Thinking in Public
This section gathers the lectures, talks, and published essays through which the intellectual frameworks of Mariam Issoufou Architects have been developed and tested, in public. Arranged chronologically, they trace the development of three interconnected strands of thought: on memory and narrative as architectural material; on sustainability as an intersectional and multi-dimensional practice; and on architecture as an act of repair in contexts shaped by historical rupture. Taken together, they form a record of ideas developed in practice, argued through built evidence, and refined over more than a decade.
WRITTEN ESSAYS
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Published in the theoretical volume of the DOM Sub-Saharan Africa Architectural Guide series, this essay argues that the term 'African Architecture' functions as an othering device — isolating work on the continent from the rest of architectural discourse, marking it as exotic, and effectively dismissing it as incomparable to work produced elsewhere. The essay proposes that framing architecture under a continental label produces an over-simplification that does a disservice to one of the most diverse places on the planet. It calls for a move towards specificity over categorisation, and positions the challenges facing African architects as continuous with those facing architects across the Global South — in India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico — rather than as a separate or exceptional problem. Resisting the temptation to develop an African theory of architecture, it argues, opens the door to a wealth of exciting possibilities for what the future could look like.
Read here. -
Contribution to the first comprehensive architectural guide to SubSaharan Africa, covering 49 countries across seven volumes. The Niger chapter was written and edited by Mariam Issoufou, and comprises three distinct parts: a survey of significant pre-colonial and colonial-era buildings across Niger, situating the country's architectural heritage in its full historical and geographical context; a project essay on Niamey 2000, the practice's first major built work; and an interview with the owner of a multi-storey earth-built bed and breakfast in Niamey, documenting a living tradition of earth construction in an urban context. Together the three parts make the case for Niger as a place of rich and underrepresented architectural intelligence.
Niger Introductio (pg 377- 385), Contemporary Housing for Niamey (pg 419-423) -
Published in Elle Decor in January 2021, this essay begins with a formative encounter: a book called The Story of Architecture that devoted itself almost entirely to Western Europe and the United States, relegating the rest of the world's output to little more than a footnote. From this opening, the essay builds an argument about what is missing from the discipline's self-image — and what the cost of that omission is. It turns to a personal case in point: Kamara's own Niamey 2000 project being read by critics as Bauhaus-influenced, when its real inspiration was traditional Hausa architecture from Zinder, Agadez, and Kano — a misreading she uses to open a conversation about where Europe's own modernist shifts actually originated. The essay argues that centuries of sophisticated architectural knowledge from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America are consistently sidelined in favour of a European canon presented as universal, and that the climate crisis and rapid urbanisation cannot be meaningfully addressed until we decolonise our point of view. It closes on the line: how we narrate yesterday determines how we imagine tomorrow.
https://www.mariamissoufou.com/news-1/zkncj8ld9g4p96xt8n2mmd5eml6k54 -
Written as a critical essay for Domus, this piece uses two buildings — the Iturbide Studio in Mexico City by Taller Mauricio Rocha + Gabriela Carrillo, and the School of Dancing Arches in Gujarat by Samira Rathod — to argue that locally rooted architecture is not a regional curiosity but a model for the discipline's future. The essay contends that the Global South has a unique opportunity to move ahead of the Global North by building from local materials, traditional techniques, and climate responsiveness — not as a nostalgic exercise but as a rigorous, transferable, and more sustainable methodology. If the early twentieth century was about technological advances and the promises of the International Style, the twenty-first century might be shaping up to return architecture to its humanity rather than its technical prowess.
https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/gallery/2020/03/13/beyond-critical-regionalism.html -
Published in the Bloomsbury anthology Beauty in Architecture in 2025, this essay develops a sustained argument about the relationship between beauty and injustice in the built environment. It moves through three phases: the economics of beauty, examining how beauty has become commodified and tied to capital; the privilege of beauty, tracing how access to beautiful architecture is distributed unequally along lines of class, race, and colonial history; and the injustice of beauty, arguing that beauty is not a luxury but a primal need — and that its unequal distribution is therefore not a matter of taste but of justice. The essay draws on examples from Hausa urban art, Hassan Fathy's Architecture for the Poor, and the practice's own work in Niger to argue that the most vulnerable communities are often the most in need of beautiful architecture, and that beauty does not require expensive materials — it requires design intelligence, cultural rootedness, and the commitment to treat every building as a site of dignity.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/beauty-in-architecture-9781350477292/
ORAL ESSAYS
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Design Indaba · Cape Town · February 2019
One of the earliest public articulations of the practice's core position: that architecture does not enter a neutral site but a place already carrying a narrative, and that the built intervention will either honour, distort, or erase that narrative. The talk argues through completed projects in Niger that architecture's most urgent capacity is not formal or technical but narrative and its ability to return dignity, anchor identity, and make a community's story visible in built form.
Watch/Read the lecture here. -
University of Johannesburg · August 2019
Delivered at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg in August 2019, this lecture situates the practice's methodology within the broader context of African architecture education and the questions it has consistently failed to ask. The talk draws on the firm’s projects to argue for an architecture rooted in the material, spatial, and cultural intelligence already present in African cities — developed through sustained engagement with communities, builders, and makers rather than imported from outside.
Watch the lecture here. -
MIT · April 2021
Delivered at MIT in April 2021, this lecture develops the argument that the stories a culture holds about its past are the primary material architects work with, whether they acknowledge this or not. An architect who does not read the narrative already present in a place is not working from a neutral position; they are simply working from someone else's story, usually the dominant one. The lecture argues that the discipline has consistently mistaken this borrowed narrative for universality, and that the most urgent task in architecture today is learning to read that narrative before touching the site.
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Alero Olympio Annual Memorial Lecture · Africa Futures Institute · Inaugural lecture · August 2021
This lecture is the origin document for the intellectual framework later named Intersectional Sustainability. Delivered as the inaugural Alero Olympio Annual Memorial Lecture at the Africa Futures Institute in August 2021, it is the first public synthesis of the argument that sustainability in architecture must be understood across four simultaneous dimensions: environmental, social, economic, and cultural. The framework is argued through built and process work in Niger and Senegal, demonstrating through projects that these four dimensions are not competing priorities but a single, indivisible practice.
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Columbia University · October 2021
Delivered at Columbia University in October 2021, this lecture argues that memory — collective, cultural, material — is not a sentimental resource but a precision instrument. Developed through the Dandaji market, the Hikma Community Complex, and the National Black Theatre proposal in Harlem, the talk moves from memory as active design research, to memory as a trap when form is divorced from the structural logic that produced it, to memory as the mechanism through which architecture can move a community forward rather than backward.
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Harvard University · Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture · March 2022
Delivered at Harvard's Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in March 2022, this lecture addresses the relationship between how architecture is taught and what it enables practitioners to see. This was later explored through the ETH Zurich Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability's three research lines — dismantling, unarchiving, and refusing — it argues that the inherited frameworks of architectural education systematically exclude the forms of knowledge most needed for building justly in the Global South, and that a genuinely equitable architecture requires not just new projects but new pedagogical conditions.
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IASS Keynote · ETH Zurich · 2024
Delivered as a keynote at the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures conference at ETH Zurich in 2024, this lecture is the most recent full public statement of the Intersectional Sustainability methodology. Argued through a decade of completed work across Niger, Senegal, Liberia, and the Gulf, it demonstrates that the material and climatic constraints of building in economically vulnerable contexts are not limitations to be overcome but the primary generative conditions of the work. The lecture shows how scarcity — of budget, of imported materials, of mechanical infrastructure — consistently produces architecture of greater environmental, social, economic, and cultural integrity than resource-abundant alternatives.
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The World Around Summit · MoMA, New York · April 2026
Delivered at The World Around Summit at MoMA in April 2026, this keynote introduced Architecture of Repair as a named methodology, distinct from restoration, which attempts to return to an original state, and from reconciliation, which smooths over difference. Repair, as argued here, is a practice that acknowledges what was broken and builds forward from rootedness: from the knowledge, materials, spatial logics, and social structures already present in a place before the rupture. The lecture develops the argument through three projects: the Bët-bi Museum in Senegal; the Unarchiving research tool at ETH Zurich; and the Bura Artifacts Restitution commission.