Radical Sustainability

Introduction by Lesley Lokko

Good evening, everyone, and a very warm welcome to you all, both here in Accra and online around the world. Tonight is incredibly special for us at the just-launched African Futures Institute — the AFI. Not only do we get to introduce ourselves via the first lecture of the season, but we also get to do it through two outstanding African women: Alero Olympio, in whose memory this particular lecture series is given, and Mariam Issoufou, who was the unanimous choice when we began thinking about this series a few months ago.

I'd also like to take a moment before we start to remember Alero's sister, the brilliant, funny, gifted, and complex Natasha Olympio, who would have been the first to champion this initiative. This event is bittersweet for many of us in the room, but I think everyone will also agree that it's long overdue.

Although we do have an anonymous donor for this particular talk, I'd like to thank both the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the support that makes the AFI possible. The AFI is a new kind of institute: it is both a public event platform, which begins now, and an academic program, which will begin in 2022. The next nine months are devoted exclusively to putting on lectures, talks, films, seminars, and discussions around architecture.

I have to say that we're a tiny organization, and I'd like to thank everyone on the team: Kofi, Esia, Yao, Kambu, Anthony, Warame, Ruth Ann Richardson, Ruth Daa, Erica, Jolik — who came all the way from New York — Michelle Kesler, and Victor Saki, who have worked around the clock over this past month, particularly in these last few days. Our filmmakers Maui and Festus Jackson, who's here, and of course Binta, Judith, and Zainab of the Mixed Design Hub, which is where we're holding the event. Our next lecture will be on September 15th and will be held here, and then we move into our own permanent space just up the road.

Over the past week, for those of you who follow us on Instagram, you'll have seen a mosaic campaign featuring quotes and words from a number of people around the world remembering and honoring Alero Olympio. I'm not going to read them out tonight, but I would like to read a very short statement from two of the people she held most dear — Dr. John Ennis and Morag Stocks, both of whom are watching from Edinburgh right now:

"We are here to celebrate Alero and the causes that she passionately championed: African architecture, sustainable building methods, and support for women at the heart of the design and building process. In the 1990s, Alero and John formed a small company which acquired a brick-making machine and land to create houses in what was then a newly designated residential area in Accra. The land was of laterite, and trained teams dug foundations and used the mud to make bricks and build the houses — an echo of adobe architecture from former times, in a city in thrall to expensive imported concrete and a Western aesthetic. The project demonstrated that a more sustainable, locally resourced approach could enable contemporary design. Though Alero's untimely death from cancer prevented further work, the deeper message persists: there is a different way, an African way, a way that draws on older local wisdom and walks more lightly on the earth. We miss Alero very much. Her smile and infectious laughter reached us across the years. She lived her life joyfully, kindly, courageously, determined to make a difference, to make things better. Her passion for sustainability and low-impact design resonates increasingly in this troubled world. In 2017, we contributed to a new design center in Alero's name, and I'm delighted that Renée is here with us tonight. We are delighted that Alero's wisdom is now remembered and recognized through this memorial lecture series. Thank you to the AFI and thank you to Mariam Issoufou."

On to tonight's speaker. When I was preparing this short introduction this morning, I went into my files — since I've introduced Mariam a number of times over the past few years, it's always good to reread what you read or spoke. Coincidentally — although I don't believe in coincidences anymore — she came to Johannesburg to lecture at the Graduate School of Architecture almost two years ago to the day. At the time, I introduced her by saying you couldn't possibly have made her up: a former software engineer, US-educated, she splits her time between Niamey and the US. She has built significant projects, won numerous competitions and awards, and is still just getting started.

It's now two years later, and in that time she won the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award and the Prince Claus Award. She's completing projects across West Africa and the Middle East. Her practice is made up of young architects from Togo, Malawi, Zambia, South Africa, and Senegal. She explores Niger's rich architectural legacy for inspiration — not so much reinterpreting traditions but rather learning from them to see which lessons might still apply today. As she herself has said, "Architecture itself cannot make a more equitable world, but we can contribute with specific actions."

Although I'm deeply interested in her work for its social, political, cultural, and aesthetic resonance, I'm equally fascinated by the story of the private and personal journey of an African woman architect exploding onto the international stage with talent and a growing reputation, and how the telling of that story influences and inspires those who hear it.

So please welcome the Alero Olympio Memorial Lecture 2021 speaker, Mariam Issoufou, to the AFI.

Lecture

Thank you so much, Lesley. That was quite an introduction — I don't really know how to follow up on that. But first, let me say how much I appreciate you giving me this opportunity. We were just talking earlier about how all of my lectures have been outside of the continent except for a couple in South Africa. This is the first one outside of South Africa on the continent, and I thank you for that. This is very special for me.

You have to bear with me because, as I've been telling Lesley, I've never been more nervous. Because this is home. And it just means so much more.

Thank you all for coming. I particularly appreciate being invited to give this lecture under the spirit of Alero Olympio. It's incredibly humbling. I definitely feel a kindred spirit of sorts — and also incredible pressure, obviously. But I think as short as her life was, the impact — and I'm so happy you're bringing it to life for all to know and learn from — the impact will resonate for years and years to come. I'm incredibly excited that this will also be recurring, because it is important. We do not have enough examples or legends that we can point to, speak about, and hold up and say: yes, these are the people, these are our icons, the people we look to for inspiration and guidance — rather than, as you pointed out, always looking to the West, looking to other masters who have been elevated. They are masters, no question, but we have masters too. So thank you for that as well.

Intersectional Sustainability

What I thought was most appropriate for this lecture was to talk about sustainability. Not so much because sustainability is what we're all talking about — I think we would all agree that we're in trouble right now as a planet — but also because it was something incredibly important to Alero. And it's something pervasive in every single project I've ever undertaken, every approach, every concept, every building I design. It's something I don't always talk about directly, but it's always there. So I thought this was a good opportunity to address it in a pointed way.

Often when we talk about sustainability, we're thinking about the planet — the environment in so much trouble, the extreme weather events, the droughts, the floods, the earthquakes. But one of the things we often don't realize, especially if you're not in the building industry: as architects and builders, we are massive culprits. The construction industry is single-handedly the third most polluting industry in the world. But that's not even counting the materials — the materials themselves come in at number six. If you mix those two together, we might actually be the number one polluter on the planet.

As designers and architects, this is something we should take incredibly seriously. As much as we talk about solar panels on roofs and all these sustainable approaches — or even sustainable concrete — we can do so much more. In terms of how we build, how we shape spaces, rather than always relying on more technology. Because those solar panels are great and important, but they also have to get fabricated. Their production has a footprint. While necessary, they cannot be the be-all and end-all of what we think of as sustainability.

For me, it's been easier to approach these notions in a way because I started practicing in Niger, where there is incredible scarcity. Solar panels are very expensive. Concrete is very expensive. It's incredibly hot — 45 degrees. So there's this automatic situation where you have to be very careful how you put things together, what materials you use. Otherwise, you build in concrete and it's 45 outside but 50 inside, which means even your air conditioner will probably break trying to cool it down. Imagine what that means in terms of energy consumption and cost.

One of the things I started realizing was that sustainability is not just about the environment — it's about how you sustain people, their lives, their economies, and their cultures. The pervasive use of concrete freed everyone to make all kinds of forms and build quickly and cheaply, but we sacrificed something incredibly important: cultural identity. Because in the twentieth century, after colonization, all of us started thinking that being modern and contemporary meant going with a certain aesthetic, and unless you do that, you're somehow backward. The local materials get left behind.

Meanwhile, we have serious challenges: flight from the countryside because of droughts, climate change driving people into cities, the need for housing — the list goes on. It's imperative that we take this much more seriously. Whether it's the materials we use, which allow us to build much more cheaply — economic sustainability on top of environmental sustainability. Whether it's the way we form spaces to nurture communities and empower people — a form of cultural sustainability, salvaging our heritage, our identity.

Identity has a lot to do with how we present ourselves in the world, how confident we are. If we say that what we're building needs to be in the image of someone else — because that someone else is apparently some kind of god who knows everything and is better at everything — this is a catastrophic problem for our future. And essentially, that's how we approach the world.

The Hikma Community Complex

I grew up in an environment where the traditional architecture is incredibly rich. I've been able to work on projects like this community center in a village in Niger — both a new building and an adaptive reuse project. We had an old mosque in a village that was supposed to be destroyed, a quintessential example of traditional architecture that we tried to save and refurbish. We turned it into a library and then created a new mosque next to it to accommodate the village's needs.

One of the things we encountered immediately: what should this mosque look like? Niger being a Muslim country, we do the same thing with Islamic architecture that we do with Western architecture — all of our mosques now look like Middle Eastern mosques, which have nothing to do with our local identity. Through research, we found examples of seventeenth-century mosques and tried to learn from how the spaces were organized, the sequences of how you move through the mosque, how you pray, how the different spaces are separated — and then made a twenty-first-century interpretation.

We tried to take some of the spirit of the previous mosque and create something more contemporary, something that could stand the test of time, something that didn't require as much maintenance — a problem considering that most populations no longer know how to maintain clay or build with that level of yearly upkeep. Rather than fighting that reality, we acknowledged it: maybe instead of clay, we should use compressed earth bricks, which don't require as much maintenance. And because we needed tall spaces, we could use concrete where it makes sense, creating a hybrid system.

We quickly came across a problem: some of this hybridity requires skill. You think all the skills come from the more contemporary builders, but we found out that when we needed to merge the two systems, our contemporary contractors didn't know how to do it — and the traditional masons didn't know how to deal with the concrete. It became an amazing learning experience where we created hybrid teams. Traditional masons making domes they know how to do — which the contemporary contractors had no idea about. They made formwork that completely misshapen and looked like it was going to collapse. Meanwhile, the traditional masons just jumped on the beams and made perfect spheres by hand, one brick at a time.

We started realizing the true power of this approach to cultural sustainability and heritage. It doesn't shackle you — it actually allows you to create something much more powerful.

Metalwork and the Venice Biennale

We started realizing there was this wealth of skill. In Niger, we can't use wood because it's a desert country, so we use a lot of recycled metal. We have people who are really skilled at soldering — they make shacks, doors, all kinds of things. It became an exercise of figuring out how to use their basic skills and amplify them. How to take simple bars of recycled metal and turn them into something extraordinary. These were all done by local masons and fabricators.

We were working on a project for artisans in Niamey — a market space for the city — and we were invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. What was really important to me was to include the artisans in the fabrication of the installation itself, so that once again we could design something they made with their own hands, something amplified, something that had nothing to do with what they're used to making. They make furniture with this embossed leather technique — furniture, doors — but we turned the whole installation into a showcase of them, their work, and their materials. The model was just this little thing on the side. The whole exhibition was about what they can do.

We asked them to make individual tiles of leather. They didn't understand how we were going to use them. Then we sent them pictures of these four-meter-high fins clad with their leather tiles, and it was a revelation. "So this is in Venice? In Italy?" "Yes."

For me, the importance is for us as designers to find opportunities to take all of us out there into the world — rather than always being the recipient of something. Proving to ourselves, too — because at the end of the day, we're also a little shaky — that not only do we have a lot to offer, but at the same level as anybody else. It's just different.

The Dandaji Market

Another project where we explored similar things was the market we built in Niger. The old market was falling apart — a weekly market where the village was interested in having a permanent market to sustain its local economy. It was very simple: mud walls, flat thatch roofs. It required a lot of maintenance and was difficult to deal with as a daily market.

But one thing about this market: there was a tree in the middle that was incredibly important to the village, one of the public spaces. On market day, people would congregate around it — it was almost like an open-air restaurant. That gave us the starting point. Understanding the place, the culture, the habits, the narrative of this market led us to do something that stayed within the realm of how they already used the space — elevating the place of the tree even more, creating a space children could use to play, where people could sit, where you could have cultural events. Keeping the language of the original market: instead of mud walls, compressed earth bricks with a bit of cement on top for protection, so you never have to touch it again.

Because it's the desert and we couldn't plant trees — there isn't enough water — we used our metalworkers to create recycled metal structures that provide shade and ventilation, with an element of whimsy. Children love it. It became not only a public space but the recess spot — there's a middle school across the street, and every recess all the children invade the market.

It's a simple structure that accommodates everything they need in neat modules. With the metal, because metal attracts heat, it was an exercise in figuring out how high the discs needed to be to not bring heat down to the people below, then staggering them to facilitate ventilation. When you're underneath, there's actually a breeze. When you line them up, the breeze is continuous — almost like being under a canopy with a fan.

We do a lot of prototyping in-house. We build things in our office backyard to test structural soundness, to stand underneath and check whether it's hotter or cooler. It becomes a very involved process.

This project was also very much about economic sustainability. One of the challenges was proposing something cheaper than any alternative. For the community center and mosque, we built the entire complex for less than what they'd been quoted for just the mosque alone — including additional classrooms. Same for this market: we had a budget for thirty stalls and delivered fifty-two for the same amount, thinking the market would grow into them. We were surprised on opening day — every single stall was taken. People watched it being built from other villages, and now even the main town of the region comes on Fridays to sell. It's creating an economic boost for the village.

Earth in the City: The Office Building

One thing that goes along the lines of economic sustainability: when you talk about local materials, people always relate them to villages. "Oh, you can do mud — it's a village." But for us, the very first project I ever developed in Niger was made of earth, and it was in the city. That's the challenge: understanding that these building systems and materials are appropriate anywhere. It's not about villages. It would be as flabbergasting to me as saying wood only belongs in a village. Why? Because it's not as durable as concrete? That doesn't make sense. So why does earth somehow become inferior?

We're building an office building right now in Niamey — the first one made of compressed earth bricks in a hybrid system with concrete, the same system we used for the mosque project. For this project, it was all about economics. The client wanted a serious building. For us, it was about how to make it affordable: earth bricks instead of cement bricks. The biggest issue for office buildings long-term is cooling — in a country where it's 45 degrees, where you need natural light but every window is a heat sink. Everything you spend on air conditioning makes a massive difference.

The entire shape of the project concerned itself with keeping the building cooler, protecting from heat — as few openings as possible, and whenever you do have one, shying away from the sun. Creating mechanisms and systems to keep the interior as cool as possible.

The Niamey Cultural Center

This all leads to a cultural center going under construction in Niamey in a couple of months, which assembles everything I've been talking about: environmental, economic, and cultural sustainability. It looks to local architectural history and to the climate in a very serious way — the shapes it uses, the spaces it produces, how it seeks to stretch the skills of local masons and builders. We use traditional forms, but because of the skills and the way we put them together, we can create new expressions and interpretations.

We looked at local habits — there was a lot of urban agriculture on the site, for example. Urban agriculture is something really hot in the West right now, but in a lot of African cities, we do that just naturally. Everywhere. If you have a plot of land sitting empty, you ask the owner if you can plant some beans. It's sustenance. So rather than imposing green roofs from elsewhere, what if we reincorporate these cultural habits? Rather than fighting them and thinking certain things are appropriate but not others?

The project concerned itself with creating public spaces, openness, so the building would be accessible to anybody even if they're not going inside. Taking both exterior and interior seriously. The towers allow you to collect water, to grow food, to dwell at their base because they create enough shade — like a perpetual canopy at any given moment. It was also about acknowledging that big buildings like cultural centers can be pretty intimidating. How do you make a building that is part of the city, that people can encounter and traverse casually, without feeling the pressure of engaging directly? If they spend enough time hovering around it, eventually they probably will engage.

It's about the gentleness with which we provide spaces. How familiar we can allow people to be with the spaces we propose. How familiar the insides feel, in a way that you truly feel like you belong — because of the forms, the architectural language. It's actually part of you. It's not about some other system out there.

The National Black Theater

One of the questions I've had is whether this approach is specifically African or something universal. I like to think it's a fundamental approach to building and architecture: you concern yourself with local conditions, with what the users need, with the challenges you're trying to tackle, and then build to that.

Now that we're working outside of Niger and outside the continent, it's been fascinating to use the exact same principles. We did this proposal for the National Black Theater in New York. For me, it was about figuring out who the space is for. This was the very first Black theater that showcased plays that wouldn't be played anywhere else in New York. It nurtured so many artists, did so much for the Black community.

What does this mean? What is this Black condition in that context? What kept coming back to me was that being Black in America — like in Africa — is really a story of triumph over adversity. Tapping into this resilience, looking at things like the slave cabin and seeing that a lot of it reminds me of African architectural languages — the rhythms, the patterned surfaces. Looking at the local material: wood. This is not a place for mud or earth, but wood is that material. Imagining interiors that explore that form in a completely different way, since this was an interior project — taking the shell of a building and molding the space inside.

Thinking about how wood can be used structurally, not just as cladding. Structural wood, which would have implications for sound, atmosphere — I would imagine even the smell inside the building. The scale is obviously different from a slave cabin, but it was about tapping into both the pain of the history and the trajectory of a people, then taking that resilience and making it soar.

Closing

At this point, I'm realizing that the work for me has really been about the truth of a place. That's really all it's about. We often overcomplicate things as designers — worrying about styles, schools of thought. Sometimes it's as simple as asking the basic questions of a place, getting down to the DNA of where you are and what you need to build for.

I'll leave it there. Thank you so much for listening.

Q&A with Lesley Lokko

Lesley Lokko: Every time I hear you talk and see your work, I think to myself, that's exactly how it should be. There's a kind of rightness about the forms, the materials, the smell, the process. Did that come later in your work, or did you always know?

Mariam: I'm always looking for the rightness — I'm kind of obsessed with it. That's what the whole process of every single project is about. I keep doing it and throw away so many ideas until it feels right. My approach isn't "oh, I have an idea, this is cool, I'll do it." It's always "is this correct?" — that's the word I always use in my head. Is this correct? Does this feel right? And often it doesn't in the beginning. It almost never does. You have to keep refining, digging deeper, and then things start adding up.

That's why our projects are incredibly layered — they always do so many different things. It's not just the environmental part, not just harvesting water, not just creating culturally appropriate spaces. It's all of that. Because of the process of trying to find what's correct — and there are multiple correct ways — but just one that seems right for the place, for the use, for the stories and narratives, and that can make a contribution to those narratives.

Lesley Lokko: Over the past few years, every time I've been on a jury or adjudicating a competition, people are much more talking about the process — how does the process make this happen?

Mariam: For me, the process is actually what I'm in this for. The thing that excites me most is launching a project where I have no idea what it's going to look like. I don't have the answer. Usually, when I feel like I do, it's not very interesting. But when I don't, there's this long process to look forward to. We spend a huge amount of time in research before starting a project — probably too much. But where else should the ideas come from if not from that research? Otherwise, how do you get to the correct solution?

That work covers everything from history, to the architecture of the place, to the socioeconomic forces at play, the political forces, what people care about, what they do in the morning. It goes from the most profound to the most banal, and all of it matters. You don't know which of those things will float to the surface — and actually, most of the time it's all of them coming together to guide your intuition.

On Interiors

Audience question: On your projects, do you finish them off with interiors yourself?

Mariam: It depends on the projects and what you mean by interiors. Because we do more cultural and public projects, the interior architecture is our concern, and it's the same approach. You have to think about the materials, the right fit. We often have problems finding things — something very simple: we can never find the proper light fixtures. On the very first project we did, a series of six homes, I could not find plain, simple rectangular light fixtures anywhere in Niamey. So we designed metal sconces and had our metalworkers make them — we put a bulb behind and those were the sconces. It has to feel right for the project. If it's not correct for the expression of that project, it doesn't belong there.

On Education

Audience question: How do we bring this into the classroom? How much of this is about how you were educated?

Mariam: Excellent question. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Part of what explains the way I think is how I was educated and the environment I grew up in. I was incredibly fortunate to grow up in the middle of the desert — it doesn't sound fortunate, but it was — near a medieval town from the fifteenth century where I could see local architecture still being lived in. And I went to the local public schools, so in history class I studied our history: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire.

When I went to the US to study and realized that even history is incredibly subjective — the arc of history I was familiar with vanished completely. All of a sudden, everything was about the Renaissance and the Classical period. But I knew that wasn't the whole truth, because I'd been fortunate enough to have had a different set of references.

The problem post-colonization is that we took the education systems of our previous masters and transplanted them. The geographies we study are their geographies. The histories we study are their histories. How can we make something relevant to us? That's not possible under those conditions.

This has to happen internally: being focused like a laser beam on who we are. Building that confidence. For me, knowing more about who we are is what did it. I was taught about the great Modernist masters in architectural school, but what I saw was that this is actually desert architecture — these cubes. Someone would tell me, "Oh, this is Bauhaus architecture," and I'd think, "No, this is actually desert architecture." You start realizing that, first, they didn't invent anything — no matter what they say. And second, there's a wealth of references out there we're just not tapping into, and we're all the poorer for it. The whole world looks one way now, which is really unfortunate.

It's about pushing knowledge of self, pushing our narratives and histories to the forefront — not to say the other ones are not valid, but as an addition. And that's not just for us; it's for the rest of the world too. You cannot imagine a correct future for yourself if your idea of your past is completely erroneous. That's true for us, but it's also true for the Western world. The way they think of themselves is a narrative — one where there's a center of the universe — and it has nothing to do with the actual truth of who we all are.

On Convincing Clients to Use Earth

Audience question: In this era, earth is associated with poverty. How were you able to convince your clients to use earth as a material — especially in the city?

Mariam: Most of our projects are actually in the city. You can't just say "use this, it's better, it's more appropriate." That's compelling, but the argument we really push is the economic one. Architecture is incredibly expensive, so you need to demonstrate you can build it cheaper — which we've proved. But you also need to prove the integrity of the material. You can't just ask people to jump in. We're incredibly rigorous in the process of brick production — crush tests, structural tests, batches tested in the national labs. We make sure clients are reassured.

But even before that, clients need to be convinced. One thing that tends to happen: I don't really push it. Clients come into our office and the bricks are everywhere. We have a play area outside where we make structures and experimentations. They're naturally curious, they ask questions, and we wait for them to ask. We answer.

Even for the office building, the client walked in and directly told me, "This will be a concrete building." I said, "No problem, it's your project." But through the process of talking, of coming in contact with the material more and more, the more questions she had, the more comfortable she became. On the very last presentation, she said, "I think we're going to do this with earth." I was even more shocked than her.

It's not about being on your pulpit saying this is the correct way. You have to respect where people are coming from, respect their fears — which exist because all of us have been conditioned to believe these materials are not good. It's our job to gently navigate that territory.

On Going to Scale

Audience question: Do you ever dream of your methods becoming mainstream?

Mariam: Anyone who wishes to do anything differently does dream that it becomes common currency — otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. But ultimately, it's more about knowing whether you're putting something of value on the table and consistently doing so, without necessarily focusing on whether everybody is doing it. It's about leaving traces of something different — a marker of possibility — that can always be tapped, even later. That's all we can do: explore the possibilities and give them our all. Of course we hope they get amplified through duplication, but that's a long process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's about staying true to a conviction and seeing it through.

Lesley Lokko: I don't know about the rest of the audience, but I feel both moved and inspired — which I do every time you talk. Events like this are really important. Someone asked about education, and education for sure is the curriculum, the stuff you learn in school, the relationship with your teachers and professors. But there's another side to education that's just the possibility to hear something different. I couldn't be prouder that this was the inaugural event.

Mariam: Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for coming.