Architecture's Ability to Alter Narratives

Hello everyone. As I said, I'm Mariam Issoufou. I'm an architect from Niamey, where my practice is based. I was going to tell you all about the fact that I was a software developer and everything like that, but now I don't have to because it was just talked about. I spend my time and pilot my firm between the US East Coast and Niamey for multiple reasons, part of the reason being that because I used to have a previous career, I was already living there. So now I spend half the year in one place and half the year in the other.

Niger: Context and Climate

One thing that's significant about Niger is its climate. It is a desert country, and as such the implications are very profound — from an economic point of view, because it's a landlocked country; from a cultural point of view, it's a Muslim country, and as such actually has more in common, I would say, with a country like Algeria or Libya than it would with a country like Ghana, for example. It also has profound impact from an architectural point of view. Again, because it's a landlocked country, even things like importing materials is a big deal. The kinds of materials you have at your disposal are very scarce. When we work on projects, we really only have access to three materials if we want to work locally, without importing anything. These things become very profound very quickly.

Niamey 2000: Housing and Density

When we worked on our first project in Niamey, the capital, all of these challenges became evident very quickly. This was a housing project in which we wanted to do many, many things — maybe too many things. Essentially, it's a context that is fraught with challenge. Not just the climate, but it's one of the poorest countries in the world. It's a capital city that is flat, as you can see, and that's spreading, but the infrastructure cannot really follow. There isn't enough capacity for electricity to reach the far-flung areas of the city, for example, or even access to water sometimes in the newer neighborhoods.

It quickly became evident that we also need to think about density. How do we start densifying in areas such as this one, but without necessarily resorting to apartment towers or apartment buildings? This is a place where there are no apartments, actually. And culturally, it would probably be cultural suicide, in a way, considering how isolating apartments can be and considering how communal the local society is.

This was really coming from this introspection to begin with. As you can see, the growth of the city — how rapid it has been and how much it's growing exponentially at this point — because of things like climate change, because of people fleeing villages and nearby towns to come into the city because they can no longer farm, because there are so many droughts, and so on.

It became this exercise of looking at how we use land right now. Because we actually have a lot of it, we waste it — we just spread it around. But the infrastructure doesn't really follow, so that's not really the best thing we could do. We started thinking about how to take a typical plot of land where someone might be able to split it and build two houses, and how many can we compact into that. Through different manipulations, we tried to figure out how to go up in height — maybe one level, maybe two levels — in a country where everything is built on one level, on the ground floor. That actually means you double or triple density, which is probably good enough as a beginning.

But at the same time, because it's a Muslim country and things like privacy are really important, how do you also accommodate that? Go up in height, not have apartmentz, but protect people's privacy. It ended up becoming this interlocking system where we have homes that are pretty much the same, that use up as much space as possible, but at the same time are organized in such a way as to allow you to be near each other, to be really neighborly, but at the same time not have views inside each other's houses — which is really important. The idea is to just very modestly densify, slightly, just enough to actually slow down this rapid spread.

The result was this project called Niamey 2000, named after the neighborhood it's built in. Aside from looking at the issues of density, we were also looking at cultural behaviors and cultural habits — how is it that we live inside of our own homes, how is it that we socialize. One of the things that's really important in Niger is that we have this thing called the fada. A fada is essentially the equivalent of what you would do on your front porch — that's what the front porch is about. But that space had vanished from more contemporary houses that are more modeled after European-style houses. It was really important for us to start carving out the front and blurring that limit between private and public.

What was really important as well was thinking about climate control. Again, this is a country where it's 45 degrees. The materials we use were really important. Everything was built with compressed earth bricks, which work like adobe bricks, meaning that the inside temperature drops dramatically compared to the outside. What we're doing right now more commonly is building with cement blocks and concrete, which is famous for imprisoning heat — so in a country where it's 45 degrees outside, that's not necessarily the best move.

We also put in place a lot of very simple techniques for cooling the interiors, creating courtyards that would allow you not only to breathe and to socialize, but also to bring in light while filtering it, because the light is really harsh and strong. Things of that nature.

At the end, it became a space where the community — this is one of the things that we noticed when the project was done. We went to get it ready for a first open house and we came and found our front porch completely invaded by the young people from the neighborhood, because they recognized what it was immediately. So we carried this kind of approach into all of our projects.

The Rural Market

Not long ago, we had the opportunity to design a market in Niger. It was a rural market. In rural areas, markets are weekly, but what that means is that there is no local economy in those villages, because people actually move from village to village every day and take their wares with them. Each individual village doesn't necessarily develop its own economy.

We were approached to design a market that would have the possibility to become daily, because there was this motivation to build an economy in the village. What we started looking at was: how do we create a space that still stays on the same site — because it's a site that's actually been used for pretty much a century in that area? It was really a marker for the community. But then how do we make it something so desirable that it would bring in the will to stay there on a daily basis, instead of thinking, "Well, maybe I could get more if I go to the next village on its market day"? And also bring people from elsewhere, so that you have a really strong customer base.

What we found interesting was to explore ways to create a space that would be alluring, that would make you feel you're in someplace special. Just because it's a market, just because it's meant for commerce, and just because it's in the village doesn't mean that it doesn't get to be beautiful. So how do we keep things as simple as possible and use those three materials I was talking about? Metal — recycled metal is actually something that we use heavily. Pretty much all of our metal is recycled. In Africa, we use everything, so we just melt it down, transform it into metal tubes, metal sheets, and so on. Compressed earth bricks. And some cement.

In the beginning, we were supposed to create just thirty different boutique shops, because it was really a small market. We thought, well, if we give them more — like fifty to sixty — then the market has the time to grow. But little did we know: during construction, the place became so famous because of those structures that people were seeing coming up and wondering what they were, that the market acquired this new rarity. On opening day, when we arrived, it was completely full. There was actually no space. So now we're already talking about an extension.

That was really gratifying. It ended up anchoring the market even more than it used to be, as an important amenity for the whole region — not just for that particular village.

The Hikma Project: Mosque and Library

The same approach applied when we had the privilege of working on this particular project. The image you see is a mosque made by a master mason who won an Aga Khan Prize for Architecture for a similar mosque in 1986 in Niger. We found that there were plans to tear down this mosque and make a replica in cement in its place, because, as you can see, the mosque was pretty much melting — it was made out of adobe, and we have kind of lost the ability to maintain structures such as these. On top of that, it had become too small; the population had really increased.

So what did we do? A whole brainstorming started when we were trying to think about what we could turn this into, what kind of space this could be so that we could save it, essentially. The answer ended up actually coming almost by mistake, through a few conversations. An idea was floated around that it would be turned into a library — which I thought was so radical. Oh my God, yes, totally.

But at the same time, we had to build a mosque on the site nearby. So the result was this: we refurbished the original mosque, made sure we brought it back to its original splendor, instead of trying to transform it. We really wanted to respect it for the jewel that it was and for the architectural legacy it represented. And then we made a new mosque nearby, along with other program — classrooms, workshop spaces, things of that nature.

It became this complex, because we were responding to certain local realities. One of which being that Niger has one of the youngest populations in the world — roughly seventy-five percent of the population is below twenty-five, but the education level is incredibly low. What that means is that the youth doesn't really have any outlets. They have very little access to education, but a lot of access to religion. And we are surrounded by countries like northern Nigeria with Boko Haram, Mali to the west, Algeria, Libya. It's a very intense situation, and it's a situation where young people get radicalized very easily.

So we started thinking about how to put together the project in such a way that it would address some of these issues. Initially, we were supposed to have two separate projects — a library and a mosque. But what we ended up doing was lobbying to have a whole complex where the two could talk to each other. You could have young people in the library studying for an exam, and then when it was prayer time, walking over to the mosque. All of a sudden, the relationship between the two — which nowadays, all over the world, you really have this confrontation between secular knowledge and religion; it's not something unique to Islam, it's something you can see worldwide at this point — for us, that was also an opportunity to address that and to help de-escalate that tension in a very benign, very simple way.

We were very lucky to have access to the original masons who built the initial structure, which helped bring it back to life. But it also allowed us to experiment in terms of materials and additives that we could add to the mud or to the different soils we were using, in order to bring in new ways of doing this kind of architecture that is more durable — that doesn't need maintenance for ten to fifteen years, as opposed to needing to be rendered every year.

At the same time, we were able to introduce new forms, or new ways of doing the same forms they were already doing in that area. Domes, for example, are not necessarily made with bricks like this — they're more made with wood packed with mud, almost like a reinforced concrete approach. So it was really interesting for us, in the new mosque, to explore what was happening in the previous one and present a new interpretation of that.

The results were spaces like these. This is the ceiling of the new mosque, where we were able to use concrete and bricks and recapture some of that magical feeling that used to be in the old mosque, which is now a library. All of a sudden, it became this — just like the market — something of a magical space, according to the students, where they could take refuge in a way. That's something we did not expect: they were thinking about it as this place to which they could retreat.

A Practice of Repair

Throughout these projects, we quickly started realizing that it was starting to feel as though we were becoming repairmen and women — where every time there was a project, because of the context, all of a sudden there were all these opportunities for fixing something, or for making a contribution towards making something better, or making something less problematic. Whether it was through housing, or economically with the market project, or with the mosque project.

The Valley of Artisans

So it was really natural for this next project — which I'm extremely excited about sharing — to come our way. It came about through Design Indaba, because they were interested in doing projects in different African cities. We started talking about possibilities with the city and with Design Indaba about what would be really useful in terms of a project.

We landed on this amazing situation, this goldmine, coming from the fact that the city of Niamey is right now being re-engineered and redeveloped. There's a lot of investment being put into cultural projects, infrastructure projects, and things of that nature. But to understand the project, I need to tell you the story of the city of Niamey.

Niamey is a city that was master-planned by the French during colonization. It used to be just a fishing village — it's a riverfront city — and it had this valley running through it. What the French did when they made the master plan is that they split the city alongside the valley. On one side was the European quarter, and on the other side was the indigenous quarter, as they called it. That separation actually persisted after colonization. What used to be "European" and "indigenous" became haves and have-nots, where the political and economic elites took residence in what used to be the European quarter, and the middle-income and low-income population ended up on the other side.

The valley also divides the city religiously, where the more conservative parts of the city tend to be in the lower-income areas, and the less conservative ones on the other side. It even affected how vegetation works in the city — the richer parts are much greener than the poorer parts.

After colonization, this amazing thing happened. A man called Boubou Hama — a distinguished writer, author, intellectual, philosopher — aware of this history of the valley that runs through the city, proposed that it be turned into what he called the Valley of Culture. His idea was to obliterate this divide by placing different cultural programs along it that would be a way for people to come together from either side. At the bottom of the valley, right before the end of colonization, a museum had been erected — our main national museum, named after Boubou Hama — and the idea was to have this itinerary that would bring you all the way down to the museum, along which you would encounter other cultural programs.

But at that point, when he talked about the idea, no one really listened. It was kind of forgotten. We have written traces of it, but nothing was ever made of it. A couple of years ago, the current mayor of the city unearthed all of this, got really excited about this notion of recreating this Valley of Culture. There was also a redevelopment of the waterfront being thought about — not in terms of putting hotels or anything like that, but public space, because there is no public space and there are borderline no cultural institutions aside from the National Museum in the entire city.

They saw this great opportunity to make a promenade that would bring people from way further up in the city all the way down to the water. That's where Design Indaba came in, because their interest in developing a pilot project forced the city to think more critically and quickly about something we could do as a first step. What they came up with was a Valley of Artisans, because craftsmanship is really developed in the country. We have everything from weavers to metalworkers, jewelers, potters — you name it. A lot of them are closed away in the National Museum, meaning you actually have to pay to have access to them. Others are only in places that only tourists go. The population itself doesn't really have access to them. So the idea was to pepper them all along this itinerary.

When we started thinking about it, I was really interested in a space that would be something like an installation. It just felt like it needed something that would be a little bit magical. I had been obsessed with these round structures you can see — these are granaries in northwestern Niger. They are hand-molded, basically beautiful thin shells where every year the harvest is stored. I've been dreaming of doing something with that. As you can see, they really mold them by hand — it's just crumbs of clay shaped into these perfectly round, perfect forms.

Looking at the site we had, it was actually a bit daunting to figure out how to inject this into the context, considering that we had buildings all around — it's actually the section of the city that has the tallest buildings, meaning just twelve levels, really. But what we came up with was something where we were thinking about ways to maintain this shell approach, this delicate, almost fragile quality, as though it was going to blow over at any given moment. The idea is that there would be several sites along which the artisans would be located, and the shells would basically be peppered all over.

At the same time, they were supposed to have public program, because the vision of the city was that it wasn't necessarily just a commercial space for these artisans, or a display space for what they were doing, but it was also to be turned into a public space that would be alive at night — because the valley right now is actually a really dangerous space. It's not lit, there's a lot of crime. So there's strong motivation to really turn it on its head with programs like these.

We came up with something very simple: this shell that can contain different kinds of program — whether it's an amphitheater, shops, spaces for socializing, play, you name it. They could vary in size, in shape. For the first stage, it will look something like this, where we have the valley on one side with the water stream that runs through it and goes to the river, kept in its ecological way, and then these structures peppered around as this basically large-scale installation, essentially over two hundred meters.

The idea is that at night, it could be someplace that really brought in the population — particularly because of the heat. I cannot say it enough: going out and walking around at night is something that's very desirable, but there are actually no places where you can really do that. There's no real infrastructure to accompany that reality.

What I find interesting about this project is that it's really exploring local craftsmanship through the project itself, through the spaces it's using, in a very simple — a very "dumb," as we say in architecture — system that allows us flexibility and that can even maybe create something of a dream world when you're weaving in and outside of it. It seems kind of surreal, but I think it's a great step towards changing the narrative of a place that has been deeply negative — both historically and today, in terms of the danger associated with it.

I'm so grateful that, thanks to Design Indaba, it looks like we'll be able to make this happen very, very soon.

Thank you.