concrete has become a staple of everyday life in Africa: it’s readily available, inexpensive and promises social mobility, safety, modernity and progress.

But bold architects, construction professionals and visionaries from Africa are harnessing this momentum – despite considerable resistance – to drive contemporary building practices across the continent: using climate-appropriate building materials such as clay and drawing on traditional, local knowledge to develop ideas for the future.

Francis Kéré, the first African architect to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize, has designed a building in Dakar for the German Goethe Institute: a modern structure made from locally produced mud bricks. Nzinga Mboup, her colleague Nicolas Rondet and the engineer Doudou Dème aim to demonstrate that a different, climate-appropriate and site-specific approach to building is possible. And influential pioneer Lesley Lokko founded the African Futures Institute in Accra, Ghana, as a think tank and school of architecture.

Spanning seven years marked by political upheaval, this documentary traces how African architecture is emerging from centuries of obscurity to take center stage in the debate over sustainable building practice.

01 The Red and The Grey Matter – New Architecture in Africa Part 1
02 The Red and The Grey Matter – New Architecture in Africa Part 2