Local Knowledge, Global Practice
In a conversation with journalist Oscar Peña, Mariam Issoufou reflects on craft, local knowledge, and how environmental responsibility takes different forms across Africa, Europe, and the US.
They discussed our first US project, Gourmega, as well as what sustainability means to people in the different geographies in which we’re currently working.
Issoufou said: “The conversations are completely different from continent to continent. In Africa, nobody cares about the buzzword “sustainability,” but we care about environmental issues like deforestation and the advance of the desert. In a country like Niger, that's really important. People there are trying to make a new world and trying to survive. That’s why I look at economic sustainability, cultural sustainability, all these things that impact the kinds of spaces we make and how we make them. My hyper-locality came from that: a project could be 30% cheaper if you use local materials, local labor, and local expertise. Then you can have affordable, world class architecture that is sustainable by default.
In Europe, because it's such an old place where everything is basically built, the conversation is more about circularity and reuse. America is too young for that to be prevalent because it built itself with materials that are difficult to reuse. There's an opportunity going forward to make buildings that last and can be repurposed. In America, there are ways your impact is calculated, and then you offset it and it's someone else's problem. A series of loopholes. How does that help us as a planet?
Those are things we're not encouraged to think about. The impact that we have not only on the environment, but also on other people. I wish there were a certain set of principles we could agree are important as architects. It’s a responsibility and an incredibly powerful tool.”