Design Pages Online

Goethe Institut Announces A Creative Call For Entries To Commemorate Their Fiftieth Anniversary in Nigeria

2012-03-08T09:57:00.000+01:00

50 Years, 50 Chairs

What is a chair?

A chair is defined as a stable, raised surface used to sit on, commonly for use by

one person. Chairs exist in various forms from backless stools, swings, saddles,

fixed seats to armchairs. A chair is a tool of various significances as a chair gives

support to the person sitting on it. This support may be physical, political, emotional,

historical or positional.

For example, a chair symbolises power or authority to the person who is appointed

to it such as a ruler on a throne or the chairperson of a meeting or organisation.

More often than not, the chair remains long after the occupant has vacated it.

The Brief

How can we show the variety in the Nigerian creative and societal landscape using

chairs as the metaphorical framework? The challenge is not to only create an aesthetically pleasing piece of work, but there must also be a polemic intent to back it.

Create a chair that challenges and inspires our perception of what a conventional

chair looks like. Chairs may range from miniature to large scale, impractical to usable, from conceptual to concrete.

Entries are welcome from every creative field from architecture to zootechnics!

Submission Deadline; March 30, 2012

Submission Requirements;

Name; Title First name Surname

Profession;

Genre;

Title of work;

Medium of work;

Dimensions of chair;

Description of work; Describe in 300 words or less the reasoning behind your creation. Also submit an image of your sketch or if you have a finished chair that fits into

the scheme of the brief send us an image of it (All images must be embedded in the

pdf document)

ALL entries must be sent as a single pdf document to 50chairs@lagos.goethe.org

Submission Deadline; March 30, 2012.

DADA collaborates with Goethe on ArtSpace RoundUp

2012-02-11T07:07:00.001+01:00

ArtSpace RoundUp #1: The Art & Space of Public Opinion

Dream Arts & Design Agency is pleased to introduce the first in a series of events planned in collaboration with Goethe Institut to hold through 2012. ArtSpace RoundUp is a set of presentations and discursive events surrounding artistic practice and spatial realities that shape and envelope them. In exploring the meeting point between art and space, Artspace Roundup brings together architects, artists, curators, producers, cultural programmers, critics, and ‘consumers’ of artistic ‘products’ into different spaces in Lagos where each roundtable discussion will be preceded by artistic presentations on set themes.

Historical precedents to ArtSpace RoundUp #1

Events that have happened in the months leading to the year 2012 have been replete with keen contests for key spaces found critical to the expression of public opinion. From the series of revolutions that rocked North Africa and the middle East, to the ‘Occupy’ protests against economic and social inequality in Europe and North America, the expressions of public opinion have been typified by contests for ‘protest space’ between protesters and agents of state.

The Nigerian Hammattan.

Several events have served to put this type of scenario in new perspective, in Nigeria, protesters against fuel price increase and waste in the public sector took their agitations beyond social media spaces in January, to convert available public spaces into public spheres for aggregating and propagating public opinion, access to these spaces had to be contested with agents of state in a manner akin to the ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Occupy’ events and the Lagos protests in particular featured a wide variety of artistic expressions by well known practitioners whose creative oeuvres are well known to have tackled similar issues in the past and regular citizens who improvised in different ways to have their voices heard.

The fight for Cyber-space.

Also in January, attempts to combat the piracy of intellectual property on the internet through a proposed legislative act in the United States, largely sponsored by organizations and groups representative of traditional models of media content creation and distribution met with stiff protests against the proposed Protect IP Act (PIPA) which reached a head on January 18 with the ‘black out’ of some websites, most noticeably the English Wikipedia sites. Alongside Wikipedia, opponents to PIPA include Mozilla Corporation, Facebook, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Yahoo!, eBay, American Express, Reddit, Google, Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch citing mainly concerns over possible damage to freedom of speech, innovation, and integrity of the internet. The January 18 internet protests have led to a postponement of deliberations on the bill. At heart, the emergence of the PIPA act and subsequent protests against it amount to another contest for the right to a space for public opinion, this time around, a digital space where artistic output get exchanged at dizzying speeds.

Graffiti- urban menace or legitimate street art.

In a different, yet related context, artists in Cape Town, South Africa battled last year to stop the passage of a proposed graffiti by-law that sought to criminalize all forms of public art and according to the online petition circulated; “violates our personal right to freedom of expression on private property.” The violation referred to here is the requirement included in the by-law (which has now been passed), that state permission be obtained besides the permission of a property owner before murals can be put up. Cape Town being a popular tourist destination with graffiti and street art being a strong component of its cultural heritage, the significance of this contest for continued access to the public space for artistic self expression can only be well appreciated against the back drop of graffiti’s roots in ancient history, dating back well before the 16th century, its tendency to give voice to contemporary social and political misgivings and its adoption as a vehicle for artistic expression within the larger context of popular culture. Violators are now being fined as much as R1,500 and interestingly, organizations like the Visual Artists’ Network of South Africa have been drafted to help speed track application processes for their members.

The Art & Space of Public Opinion
It is in view of these happenings that the first edition of ArtSpace RoundUp is themed: “The Art & Space of Public Opinion.” On Saturday the 25th of February, we shall be deliberating on the role of the artist in the calibration and expression of public opinion and the control of / negotiation for public spheres for its expression. There will be artistic presentations, a roundtable discussion and interactive engagement. The event holds at Goethe Institut, 4th Floor, City Hall, 30 Catholic Mission Street, Lagos from 11am – 2pm.

The series of six bi-monthly artistic presentations and roundtable discussions is developed and coordinated by the Dream Arts & Design Agency (DADA) with the partnership and support of Goethe Institut Lagos.

30-storey hotel built in just 15 days

2012-01-09T21:22:00.000+01:00

Broad Group, a Chinese building company, Broad Group, has a youtube time lapse video (which has generated 450,000 hits already) of a jaw dropping feat: They have built a 30-story tall hotel prototype in 15 days, inclussive of all the furnishings in the rooms. They are credited for having a previous record of building a 15-story building in a week earlier in 2011. The 30 storey hotel was completed over Christmas in 2011, in China’s South Central Hunan Province.

Statistics offered on feat include:

Higher precision in fabrication (+/- 0.2mm).

More coordinated on-site construction management.

Shorter construction time span.

Lower construction waste.

Six times less cement.

Five times more energy efficiency.

And other health and energy features.

WATCH YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE:

According to Yahoo News: "The Ark hotel was built using pre-fabricated modules and uses a diagonal steel bracing.

The remarkable building also boasts a filtration system with air 20 times purer inside than outside and can withstand a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, as tested by the China Academy of Building Research.

In 2010, the same firm built a 16-storey residential block in only five days.

And it’s not just the hotel that was built in the 15 days, but all the furniture has apparently been moved into the building, so it’s ready for guests".

One comment on the Youtube page reads thus: "Building and assembling are two different things. And in the case of this building, it was assembled in 15 days, not built."

However that rhethoric was challenged by another viewer with the following:

"Define (verb) Built: Simple past tense and past participle of BUILD.

Define Build: To construct by assembling and joining parts or materials.

(Hopefully to silence the neigh-sayers regarding any doubt that this was BUILT as correctly stated in the video's title and summary.)"

Whichever side of that debate your sentiment swings, it reamains no doubt a jaw dropping feat and makes a strong case for pre-fabrication in delivering high performance buildings at a competitive cost.

DesignPages Issue 2 launches via digital downloads

2011-12-22T21:45:00.000+01:00

Definitely, there's no better way to extend to you the best compliments of the season!

DesignPages Issue 2 launches today via digital downloads on: www.designpages.biz.

Do visit our site, take a look at the magazine and tell us what you think!

Despite sounding all cool and civilized about this, we're actually celebrating and doing mental cartwheels as this post is being sent. It's not been a walk in the park, since 2008 when the preview
edition (issue 1) was published through mid 2011 when we decided the time was ripe for the return
of DP. We serve you our modest offering and hope you'll join us in the journey through many more editions.

British Council turns out an impressive Creative Industries Expo

2011-12-22T21:23:00.000+01:00

British Council has come to be known for a bevy of highly impactful interventions in a sector now globally referred to as the Creative Industries over the past decade, including the Crossing Borders online creative writing scheme (with Lancaster University), the New Writing in Drama Project (with the Royal Court Theatre), the International Young Design Entrepreneur of the Year award, the music and publishing versions of that initiative and the more recent creative entrepreneurship training programmes organized in collaboration with the Pan African University and the Creative Industries Development Agency (CIDA). These interventions in creativity in Nigeria came to a head with the recently concluded Creative Industries Expo held at the Eko Hotel and Suites in Victoria Island.

Organized in collaboration with an impressive list of partners like the Bank of Industry, UK Trade and investment, Goethe Institut, Nexim Bank, Federal Ministry of Culture and Channels Television and Cool FM as media partners, the expo delivered resoundingly well on what was from the outset a fairly ambitious programme; starting off with a pre-event networking session at the Eko Hotel on Sunday the 4th of December, through three days of intense seminars, professional clinics, exhibition and creative showcases

DP correspondents particularly found the session on Intellectual Property, Copyright and Creativity (co-ordinated by D’Talkshop) and the session on The Creative Economy in the Digital Space (co-ordinated by Paradigm Initiative) both of which held on Day 3, to be most instructive given how critical IP and Internet Technology issues have become to the existence and survival of creative enterprises globally. Discussions surrounding policy frameworks and challenges of the Nigerian creative entrepreneur were slow in gaining audience enthusiasm, but not so the evening events which included a music and fashion showcase, a film and television showcase and a closing gala that was well attended and headlined by Liyel Imoke- the Governor of Cross River State whose special assistant and Chairman of the planning committee for the Calarbar Carnival- Nzan Ogbe was beside himself with pride in presenting the Calabar Carnival as a successful example of public-private partnership working well to the benefit of the creative industries. At the Gala, David Higgs, country director for the British Council half jokingly commented that the Council looked forward to when the creative industries would no longer be refered to as an emerging economy, this is rather apt given that creative enterprise predates even the 16th century creation of the Idia mask in Nigeria, however it is the collective realization that ‘this creativity business is not just business, but big and serious business’ that is novelle, and not just in the Nigerian environment, as the British Council’s initiatives in Nigeria stem from an industry wide awakening that has spread from the UK to countries across Africa and other continents.

The main clincher for the organisers in our estimation however, was in their ability to harness the gains of having invested in entrepreneurship training for a large number of creative entrepreneurs over the past two years and taking the initiative to offer 50 of these emerging businesses free exhibition spaces at the expo, which were all taken up, resulting in a rich and diverse exhibition. Exhibitors engaged by DP revealed that their presence at the expo had afforded them an amazing opportunity for networking and promoting their creative businesses, the benefits of which they were reaping already through new business contacts. Of all the stands taken though, there was a preponderance of fashion / accessories related brands over and above subscribers from the architecture, design, software sub-sectors. These sub-sectors registered very little presence in comparison to the publishing, film & TV, and performing arts sub-sectors which does not indicate a dearth of practitioners in these fields, but rather a lack of awareness or lack of willingness to publicly exhibit. DP correspondents took time out to engage some of the fashion / accessories based exhibitors at the expo.

Onyechi is built solid.

2011-08-17T23:40:00.001+01:00

Recently, the design sleuth encountered one of the most interesting
show reels he had ever seen since he started keeping tabs on the
Computer Generated (CG) art scene in Nigeria. The show reel features
the character design portfolio of Onyechi Nnoli, a soft spoken digital
artist who just returned to Nigeria for a spell after concluding his
studies in animation at the Frameboxx institute of animation in
Bangalore, India. Onyechi's art is solid all through with absolutely
no fissures like you would find in the works of some CG artists who
are quite adept with different software but are weak in the actual
design of animated characters. Onyechi is a thorough bred artist with
his digital art finding a strong foundation in his abilities as an
illustrator, a painter and a designer. The design sleuth tracked him
down for a quick chat.

AA: You have an amazing portfolio of 3D character designs, what
inspired your interest in the art and how have you been able to
develop the skill to such an impressive level?

ON: What really inspired me was the 3d aspect of the art. It is really
being able see the totality of the object or character from any angle
that inspired me to develop myself in the field. I have always liked
sketching and painting, in fact all I ever wanted was for my parents
to just keep old diaries for me to draw my stick men on and paint
them. Along the line I started seeing 3d movies, then came across some
amazing 3d communities online and started building a collection of
pictures of 3d characters on my computer which inspired me even more.
During my training as a 3d artist, the passion I had for concept art
and modeling played a key role in the character design. I would
practice in the day time and spend most nights on research. I spent a
huge amount of money on 3d character design and modeling books and
tutorials which really went a long way in giving me ideas and
sharpening my skill. I also had to really dedicate hours on modeling
and concept sketching. My best friends were my pencil and paper.
Sometimes the model wouldn't come out as desired but the key factor
was never giving up and never listening to the praises of people
because there is a lot to learn and improve on. The desire to move
from one level to a higher level of perfection inspired me to keep
digging for better results

AA: India has quietly become a major destination for high quality
animation and visual effects and you have been immersed in that
development for the past four years while training to be an animator,
how has that experience shaped your career?

ON: The experience has been wonderful; it has really opened me up to a
higher level of art and creativity.
India is a country which has movies as part of its culture. Big
companies like DreamWorks, Rhyme and Hues and others located in India
provide internship for students. It has really shaped my career in
many more ways than one. When I sit and see a CG movie I see the
various stages and processes involved and it makes me appreciate the
movie and producers the more. It has given me the skills needed to
take up 3d movies and presentations with more courage knowing the
steps to take to get the required results.

AA: You studied fine art at the IMT Enugu before leaving for India,
what skill did you pick at Enugu that you rely on the most in your new
specialization.

ON: IMT was a training ground for me because I got the basics of arts
such as drawing, clay sculpting, basic designs, colour harmony,
balance and principles of design in that environment. As a concept
artist and a modeler, the art foundation made it possible for me to
skillfully convey my idea on a 2d surface with the traditional media.
This went a long way in affecting my art. Now as a CG artist I haven't
left my pencils but rather been introduced to other 3d applications
such as Maya, Z-brush, Animo, Photoshop, AfterEffects etc. However,
without the art background I had in IMT, it would have not been a
smooth journey being a concept artist/3d modeler.

AA: Bangalore is said to be the IT capital of India, does that also
make it the animation capital? What character does Bangalore lend to
your work, as a student, and now as a professional?

ON: One can definitely say it's an IT capital but not really the
animation capital because other cities like Mumbai, Chennai and
Hyderabad have a lot of animation studios just like Bangalore. Though
Bangalore may not be the animation capital, the city still exposed me
to a lot as I walked into seminars conducted by makers of top world
known animated movies like Lion King, Incredible Hulk, Kung-fu Panda
and Madagascar. This really brought a lot more meaning to my
understanding of animation.

AA: What has been the most challenging project you've worked on as an
animator / 3D modeler?

ON: The most challenging project I have every worked on was the first
project I did back in India as a student titled "The Dirty Pilot". It
was a short movie. I ran into a lot of challenges because I had
problems being able to finish the work within the time given. As a
fresher then my main problem was really carrying my team along and
sticking to a finished concept - without changing the CG - to the very
end of the project.

AA: If you had one chance to influence Africa's role on the global
animation scene in any way, what would you do?

ON: I would suggest good and quality trainings centers be established
in our society. Africa has a lot of talented people but few really
make out the time and opportunity to sharpen their talent. This has
limited the quality of output in so many ways. I would setup training
centers that don't just teach animation but focus on the creativity
and the psychology behind animation coupled with very good acting.

AA: For a new animation and special effects company on the scene,
Paperplane Studios seems to be poised to enter the industry in a big
way, what with the pool of talent you have assembled. Are there
in-house projects like feature films and computer games in the offing
or is it strictly about servicing bigger production houses?

ON: Actually the vision of Paperplane studios is to produce animations
that can stand out anywhere, having all the qualities of a well
animated movie. We aim at being able to convey a storyline in the most
convenient method whereby adults and kids would sit back and really
enjoy and look forward to seeing our products on air. Nevertheless,
Computer games are being work on currently as well as VFX adverts/
presentations. Our goal is to build a strong animation team in and out
of Nigeria, whereby we as Nigerians can proudly have studios and CG
content that can comfortably compete with any animation studio out
there in the world

AA: You've just visited Nigeria for the first time in three years,
what has this homecoming been like for you? Have you been able to
scope the 3D animation scene in Nigeria within the time you've been
here?

ON: It's been very welcoming and interesting. Seeing my fellow
Nigerians has really been a thing of joy. I have also observed that
many people are very eager to learn about the animation production
pipeline. It's still fresh here and at the same time coming up pretty
fast. I hope we start promoting CG in our society here and giving more
support to the young ones as the DADA group has devoted time and
resources to encouraging and empowering the youth.
.
AA: Where will Onyechi Nnoli be in the next twenty years? What will
you be up to?

ON: I hope to have animated at least seven world known movies and
trained more Nigerians in the art of 3d modeling /animation. I would
love to have affected kids and the youth with opportunities that would
give some of them the chance to positively affect their future and
that of generations to come.

If a Pool Guy can drive a Ferrari...

2011-07-30T12:26:00.003+01:00

...then Omoluabi must have his Tarred Roads and Covered Gutters.
-Ayodele Arigbabu
(first published in March 2006 in The Guardian)

Femi Omoluabi is possibly the only person in these parts who can go to
work in his pyjamas and have no one complain. For a young man whose
workplace is just ten paces away from his bedroom, life can hardly get
any better, if you asked him, that's what he'd tell you. The people in
the neighbourhood where he keeps an apartment assume he is into shady
internet transactions of the Yahoo Boys ilk. You would too, if you had
a young man for a neighbour who is often indoors watching television
by all appearances and hardly leaves home to pursue any visible form
of livelihood. Yet Femi is no couch potato, his tubby frame not
withstanding, this fellow wakes up between 5am and 6am every morning
and trains for two hours before starting the day's job. What does he
do? Sumo Wrestling? Femi scratched his chin and thought for a second,
"Come" he said, gesturing towards his PC's monitor, "I'll show you"
and with a few clicks of his mouse, he did show me.
His odyssey started with an interview he watched on CNN while in first
year at the University of Lagos. The guy being interviewed worked at a
blue-chip company and obviously earned some good money there. When
asked what motivated him, he said it was his friend, a swimming pool
attendant who drove a Ferrari. Femi latched on to that and since then,
the Pool Guy (or the Ferrari or what they both represent) has been his
prime motivator. But that's not exactly where it all started. While
attending Comprehensive High School Aiyetoro before switching over to
Command Secondary School Ikeja, he already knew he wanted to do
creative stuff. He also wanted to work with computers so he toyed with
the idea of being a computer programmer until he realized that would
involve loads of calculations. He also faced the prospects early
enough of starving if he stuck to the pure arts. To say the least, he
was in a quandary.
Enter Koku, his high flying architect cousin who just returned to
settle in Nigeria with really nice clothes and 22 pairs of shoes (he
actually counted). Koku was a revelation, he's so cool, an architect,
he's creative…hmm…a good blend of art, science and business. Femi hung
around his cousin long enough to get hooked, his choice to study
architecture, he admits, was influenced by his cousin's apparent
success. Though, he chuckled, in hindsight, it was what Koku himself
would call Rush – Rush money: Very nice car without the money to fuel
it, just a few designer clothes and nothing else, but that was enough
for Omoluabi.
Studying architecture at Unilag however, was a disappointing
experience. In his own words, it had no role to play in his current
occupation. Okay, he gives it a thought; maybe it did, since nothing
in life is wasted. He sees design education in Unilag as being given a
bare foundation when what is needed is a super-structure which each
individual can then clad to his taste. The skill base could be useful
but there is a need to understand broader concepts. In an era when
it's cheaper to buy a personal computer than a draughting table,
students are allowed to learn Computer Aided Draughting and Design
(CADD) but are still restrained from presenting their assignments in
CADD form (*editor's note: this has since become a thing of the past
as the architecture department at the University of Lagos has since
fully embraced digital technologies). Omoluabi sighs after a pause-
Almost all learning is self development. That statement explains his
development to a large extent. A lot of his learning came from
magazines, and from studying them, he realized early enough that
architectural consultancy does not earn the sort of money that his
Pool Guy represented. He looked at architecture as a business and
didn't see the prospects so he thought to himself, how do I make money
and move out of home to a fairly comfortable place before I turn 30?
Femi had been hanging out with Peller – a senior course mate at the
University, nick-named after the late magician Prof. Peller in
deference to his adeptness with computer graphics at a time when it
was still at its infancy, he augmented this interaction with several
magazines which he purchased under the bridge at Ojueleba. In late
1999, Cadbury was selling off some of their old computers. Around this
same time, Omoluabi together with Prabu Ramalingam another course mate
entered for a competition organized by MOE for adaptive re-use of the
Ijora power station. They came fifth and part of the money awarded to
them went into the purchase of one of the Cadbury PCs in January 2000.
Femi added on some more hardware and did his first tutorial in
animation on the 21st of March 2000AD (he remembers the exact date)
and has never stopped learning ever since- hence the strict early
morning study regimen.
Through Peller, he was soon doing architectural animations for
different firms. His foray into the advertising industry was through a
chance meeting in a Cyber-Café. He made friends with a guy through
whom he eventually met the Agency Producer at SO&U, an association
that saw him doing voice-overs for the agency late in 2002. His first
job came out of an argument over the possibilities of creating some of
the animated adverts that Promassidor was airing on television in
Nigeria. Soon, Femi got his chance and did a Launch Video for HP in
Nigeria. Several jobs have followed, with SO&U remaining his major
source. In essence, Femi Omoluabi is a hired gun for advertising and
architectural firms for the production of Computer Generated Images
and Animations and he's not doing badly, in fact, he's living a dream.
Omoluabi takes time out to philosophize, being the son of a renowned
Psychologist; he has every license to do so: In life you can't see
your next level until you are on the present level….you cant really
visualize the future until you are on a level where it becomes
feasible. Which is why the rich will get richer, because being rich
anyway, they are at a vantage point for visualizing even more wealth.
10 years from now? Femi doesn't bother with long-term plans. In the
Interim, he's looking at a house in an estate plot in Lekki, meanwhile
a house on the Mainland would do. Do you know how difficult it is to
find land in an area with tarred roads and covered gutters? He asks
humorously. Next, he wants to go into the property Market at the sub
10 Million Naira level. In his chosen occupation, Omoluabi has a
floating idea of upping his game to provide international outsourcing
for architectural representations and content for television. He has
no clear cut route to achieving that but knows it's definitely the
next level because things are getting easier. He looks back with
nostalgia at the old days when things were more stressful. His major
pains still remain payment delays and unrealistic deadlines though
those are reducing now that he's established in the field.
For someone who works alone, he finds it rarely boring and cites his
work for MTN Graphix and Premium Chicken commercials as his most
memorable efforts due to the technical challenge they presented.
Omoluabi comments on the advertising industry: Ad agencies contain
some of the brightest minds in this country. It doesn't show though,
because clients shut down bright ideas due to their belief that
Nigerians are not appreciative of high levels of creativity. Femi
smirks regrettably, they're probably right.

Studio Prowl with the Design Sleuth:

2011-07-20T19:05:00.001+01:00

B+TIC's Taiwo Aina on the Mercedes Benz Business Park, Lekki.
-Ayodele Arigbabu.
It's always interesting meeting an architect in his own space. The
last time the Design Sleuth met with Taiwo Aina at his Victoria Island
office was in 2008 when we had cause to collaborate on his pitch for
the Africa Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in China. It was fun
engaging with a literally out-of-the-box design initiative, albeit
that the endgame left Aina feeling sour with the Chinese. "I'm not
having anything to do with the Chinese again," he said while we had a
chat on a wet Sunday afternoon. Aina looks the quintessential
architect, with a clean pate and slim round glasses, the round neck
tee shirt he wore was dark grey in colour, but got me wondering
whether black tee shirts were still in vogue internationally as the
de-facto uniform for 'trendy' architects. The office has a retro feel
to it and has a slightly surreal air when you visit outside office
hours. The chairs at the workstations are empty but you can almost
hear the mouse clicks and digital whirs that would take up the space
when each workstation is manned.
We played catch-up, talking about our shared interests in digital
media, 3D modeling, animation and interactive arts. Aina was for quite
a period a distributor for Graphisoft - manufacturers of Archicad -
which was the best thing to happen to architectural modeling,
visualization and Building Information Management before Revit took
over the scene and made Archicad look obsolete. "I ran into someone
with an amazing portfolio recently and couldn't believe he did it all
with Archicad," Aina mentioned. We both concurred that it's not the
tool, but the man (or woman I must add) that uses it, besides, being
in competition, the software vendors are in a constant process of
continuous improvement.
Then we talked about a project of his which had only recently been
commissioned. I had noticed the Mercedes Benz Place on the Lekki
Expressway several times while plying the route without realizing that
Aina's Building And Technical Information Consultants (B+TIC) was
responsible for it. I had wondered why the project took so long to
reach completion; now, talking with the architect behind the project;
I got to understand about the challenges behind direct labour
contracts and the fabrication of exposed structural steel members in
an industry where bespoke steel works are difficult to procure. The
Mercedes Benz Place comprises a business park made up of the Mercedes
Benz Center (show room, diagnostics, body shop and spare-parts store)
Bang and Olufson Center, Technogym and an Ecobank branch. B+TIC were
architects and project managers with Fred Moye Engineering as
structural engineering consultants. Jengs Engineering provided
structural engineering consultancy and Dwab Costprudence were quantity
surveyors. The project had Domus Construction Limited and Interkel
Nigeria Limited as contractors, Eurotech as Roof Contractors and EBM
being responsible for the Aluminium works while Dorman Long provided
specialist steel works fabrication.
For the project which is the 3rd Mercedes Benz project Aina would
deliver for Mercedes Benz Nigeria whose Managing Director, Benson
Uwatse (husband to visual artist Chinwe Uwatse who also runs Bang &
Olufsen) is a good friend.
According to Aina, the design process involved close interaction with
Mercedes Benz Stuttgart who gave detailed outlines as to how the
Mercedes Benz brand architecture was to be developed for service and
retail outlets. Given that Mercedes Benz's architects in Stuttgart
have stringent requirements for appending the 'star' brand identity to
any outlet, B+TIC had their work cut out for them despite having built
a couple of outlets for Mercedes Benz Nigeria in the past fifteen
years. Having worked in the past on a similar automobile retail and
service outlet for an international brand on the same Lekki
Expressway- The Briscoe-Ford Center , the Design Sleuth could very
well understand what Aina had to go through in meeting Mercedes Benz's
demands. The attention to detail paid off with the adoption of the
new Mercedes Benz Place Lekki as one of their international flagship
centers, just like an earlier facility built for the car brand by
B+TIC tagged 'The Habitat.'
While Aina slipped away for a minute I read a paragraph from a note he
had made on his experience putting the building together:
"Because of its worldwide presence, all aspects of Mercedes Benz
operations are of great significance in portraying their brand values.
The values are conveyed and emphasized through the architecture.
Customers and staff experience the appearance as part of the corporate
and brand culture. The architecture established the design and
ambience of all Mercedes Benz operations formats with the aim of
creating an identity that can be reorganized across all formats."
I'll leave off with another quote from him which lays plain what
brands like Guaranty Trust Bank and now, apparently, Mercedes Benz
have long put into practice in perpetuating their brand identity:
"Since a brand fulfils the real or perceived needs of the customer,
this perception occurs at a subconscious or subliminal level which is
emotional and based on relationship. Architecture and interior design
offer a wider field of synthesis, where all these components can be
brought together to evoke predetermined emotions and spur relationship
between the customer and the brand."
Well said Arc. Aina.
What else does this architect and his B+TIC have up their sleeves?
Well, let's just say I spied a visualization of an egg shaped form –
highly reminiscent of Norman Forster's Greater London Authority
building – pinned to the wall. It's for an office tower that is meant
to replace the building where the B+TIC office is currently situated
in Victoria Island. Shhh…that should be enough gossip for one week
already!

3D BOOTCAMP

2011-07-20T13:56:00.001+01:00

DESIGN AND DREAM ARTS (DADA) ACADEMY

presents:

3D BOOTCAMP

August – September 2011

Design And Dream Arts (DADA) Academy, presents a 4 Day 3D Bootcamp scheduled for four weekends between August and September 2011.
Course content: The workshop course content will cover introduction to the creation and manipulation of 3D models with the Bonzai 3D interface, including understanding of texturing, and the principles of lighting, rendering, and project workflow.
This intensive training is ideal for beginners, proficient 3D artists who would like to switch to the Bonzai 3D interface, as foundation training for those interested in architectural visualizations, character modelling and animation and as foundation training for more advanced 3D training, especially with Form Z- an industry standard 3d modelling and animation programme from the same manufacturers as Bonzai 3D. Reference will be made to other 3D software like Maya, 3D Studio Max and Revit, however, Bonzai 3D, a lighter and exciting 3D programme with a shorter learning curve from Auto-des-sys will be the training platform in focus.
Participants will be provided with lecture notes, training software, training videos, and internet resources. Lunch will also be provided on the four days.
Facilitator: The training will be led by Nnamdi Akubuiro, a director of Mind’s Eye Ltd, Nnamdi Akubuiro studied architecture at the University of Lagos and founded Mind’s Eye – an architectural visualization company - in 1998 with a couple of colleagues. Since then, the company has grown to be an industry leader in Nigeria in the field of architectural visualizations. He has over 12 years experience in the field and is proficient in the use of Sketch-up, Autocad, Bonzai 3D, Revit, 3D Studio Max, Mental Ray and V- Ray. He has worked on projects for top architectural firms and advertising agencies in Nigeria.
Details:

Dates: Batch 1: 20-21 August (modeling & texturing)

27-28 August (lighting, rendering & project workflow)

Batch 2: 3-4 September (modeling & texturing)

10-11 September (lighting, rendering & project workflow)

Venue: CORA House, 1^st Floor, 95 Bode Thomas Street, Surulere, Lagos.
Time: 9am – 6pm each day + 1 hour lunch break.
Participation Fee: N40,000 only.*
* Participants are expected to come with their own Laptops.
Contact for registration:

Dream Arts & Design Agency

CORA House, 1^st Flr, 95 Bode Thomas Street, Surulere, Lagos.

Telephone: 017451990, 08033000499.

Send an e-mail to: dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com for a registration package or

Visit: http://www.dadaenterprises.net/dadaacademy.htm for more information and to download the registration form.

Procedure: Fill the form, make the payment as directed, (scan) and mail back the form together with evidence of payment and you will be contacted with confirmation of your registration.

Account Details: Guaranty Trust Bank

Account Name: Design And Dream Arts Enterprises

Account Number: 213772344110 (NUBAN No: 0008250008)

Limited spaces available. Get your 3D Groove on!

System requirement for a laptop:
- Operating System: (at least) Windows XP / Mac OS X
- At least 10 GB of free HD
- At least 1024 MB of Ram
- Graphics Card: ATI Radeon Family, Intel Graphics, Nvidia Geforce
- 3 button optical Mouse

Software: Quick Time 7.1 or greater, VLC player, Acrobat reader, Photoshop / Coreldraw

This training programme is organized by DADA Academy, a training division of the Dream Arts & Design Agency with the support of the Committee For Relevant Art (CORA), Positive Development Foundation (PDF) and Architects’ Collaborative Enterprise (ACE). A percentage of the fees will go to the Committee For Relevant Art (CORA) and Positive Development Foundation (PDF) in support of their art and culture and technological education advocacy efforts.

Lagos: Mapping an identity crisis.

2011-05-01T17:22:00.000+01:00

Architectural Identities: An Exhibition- Opening Night Friday 11th February 2011 at 7.30 pm

2011-02-06T10:37:00.000+01:00

As a form of penance for not posting for such a long while, The design Sleuth offers this bit of information on the forthcoming Architectural Identities exhibition. Attend if you can.

Architectural Identities: An Exhibition - Opening Night Friday 11th February 2011 at 7.30 pm
Why care about an exhibition on Nigerian architecture and design, when

there is the excitement and glamour of fashion shows, live music

performances, photography and art displays? Because design is at the

foundation of everything! Everything must be designed, even the very

spaces in which we live.

Every element of a city – its public spaces, parks, buildings and

streetscapes – needs design. Yet some argue that post-1970, one of the

problems in Lagos is that it lacks a coherent and authentic aesthetic,

much less functionality. The house you live in and the building in

which you work may (hopefully!) stand straight, but do they inspire

you? The streets on which you drive may (eventually!) lead you to your

destination, but what do they illuminate along the way about the

possibilities of our city? And where is the green in Lagos? Do we have

real open and public spaces? Is Nigerian traditional architecture

completely dead or can it be adapted and worked into a 21st-century

city?

Architectural Identities: An Exhibition seeks to answer some of these

questions and prompt you to ask more.

It showcases the work of a young crop of architects and designers who

are looking to redefine the design landscape in Nigeria, with

intelligence and boldness.

Exhibition runs from Friday 11 - 18th February 2011
@ White Space, 58 Raymond Njoku Str. Off Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Please feel free to forward on this email to anyone that may also be

interested is coming along.

Contact lagos@whitespace-ng.com (tel - 017368094) for more information

Taming the Taj: An expensive love story.

2010-03-05T00:18:00.000+01:00

By: Ayodele Arigbabu 31st January 2010.

(The design sleuth dwarfs the Taj!)

The tourist thing. Standing a hundred meters in front of the Taj Mahal and posing with one hand poised as if touching its highest tip. You become the giant, the tourist who conquers one of the Seven Wonders of the World sufficiently to dwarf it while a complicit and more than willing photographer captures the optical illusion. You had sworn not to do it, when the idea was first marketed to you by one of the many photowallahs at the site. But some other guy snuck up while you struggled to frame a good shot with your handy camera and offered to capture a better shot of the building with its reflection mirrored in one of the pools before it. Soon enough, he had arranged you in a pose that was guaranteed to take best advantage of the available light, then, another one, then with a sneaky smile, he got you to do the ‘tourist thing’ by arranging your hand like a mannequin’s and moving the camera back and forth till he got the required effect. Then came the photography lesson, he had been at the business for over 20 years, he pointed out the best angles to shoot from at different times of the day to take best advantage of the light. Of course he asked for a tip after handing back the camera, of course he asked for more when you gave him the bit you felt was fair enough, but then he smiled and accepted your thanks in lieu of extra rupees.

(Pix: Taj Mahal: Amazing symmetry, timeless balance)

Taking awkward poses in front of humongous structures is only one half of the story surrounding the tourist thing. The other half will have to be understood in economic terms. My volunteer photowahalla, had offered information to the effect that I was lucky to have come on a less congested day, I looked round the massive grounds at what I’d considered to be a decent crowd, which he now referred to as a small crowd. Typically 35,000 people could show up at a time to see the Taj Mahal, the queue to enter the famous tomb was thus usually quite long, hence my luck for showing up on a less crowded day. Let’s do a bit of arithmetic here, taking an average of 15,000 from his peak figure for sight seers that visit the Taj Mahal and assuming that a third of that number would be foreign tourists (yes, majority of the visitors at the Taj are Indians who pay just 20 rupees compared to the 750 rupees paid by foreigners!) and multiplying that number by the 750 rupees being charged foreigners, the Indian Department of Archaeological Survey stands to earn up to 3,750,000 rupees which is equivalent to N11,250,000 (Naira). Let’s scale it downwards yet again, and assume that sort of revenue will only be generated on 3 days out of a 5 day week. Then the government of India can expect to earn 11,250,000 rupees or N33,750,000 in a week. If my volunteer photographer’s estimate of 35,000 visitors per day on a peak day is correct, and my rudimentary statistical calculations are passable, then we are talking about more than 45,000,000 rupees or N135,000,000 in a month and 540,000,000 rupees or N1,620,000,000 in a year. (Checking on this later, it turns out the Taj Mahal rakes in twice the amount estimated here).

(Pix: The mirror to the Masjid)

Staggering figures, yes, but what exactly is the Taj Mahal? It’s a tomb, you know, a grave, the site where someone was buried. A massive tomb with a massive mosque on one side to ‘sanctify’ the site, a replica of the mosque mirrored as a guest house on the other side to keep the ‘symmetry’ and exquisite gardens on extensive grounds that could accommodate a modestly sized town. With the central dome standing at 45m high and the four minarets that frame the building standing at 47m, employing thousands of labourers and craftsmen under the supervision of a team of architects for 22 years, The Taj Mahal’s magnificence beats the imagination till date especially when juxtaposed against the ….ehm….slightly whimsical raison d’etre behind its construction.

(Pix: even the pool obeys the law of symmetry in reflecting the Taj!)

Built in the 17th Century by Shah Jahan, the 5th Emperor of the Mughal Empire which ruled most of India from 1526 till 1857 (when the last Mughal emperor was deposed by the British), Shah Jahan like his predecessors had a great taste for architecture and the arts and was known to be a great builder. He was also madly in love with his wife Mumtaz Mahal, whom he married at 19 and from whom he could not be separated, so much so that upon her death while bearing their 14th child in 1631, he commissioned the most magnificent tomb ever in her memory, as a mark of their abiding love.

(Pix: Intricate motiffs in marble adorn amazingly precise forms and voids)

In the most outstanding blend of Persian / Islamic and Hindu architectural styles, that typified the architectural bequests of the Mughal period, the Taj Mahal, together with the Majid (mosque) and its twin- the Mehman Khana (guest house), the Darwaza-i-rauza ( a three storey gateway) and the mirrored Naubat Khanas (music galleries) that flank the central Charbagh (quadrilateral garden) with its distinctive lotus pool are all bedecked with incredible geometric and floral details in white marble, red sandstone, jade, amethyst, onyx, sapphire, coral and even diamonds sourced from far flung locations.

(Amazing decorative details)

Located on the banks of the Yamuna river in Agra which was the cultural and commercial capital of the Mughal empire, The Taj Mahal has futher consolidated Agra’s position as a major destination in modern day India by being part of the major tourist route called the Golden Triangle which defines the path from Delhi to the pink city of Jaipur and the romantic sleepy town Agra has become. The Taj Mahal barely survived attempts by an officer of the occupying British forces to take the building apart piece by piece and auction it off in England and the magnificent lawns once hosted great parties by the English elite. The Taj Mahal has since been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Should all that explain the interest of local and foreign tourists in the massive and richly decorated tomb where Shah Jahan’s grave is located beside that of his beloved Mumtaz Mahal (after whom the Taj is named), generating considerable revenue for the Indian economy, then the irony shouldn’t be lost on you that the entire enterprise which is now the pride of India, contributed in some way to the decline of the empire that saw its development. The more Shah Jahan spent of his time and his empire’s wealth on his love gift to his wife’s memory, the more his influence over the large area he controlled dwindled. Meanwhile, taking his obsession with symmetry to an extreme, he had planned to mirror the Taj Mahal across the Yamuna river in black marble. Age was not on his side however, his declining influence gave room to his sons to squabble for control of the empire which was soon taken over by Aurangzeb who summarily banished his father to the Agra Fort while struggling to put the empire back on its feet.

(one of the minarets standing tall against the Agra sky)

Imagine this short speech from son to father: “Dad, you’re spending all our pocket money on your girlfriend, now that would have been okay except that she’s been dead for twenty years. You’re therefore grounded. Go to your room Dad, you shall remain there for the next seven years.” And remain there he did, at the Red Fort in Agra with his room having a clear view of his beloved monument from across the river Yamuna- The Taj Mahal - at which he stared till he died.

For third world countries struggling to make the best use of the resources available to them and trying to hold their leaders responsible for how those resources are deployed, projects like Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal would probably be in bad taste in today’s world, and given that even the Mughal empire paid a grave price for his romanticism, then for good reason too. However, having survived centuries to become a major tourist attraction, especially when you stack the figures, history seems to have justified the love struck emperor in a fine example of that Shakespearean buzz phrase- that the ‘evil’ that men do, will live after them.

When Soyinka lodged in style in India.

2010-03-04T22:55:00.001+01:00

Impressions from the Jaipur Literary Festival 2010
By: Ayodele Arigbabu
27th January 2010

(Pix: Inside The Rambagh Palace Hotel)

(Pix from left to right: The Design Sleuth With Wole Soyinka and Adenike Fagade @ The Rambagh Palace Hotel)

At the Jaipur Literary Festival which held between the 21st and the 25th of January 2010, Wole Soyinka wowed the crowd with his sonorous voice, earning a remarkable headline in a national daily: “Soyinka casts a spell over Jaipur!” The Nigerian Nobel laureate was practically mobbed by young Indian literary enthusiasts who desperately wanted his autograph. However, the design sleuthe, warped mind and all, was more interested in Mr. Soyinka’s place of abode for the period, beyond envious headlines and wild mobs asking for your authograph, what does it feel like being a Nobel laureate? What sort of hotel is worthy of your status when being hosted by the self styled biggest literary event on earth. Enter the Rambagh Palace Hotel.

(Pix: Reception desk at The Rambagh Palace Hotel)
The cheapest room at the Rambagh Palace Hotel in Jaipur, the capital of the North Indian state of Rajasthan costs N79,500 (26,500 rupees) while the most expensive suite costs about N600,000 (195,000 rupees) per night. Yes it is, quite literally, in every sense, a princely place to stay at. A former home of the Maharaja (king) of Jaipur, converted to a palace from a guest house and hunting lodge to his taste in 1925, the edifice stands as a worthy example of successful adaptive re-use and impressive conservation of a historical monument, a trend which has caught on in Jaipur and other parts of India.

The architects Amit and Shalini Gehlot were commissioned by the Royal Family in 1999 to renovate the palace which had already been converted into a luxury hotel in 1957 before being taken over by the Taj group in 1972. The architects were given the project on condition that they approached the project with deep reverence for the cultural and historical relevance of the site, as if they didn’t have their work cut out for them already, having to introduce elevators, air-conditioning, hotel reception and other perks that would be expected of a modern luxury hotel. The palace’s generous acreage of lush lawns came in handy though, providing extensive readymade gardens for the new hotel. The local paper DNA.Sunday also reports that the duo had to recreate an Italian carpet for the floors from what the royal family could remember about the original and other items of furniture and other decorative elements had to be recreated from photographs of the originals that survived. “In fact, the Indian influence in the palace was limited and we had to be honest to its colonial flavour and architecture,” DNA quoted Amit Gehlot as saying in response to the notion that the main challenge they had was in reflecting the Indian heritage of the old building. “The royals were widely influenced by their travels abroad and this was reflected everywhere – in the architecture, artifacts and furnishings.”

(Pix: drive way to the hotel)

‘Indian architecture’ interestingly is almost as vague a term as ‘Nigerian architecture’, India is made up of such diverse cultures which have in turn been influenced by several foreign influences over the centuries that it is nigh impossible to articulate a particular style that is purely Indian. However, the Rambagh Palace hotel makes good use of ornamentation and tasteful décor in delivering a super luxury hotel. The ceiling of the main banquet hall is said to have been hand painted in exquisite detail by Italian prisoners from the Second World War. The architects had to closely monitor the recreation and renovation of these and many other details. The doors opening out from the reception lounge into the inner courtyards are not mere doors, they are carefully sculpted with the lintels housing them following each turn with amazing precision. And then you have richly liveried attendants at every corner you turn, manning each door and staying within range, bowing in greeting even when you head into the rest room. Splendour redefined.

(Pix: Nigerian Author- Onyeka Nwelue with Indian Author- Amit Chaudhuri at the Rambagh Palace Hotel)

The authors of the quirky book of trivia - Superfreakonomics offer that for no clear reason, Nobel Prize winners tended to live longer than their peers who merely got nominated or were just as good but never got nominated. With his luxurious white mane and rich sonorous voice that bewitched the audience at the Jaipur Literary Festival, little wonder that Wole Soyinka remains such a sprightly septuagenarian despite having spent so many months in solitary confinement during the Nigerian civil war and despite the appalling politics that still draws his ire from his home country, propelling him just recently to lead others on a protest march to the nation’s capital. If you are housed at places like the Rambagh hotel from time to time, you sure will live to survive all that.

With that deduction in mind as I walked down the steps of the super luxury hotel and waited while they called for my cab, I felt once again, like a Maharajah.

The hare and the tortoise: of real and perceived growth.

2010-02-11T17:01:00.004+01:00

So here you are at Jaipur on the 3rd day of the Jaipur Literary Festival, that literary fest that has been tagged the biggest literary festival in the world. There you are, seated beneath a big colourful tent filled with people listening to a famous Indian author as he reads in Hindi. It’s late afternoon; a cool - yet sunny - winter evening with chirping birds and the deep smell of horse droppings from the adjoining stables mingling with the rich smell of coffee from the nearby concession stand; in a collaborative effort that succeeds at confusing your olfactory lobes.

You forgive the horses easily for the intrusion having seen how elephants, camels and horses share the streets with automobiles and auto rickshaws. This is India, and horses are not out of place at literary festivals.

It matters less that you had spent close to 48 hours journeying to get here. That the 17 hour flight from Lagos to Delhi had been stretched by 8 hours due to bad weather during the stop over at Doha, that the subsequent six hour drive from Delhi to Jaipur was just as tiring, that you had missed two days of the festival already and had missed Soyinka’s – your countryman’s - session. You were here, that was what mattered, so you sought out one of the three sessions that were running simultaneously at that moment and tried to tap into the gist of the thing. Titled Migrant Words, Hanif Kureishi, Sadia Shepard and Tania James were assembled to discuss the self, the other, identity, barriers and borders and all those other things that preoccupy writers especially because they are the ones who bother to articulate the angst felt from contradictions that arise from space, place and identity. Blah ,blah, Sadia remarked about how her name elicited questions about her mixed muslim and christian parentage from fellow Indians, while Americans simply smiled and said she had a nice name, blah, blah, blah, Hanif (that guy with the deadpan responses must have been Hanif) cracked up the audience with his confused and apt responses to confusing questions about confusion in the writers’ minds particularly those that arise from complex issues of identity, blah, blah, typical writerly stuff on migration and identity. At least you learned a new acronym - ABCD- American Born Confused Desis.

You wander away after they’re through, browse through the books on display and find your way back to the hall just in time to catch what turns out to nearly be the greatest eureka moment of the evening. In a session tagged The Ascent of Money (similar to the roundtable discussion on motivational literature and financial intelligence held at CORA’s 11th Lagos Book & Art Festival in November 2009) and moderated by Omair Ahmad, Niall Ferguson gives a virtuoso performance as he delights his audience with deep insight into the world’s current economic landscape and India’s place in that flux.

Ferguson’s performance saw his book selling out at the exhibiting bookstore right near the hall, within minutes of his presentation, showing that Indians and foreigners alike are keenly interested in India’s position in the global milieu. That is to be expected, Indians are in constant engagement with the rest of the world in one way or the other, India probably has the largest diaspora population in the world and that should explain why Indian authors can easily spend 30 minutes discussing their migrant angst. This, however, is why Ferguson’s book sold out so quickly- he’d come to tell the audience that the ‘Empire’ had subverted itself and the underlying sense of Karma behind such a statement can not be lost on any self respecting Indian.

You start to pay attention when he explains that India’s current economic strength was derived neither from foreign trade, Foreign Direct Investment, nor the gains of globalization in the strict sense, but from savings and investments within their own economy and patronage of Indian products by Indians. Making you have a double take however, he continued by saying that the said economic growth was still not moving at the kind of pace at which China was developing, partly due to India’s relative aloofness to the global market.

Although this same aloofness had protected India from feeling the brunt of last year’s recession the way China felt it, India’s economy is still not as big as China’s which triples India’s and would soon quadruple it. Ferguson went on to identify the large gap between the rich and the poor in India as another indicator that the economy was yet to peak. According to him, the meaningful debate we should be having should not be about whether we should regulate capital, but about what sort of regulation of capitalism we must have, given that other alternatives to capitalism have proven to be quite worse in reducing the said disparity between rich and poor in other parts of the world in the past fifty years. In that context, Ferguson cites the ability of the individual to secure his right to land as an indicator of the strength of an economy, India still falls short in this regard, from his observation that it takes 265 days to get a construction permit in India…at that rate, growth, even if limited to the physical sense of the word, can not be exponential. Yet he believes India is catching up with China and would rather stake his investments in India than in China. He holds this view not just because he believes in India - compared to China - there is the rule of law, but also because of his anecdote on the hare and the tortoise. The hare being super-fast China, while the wise and slow tortoise is cautious India. While the hare races forward at top speed, as the fable goes, the tortoise keeps a slow and steady pace, the hare naturally has to stop to catch its breath at intervals, but the tortoise just keeps going. Ferguson is staking his money on slow and steady winning the race. While his comparison of the Indian scenario with the Chinese scenario on the issue of rule of law might be debated, his avowal that the gap between the haves and have nots needs to be closed for economic stability and the need for markets to be regulated have been validated by recent history. Just as interesting in a historical context is his observation that Indian companies have suddenly found themselves sufficiently empowered to buy over British companies, exemplifying a growing notion that the world is tilting back to the east. The West - more so Britain than the United States - had been over stretched economically while the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans and the Indians had been steadily building wealth. Hence, he opines, Indians should be happy.

Ferguson must love the sub continent. He lauded the nation’s democratic stability compared with other former British colonies, especially in sub- Saharan Africa (sic: Nigeria), and offered the opinion that the economic boom China was experiencing was vulnerable for as long as China remained a one party state without a commensurate growth in political stability. Essentially, Ferguson is an obvious indophile, however, his great enthusiasm for the sub-continent seems to have ignored two key factors in his choice of India over China: 1. China still beats India at the game of numbers and that remains even more vital in today’s politics and economics on a global platform. 2. China might remain bullish and autocratic on the political front, however, the world is still a school yard that makes space for the school bully- America’s sustained role in global economics today despite its military mis-adventures and the recession should say something about that. 3. It would appear that Ferguson forgets that the emergence of the East is much more a product of intangible qualities like cultural and philosophical tenets that have slowly permeated into management systems and refined western style processes into more efficient systems; than Havard style econometrics or just a fairytale result of the unfolding of democratic rule and the adoption of almighty capitalism. As capitalism is being forced to adopt a more humane face, so was Communism forced to reinvent itself. Pundits argue that an amalgam of both, a more social form of capitalism, somewhat akin to what obtains in Europe, will be the future for many nations.

Ferguson’s postulations are useful to note nonetheless: that China’s economy will soon get eroded, that he is more concerned of potential conflict between the world’s most populous countries than of any crisis in the middle east, that China will slow down and India will catch up, that India will soon have an aging population and will have to pay attention to demographics to be able to sustain its economic growth and that one fifth of the world’s population will be Indian by 2050.

So apart from how Ferguson’s book sold out after his lecture, of what other relevance is such an intense discussion on world economics to a literary festival adjudged to be the world’s greatest? If the world is tilting to the west and India is poised to take the lead of such a new world order, then it is most useful to pay more attention to what Indian writers think and feel about themselves and the rest of the world, because writers are the plumb line for a people’s soul. Is that why you are now paying more attention to all that writerly talk, about Hanif Kureishi’s confusions about a world confused over confused identities and Sadia Shepard’s angst over a multi-religious parentage; and about American Born Confused Desis.

In understanding their worries, do you seek to understand yours better, coming from a similar pluralistic, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, culturally confused, highly populated and much more under achieving nation? You wander to the next session, feeling like a Maharajah.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
Jaipur, 23-01-10.

For ‘small London’...na flower we go chop?

2010-01-27T18:50:00.003+01:00

by: Ayodele Arigbabu
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

(First published by The Sunday Guardian in February 2009)

One lingering memory of Lagos is that of a market woman in a bus on Oshodi bridge, looking upon the stretch of land below the bridge where a section of the market had been demolished by government. She sighed and intoned: "Now they will come and plant flowers here"- her sympathies obviously with the traders whose livelihoods had been destroyed by the Urban renewal drive. Urban Renewal is never an easy task and should not be about whether landscaping / beauty and the therapeutic benefits / tourism it brings to residents and visitors alike is more important than the livelihood of the inhabitants who will be displaced or otherwise adversely affected by the change or vice-versa...Urban Renewal should be about mutual trade-offs and the good of all, which with deep soul searching, is not so impossible.

That was last year, five months before the bulldozers moved into Oshodi and proved once and for all that no matter how long we might have lived like barbarians, sanity can still overcome our basest instincts to perpetuate mindless clutter and congestion of a major transport artery in an all important city. Just this year, I was on another bus (okay, the design sleuth does the bus hopping thing, but let’s assume for the purpose of this discussion that I leave the Maybach parked at home occasionally in the cause of my anthropological studies of the designscape) and heard a passenger from upfront exclaim animatedly – “Eh-ehn...is this Oyingbo? Lagos don dey become small London o!” Another citizen made a similar statement on National Television just a couple of weeks after. Lagos? Small London? As much as their euphoria for the improving face of Lagos might be appreciated, their depiction of one of the foremost urban centers in Africa as a city aspiring towards ‘Londonness’ (is it not that small ‘town’ in the UK that they’re all referring to with froth in their mouths?) is irritating to say the least because there-in lies the problem. Lagos should be a city that London should aspire towards! Okay, that’s mind numbing right? But we Nigerians, we’ve been so used to sub-human standards that when presented with slight improvements, we assume we’ve attained nirvana. If our imagination was alive and well, we would know that the current efforts can only be the beginning, we would know that there is still a long way to go in building this city into a world class urban center, we would not be asking “Na flower we go chop?” like brainless beasts who must ‘chop’ everything, including our own dignity as a people.

I’m seeing some parts of Lagos as if for the first time despite having plodded through those same streets for the past several years. Illegal sheds, stalls, awnings and other mindless assemblages that once defaced building and made their finer character indiscernible are being stripped off with unprecedented alacrity, even shop owners, the perpetrators of all that clutter have got the message, they are curtailing their own excesses in an unprecedented wave of public compliance to government directives and all of a sudden, old dusty decrepit buildings are wearing new coats of paint. You look around and feel lost, the buildings are breathing, they communicate their contribution to the streetscape a lot better, you don’t feel so hot under the collar anymore just walking down the street, because your eyes are not assaulted to the same degree to which they were previously, but you are not thinking ‘small London’, you’re thinking ‘new Lagos’.

You read a quote ascribed to Dr. Samuel Johnson, London’s foremost dramatist of the 19th century and feel envious, what are they feeling like, that quote should have been directed at Lagos: “You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” This quote, adapted to Lagos should explain to the governor why many of us are not going to leave this town, sorry your work is not going to get any easier with a sudden drop in population, this is where we must rock and die, and we’d better make it work together.
But this ‘small London’ thing is so very annoying, what is it about London sef?” So what if the city has survived a revolution, a great plague (that extinguished 100,000 souls), a great fire (that razed 80% of the city); all in quick succession in the 17th century, yet grew in population to become the world’s largest city by 1914. The world wars, particularly the blitz of German air bombings between 1940 and 1941 that claimed 30,000 lives and 130,000 houses, social unrest in the 1980s and more recent terrorist attacks – especially that of July 2005 which coincided with the announcement of London as host city for the 2012 Olympics – and the current global financial meltdown have not been sufficient catastrophes to steal the swagger from the flagship city of ‘cool Britannia’.
Reading former Mayor of London- Ken Livingstone reel out the city’s plans for using the opportunity of their hosting of the 2012 summer Olympics to upgrade the city’s infrastructure and engage the east end in some serious urban rejuvenation in the October 2008 edition of the Cityscape magazine, one starts to feel heightened pangs of jealousy, can ‘Fash’ have enough time to help us catch up with the rest of the world once and for all and stop these ‘small London’ jibes decidedly?
Sure Lagos had its share of ‘bombardment’ from British gunships at the tail end of the 19th century to encourage the Oba of Lagos to cede control to the Queen of England, however, that’s child’s play in comparison to the Blitz...Lagos even remained completely untouched throughout the civil war! So what is our problem? A lack of imagination I dare say, we are yet unable to imagine ourselves deserving of well maintained public parks, public transportation networks, intelligent retail systems, dignifying and attractive mass housing schemes; and as long as we lack that imagination, no matter the government’s best efforts, we will keep whining about how we can’t feed on the flowers they are planting and why their attempts to de-clutter and properly organize our streetscapes and informal retail systems are anti-poor people in a shameless glamorization of poverty like blind adherents to a primitive and outdated religion.
It will be interesting to see London one day and say without cynicism, “Ah-ahn, London don dey become small Lagos o!” It may sound like wishful thinking at the moment, but that has always been the bedrock of remarkable development in every sphere of civilization, a healthy doze of imagination.

London facts courtesy 2008 Encarta

Reconstructing the Twist Cube.

2009-09-16T20:44:00.003+01:00

Photo courtesy: www.theguardianlifemagazine.blogspot.com

Architecture has the potential to do much more than just delineate
spaces for human activities, in truth; architecture can create
excitement and bring new energy to a community. That much did the
design sleuthe find out while chatting with James George on his self
styled ‘twist cube’ design for the Guaranty Trust Bank branch in
Lawanson, Surulere, Lagos; which has since completion become a head
turning spectacle in the ever bustling neighbourhood. It is not
always that you encounter a building that makes you look again,
especially in the seediest parts of Lagos, James George tells us why
and how he set out to do what he did with the building.

AA: There's been some excitement over a particular branch of Guaranty
Trust Bank (GTB) in Lawanson, Surulere got any clues what the static
is all about?

JG: I’m wondering, I’ve had a few calls at odd times about the design
and how some concerned individuals think it’s collapsing. I just laugh
it off. What do you think?

AA: Word has it that you are responsible for the urban disturbance,
what's the history? What role did you play?

JG: I hear that too... I was approached by Yaba based Line Smiths
Design Associates (LSDA), to provide a response to a place that has
developed in a certain way. I imagined that the area would grow in a
certain way, in the next few years. This is what I describe as an
Urban Architecture or Urbanitecture. The building already existed as a
shop. The question was how to take a boring shop design into a future
that has no such buildings... the response was the twist cube

AA: Can we infer from that, that your imagination led you to a future
where Lawanson will be populated with buildings that appear to be
collapsing? Were you trying to create an ironically ‘iconic’ reference
to the history of collapsed buildings in Lagos?...okay, what really is
the twist cube?

JG: The twist cube is an allegorical reference to the GTB logo. It
says that the readings of the GTB cube that go on to form its
architecture are assumed to have reached an end.
The idea is speed. And excitement. That part of Lawanson is always
congested. The building provides excitement, and enjoyment to the
static viewer. Architecture should provide enjoyment to the onlooker.
People always need to be surprised... Lagos needs to provide surprise
for 17.5 million people; or 8 million depending on where you look at
it from! (Laughs).

AA: So the design intention was not simply to give a notion of a
collapsing building as many concerned citizens have assumed? Is that
'collapsed building' feel something serendipititious or evidence of a
gap between your original design intentions and the ability of the
builders to interprete those thoughts from the drawings?

JG: I wanted to cover up the existing building with a sign post and
create some movement around that area. the area was quite dull and
monotonous before the interruption caused by the twist cube. I
actually set out to create a slant at the angle that the builders
built it to. The twist cube is one of the rare occurences in the
profession in this country what we set out to do was obtained to a
very close degree. It’s alarming and audacious, and clear. These
metaphors, in addition to the layering of other ideas are the thoughts
that go to form my architecture there. The LSDA ensured that what we
thought of first was what we got in the end. Kudos to those fellas.
They sure can build. (Laughs).

AA: The building has been described as one of the more arresting
attempts at deconstruction on the design scene in these parts, I
picked up a little book on Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum -one of
the better known temples to deconstruction - in Berlin last year and
in it, an attempt was made to explain deconstruction:

”The deconstructivist architects are similar in their approach,
although they have different architectural styles and do not define
themselves as a group. But they, too, try to break up the foundations
of a modernism that has become static, a rational geometry that has
become a dogma. Their work is no longert centered just on the finished
building- in their complex building plans and sketches the process of
designing itself becomes the central theme. Their buildings
deliberately show the disparate character of their parts.”

Where would you place your work as typified by the Twist Cube within
this mileu?

JG: Hmm, the built form of the twist cube has been described as
deconstructivist? I prefer ‘responsive’. Our architecture in Africa is
naturally deconstructivist. The insistence on the non Euclidean
geometry, that caused the deconstructivist eureka moment in Europe is
common place in our traditional architecture. This is the reason why I
cannot align my thought process to that of the Libeskinds and
Eisenmans of this world. They learnt fractal geometry, but as Africans
we are born with the ability to see all the fractal dimensions of
time. This has been so from our religious responses to our social
outlook. Deconstruction, as they call it is another African response
that has been theorized and pimped out by European intellectualism.
Here, non linearity is natural, and indeed spiritual. I have not
deconstructed a building, i have only created an African Temple of
Banking in the lines of Susan Wenger’s Oshogbo architectural
responses. If this is not African, I dont see what else is...

-by Ayodele Arigbabu
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

Bridging Possibilities

2009-08-21T01:49:00.005+01:00

The first time I met the consummate architect that goes by the name James George, he informed me that he’d crossed the third mainland bridge on a motorbike from Victoria Island to get to Ikeja to meet me. Six months afterwards, we were working on a book. About a year later, we were working on a conceptual intervention for the city of Lagos with the proposed 4th mainland bridge as a take off point, thoughts from which informed an exhibition at Goethe Institut, Lagos which opened on the 18th of July. The Lagos: Absence of Systems exhibition featured a pre-opening seminar on the systemic / infrastructural challenges of running a Mega City like Lagos during which participants drawn from the media, key government agencies and professionals in the built industry mapped key infrastructural areas of Housing, Waste Disposal and Transportation, highlighting problems and proffering solutions. The exhibition to which the preceding conference served as a backdrop has been described as a fantasy take on resolving some of the issues discussed. For a nation in dire need of re-imagination, fantasy takes might not be that much of the impractical schemes that they tend to be cartegorised as; they might as well be the right panacea for Lagos to lift it out of the doldrums, placing the city on the same global reckoning as contemporary cities like Dubai and Beijing where fantasy has become commonplace.
Ayodele Arigbabu and Nike Fagade sat James George down for questioning recently on the rationale behind the exhibition.

Why the exhibition?

Exhibitions are ways to reach out to people when ideas have reached a point where they can become realised as cogent concepts. We’ve been working on these ideas for a while now and we thought that it will be best to use an exhibition to take it from research to buildable concept. Given that Lagos is developing at the rate it is, we think right now that its a nice idea to have research in this way put on the mainstream, to give policy makers, architects, designers and ideas people around the nation who have things to do with Lagos, a better perspective on how to solve problems in Lagos.
We had to publish an idea. There are two ways- either you make it public by exhibition or you write a book. We wrote a book but we haven’t published it yet. The exhibition just served as a point of contact between us and the public about an idea that has been worked out over years and can affect lives in Lagos. The exhibition was designed to create a shock reaction with the public, to make people realise that urban plans and designs can be better and to help us to give a leeway to policy makers to help them rethink their approach to policy formulation for urban development. So, I’ll say that the exhibition is more or less a bridge to a bigger scheme of implementation as the case may be.

What’s the central idea behind the project?

We are trying to stitch the two different sides of Lagos into one. The idea is to create an organism that stitches the disparate sides together. Now, what we’ve done is to rely on existing paradigms of housing and how people view urban infrastructure of Lagos and re-engineer it back into the city project. You will find that people live under bridges as a fact in Lagos, so if those things are studied properly, the result wouldn’t be far from what the Lagos project is. We are trying to create a light ground for Lagos using existing paradigms of urban infrastructure, using existing typologies of urban infrastructure to create new ways of building within the city. The project also serves as a point where ideas are gathered theoretically for solutions to be created for Lagos, in future, by other people. So, I’ll say the Lagos project is necessary at this time to enable the rest of the thinking population of Lagos to rethink the other means.

Why the focus on the fourth mainland bridge?

The fourth mainland bridge is actually a means to an end in this whole discussion. We discovered the bridge system that we call the habitable business bridge and we needed a bridge to put it on. Fourth Mainland Bridge is going to get built so if we put our thinking process on the fourth mainland bridge, we get the Lagos project which brings in elements which are not usually on bridges, into the bridge to create taxable income for the government, from construction and from habitation. The fourth mainland bridge is extremely short. It’s about 3 to 4 kilometres long. It’s an area where an urban intervention would create a large volume of traffic for commerce and residential uses and things like that. We thought to use that bridge because of those reasons. The fourth mainland bridge as it is right now is the stitch that Lagos needs to tie the mainland and the island. So if we create an organism on that stitch, we’ll be shortening distances of travel, creating a secure bridge that is not only for travel, putting people in places where they weren’t before. Moreover, we’ll be creating ‘land’ on the lagoon which is very necessary because as it’s always said, land is depleting at an alarming rate
We’ll be creating ‘land’ in the air. We are building concrete spaces to a certain percentage and letting people develop the rest at their time for housing. So you get a piece of ‘land’, the same way you buy a plot from government, but it’s in the air, over water and you can develop it one room at a time until that point is reached where it can become personalised. Another intervention would be bringing offices and office complex into the bridge. How we see it is that not only people who live on the bridge work on the bridge but we see it as a midway point between the island and the mainland. So this organism which we are creating has one place as the head, the other is the anus. At the anus, dirt is dumped, at the head business is done. This spine now serves to shorten distance between the two. People don’t have to travel all the way to the mainland anymore to get the things they want or travel to the island to get things from Shoprite. It’s a nice midpoint between being on the island and being on the mainland. It enables Lagos to work more like an organism.

How wide is the fourth mainland bridge to accommodate all these components?

We worked with a 60 metres dimension which is about twice the third mainland bridge if I’m not mistaken. 60 metres will mean that we have through it approximately 10 metres or 11 metres each and then a central core. We created a structure that all the component parts are supported differently but there’s a general support system so that when trains pass the centre of the structure, it does not cause any vibration. When cars pass at high speed, they do not disturb the train traffic. When BRT busses stop, the train passing would not be causing vibration that can make it tumble because there’s a lot of traffic happening there, there are 2100 homes, 240 square meters of office spacing for medium and small scale businesses and there’s a whole 60 meters/ 30 meters space up there for traders and things like that.

How long will it take to get this fourth mainland bridge project in Place?

It will take about 2 years to gather all the data to a point where we can say that the drawings, designs and the thinking processes and policies required are complete because when that’s done, then people would invest. Then the project can start.

Why Lagos?

First, I’ll say the cliché. Lagos has about seventeen point something million people. Then came international attention. The Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas came to Lagos a while ago to talk about this urban menace. In my own sense of it, I think Lagos has provided people like us with the leeway to think in a way that hasn’t been thought of before in Nigeria. So we are creating a new architecture in a place where architecture is really needed because most of the things that go up today in the name of architecture are deplorable and an intervention has to be given at this point. So I think from Lagos, things will spread like cancer around the country so we have to start where it’s dominant and then spread out from there. Lagos needs development. It can’t cope with the number of people it has now and it’s going to increase with about 21 people an hour for the next 9 years so we are talking about 25/ 26 million people in 9 years. That’s an extra 9 million people that we are trying to cater for. Government schemes are catering for one point something million people in all the extensions so, there’s still 8 point something million floating population that has to be catered for. Lagos needs thinkers to bring to bear ways that those people can be catered for in housing, infrastructure, business and transportation. Lagos depends on its people for survival and we have to be able to create a point where people can go to in Lagos.

What was the methodology by which you arrived at the product in terms of the design?

Ayo Arigbabu and I argued for a long time. Thanks to Azu for giving us the space to beat ourselves up and argue. We were arguing about paradigms that we already understood, about data that we had collected. Well, I don’t know about Ayo, Ayo has his own ways of collecting data but I’ve collected data from studying how people use the city and the infrastructure in the city. We’ve always had thoughts, right from where we met each other, about the city. We also tried to put together a manual of some sorts from his discourses and my own discourses of how the city can be developed based on ideas and things like that. It’s an ideological process that’s based on research and plenty of calculations on my part that led to what can be seen now as the habitable bridge project.

The habitable bridge project, does it not repeat what western thinkers have done in the past in trying to apply broad sweeping paradigm to urban regeneration or urban design that have been proven over time not to work in some instances...that essentially you might just be proposing a white elephant project to solve an urban menace or perhaps you are creating another urban menace in the same tone?

Le Corbusier created an urban menace in India. He created a city, I’m creating a stitch. There’s a big difference between a city and a stitch. A city houses people in droves, a stitch houses a chosen number of people. We are talking about 6,300 people. The percentage of error, when you deal with 3 kilometres of space on a 60 meter strip compared to when you deal with a whole city, is very minimal. I’m not suggesting ideas that people will live by, I’m not suggesting grid iron patterns by which you build your houses; in fact I’m really not suggesting anything. I’m just saying we can do it better. This is how we do it, here’s land to do what you want to do. But while you do what you want to do, you could have done it like this because if you do it like this, you’ll have more air flow, light and things like that. So, I’m creating a stage, not a city. I’ll create cities maybe when I’m 50 but right now, I’m creating a stage because that’s what Lagos needs. It’s a self- sustaining commune that still needs a Lagos scape as we call it, to survive because if you divorce what we are creating from Lamgbasa or Ikorodu, it can’t exist in isolation. So either way, it has to be stitched down to the cities and I think that stitching process will serve to sweep away all that broad minded urban thinking that Jane Jacobs talked about in her book. We are not proposing that kind of development. I think we are proposing something more humane; because of the scale and conceptual process behind it, it had to see the humanness. But as time goes on, it will be just as humane as any other project there can be.

Your research extends into the economics of: 1. Erecting structures- because you are building over 3 kilometres of space, and 2. The economics of how the structure sustains itself over time. Did your research attempt to cover those grounds?

We’re recreating two ways of solving that problem. First of all, we’re creating an energy park on the roof that provides for lighting through solar panels and wind turbines and then we are creating a biomass base at the base of the structure where all waste would go through and be converted to gas for cooking and non- biodegradables can be carted off via the lagoon. Based on those precepts and the way we were handling the cross ventilation programmes and things like that, based on those precepts, the structure will be able to maintain itself over time. The solar panels are right there on the roof so that they can be washed off by rain and reduce maintenance cost. Now, the rain that washes off from the solar panel can be gathered through the openings in the roof, at the central area of the building as gray water to provide for watering the areas that need watering within the structure because there’s a buffer zone right in the centre of the structure. The biomass and the waste water go down through the structure to the base to be converted to gas. So the structure is an organism as I said earlier. It sorts of breaths on its own and solves its own problems hopefully.
Now the economics of the structural balance as you say, the structure is a very complex structure but the good thing about complexity in this case is that we are bringing in technology that can be reused in smaller scale around Lagos. So we are hoping to create urban development and infrastructural development by creating a very complex project. The structure is in two parts- the structure itself that carries the building and the bridge. And there’s a dampening system that runs around the bridge to take away vibrations and all of that. With time, we’ll work on a more elaborate structural discourse that can be talked about in public. But for now, I think we’ve reached where the architect’s mind can grasp conveniently, the rest is engineering.

Beyond the exhibition, what do you hope to achieve by this project?

I remember discussing with Ayo and also listening to Tupac at one time like he said he isn’t the guy that changes the world but he likes to be the spark in the guy’s mind that changes the world. So this is the spark. We are striking off a brand new architectural design typology and a brand new urban design typology. We are saying architecture can be done better we are doing architecture on a scale that no Nigerian has thought of before. We are bringing chaos into urbanism, call it chaos scale urbanism. We are saying that professionalism, architecture and urbanism can be changed by sheer thinking. This is the beginning of great things; this is the beginning of great new architecture and architectural thinking in Nigeria. I’m glad and I’m very sure Ayo is glad also to be at the forefront of it. I think that we will achieve, we will bring in architects from schools and all, that can produce true, great architecture that is indigenous and yet uses technology to its ultimate end. That’s fantastic to achieve from an exhibition.

Who exactly are you?

I’m James George. I was not born in Lagos and I’ve lived all my life away from Lagos. I went to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, I have double degrees in Architecture from ABU. I did my thesis on Lagos titled– Greater Lagos. I got interested in paradigms in the course of my research for my thesis. I wrote a book, came to Lagos to settle and I met Ayo Arigbabu who wouldn’t let me sleep. Here we are now.

Welcome to the world of DADA

2009-01-21T09:32:00.003+01:00

Hello, have you heard about or received emails from the Dream Arts & Design Agency before? Or is this the first time we’re bumping into you? Well, we thought we would start the New Year by letting our friends know a bit more about what we are all about. Hope you had a splendid Christmas, despite the global credit crunch and our own home grown problems, we reckon 2009 will not deny us our fair share of fun, so we are happy to welcome you into the new year and to let you in on what we’re all about and what we’ve got up our sleeves.

About Dream Arts & Design Agency

Dream Arts & Design Agency is a creative enterprise registered to transact business in film, publishing and other related media and to promote research and development in design and the arts. Registered in Nigeria as Design and Dream Arts Enterprises, and conceived to advance creative production along innovative lines, the company also seeks to bring more Nigerian artists and designers and their works to global reckoning, and to encourage productive exchange between the creative industries in different parts of the world.

Dream Arts & Design Agency offers products and services in Architecture, Set Design, Computer Graphics, Animation, Film, Marketing Communications and Book Publishing through its different divisions, a bit of a mouthful, yes, but there’s nothing better than a creative balanced diet don’t you agree?

The acronym DADA offers a slight nod at the 20th century avant-garde artistic and literary movement of the same name as a mark of the Dream Arts & Design Agency's mandate to push the creative frontiers while democratizing arts and design as viable components of popular culture.

Dream Arts & Design Agency is inspired by and operates out of cosmopolitan Lagos- the economic and cultural capital of Nigeria, in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our first project for the year was in February 2008 with set designs for two concert scenes in the Tunde Kelani Film- Arugba for Mainframe Productions.

We started off our flagship magazine: Design Pages in September 2008 and followed up soon after with our book publishing imprint- DADA books. (Read more below).

Many would have encountered us first through our email updates and notifications on events and shows by the Crown Troupe of Africa. Our customized marketing communications campaign for this unique dance theatre company continues into 2009 with more jaw-dropping productions and the release of an exciting album that has been fermenting quietly behind the scenes.

The Design Sleuth on the prowl
Dream Arts & Agency was happy to have its Creative Director: Ayodele Arigbabu otherwise known as the Design Sleuth snoop around the Cape Town scene between April and June, picking up some clues on the animation hotbed Cape Town has grown into, tapping into the Cape Town Book fair and even creating his own yet unnamed character who most observers love to hate!

Berlin proved another pleasurable pit-stop in November with several architectural ‘greats’ to investigate, especially the Design Sleuth’s personal favourite: the House of World Cultures (formerly Kongresshalle) which hosted the workshop he was invited to facilitate.

Lagos on my mind
November was a particularly exciting month as we successfully initiated and ran our street art project- Lagos on my mind in partnership with the British Council and African Artists’ Foundation and support from the Committee For Relevant Art (CORA), Children And The Environment (CATE) and Revolution Media and facilitated by Karo Akpokiere and Chukwuma Ngene of The SeekProject, the hands-on workshop dovetailed into the 10th Lagos Book & Art Festival / 4th Lagos Comics &Cartoons Carnival between the 7th and 9th of November. The project involved a workshop on graffiti / mural painting for young people on the theme: ‘Lagos on My Mind’ and took the participants on a wall painting spree through four different cultural institutions in Lagos alongside seminars on pop-culture and art as bona fide vehicles for youthful expression. An exciting title sound track was produced of the same title and a short film to document the effort is still in the works.

Initial plans to bring in Cape Town based Faith47 and Manchester based Dreph had to be put on hold till 2009 due to sponsorship limitations.

DesignPages is a specialized magazine with a primary focus on the design scene in Nigeria, however global trends will be featured to make for a robust offering.

DesignPages is conceived to harness the creative energies of Africa’s most populous nation and divert global attention in its direction, first by identifying / stimulating a local design culture and exporting same. DesignPages seeks to be a rallying point for the widely dispersed design practitioners within Nigeria and in the Diaspora, engaging their works in a qualitative fashion and documenting their own commentary on how their works sit within global trends. The maiden edition of DesignPages was published in October 2008 and has fast gone out of stock. A sequel is in the works.

We have anticipated and celebrated the arrival of Farafina’s publication of this tome- The Architecture of Demas Nwoko by John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood, which we believe is an essential contribution to the discussion of design in Nigeria and we are thus partnering with Farafina in its marketing and distribution through different platforms available to us. Interested in The Architecture of Demas Nwoko? Drop us a line or give us a call and let’s talk.

DADA books is the publishing arm of the Dream Arts & Design Agency (operating as Design And Dream Arts Enterprises) with keen interests in breaking fresh talent on the scene and generating titles that will appeal to popular culture and build a large following.
The imprint is proud to present its first two authors: Jumoke Verissimo and Onyeka Nwelue whose first books- I am memory and The Abyssinian Boy (both published by DADA books) have been well anticipated and are enjoying an impressive following. Find out more about the authors and their books below:

Jumoke Verissimo
Some would know Jumoke for her engaging poetry deliveries at different literary events over the past decade, others will know her more for interviewing a growing list of writers for the Guardian since 2006. What most won’t know is that at age 7, her class teacher wrote on her mid-term report sheet, "Jumoke loves to write".
While that was just a teacher's observation, it is one revelation that has remained true. A 2004 graduate of the English Department at the Lagos State University, her love for words, have never taken her far from that revelation. She has worked as a printer's clerk, assistant sub-editor, editor, performance poet, and journalist. Now, working as a copywriter, she maintains a page in the Guardian Newspaper. Her poems and short stories have appeared in several magazines like Chimurenga, Bathtub Gin, Canopic Jar, Eclectica, Sentinel, African writing-online, Boyne Berries, Farafina, Kwani and several anthologies. ‘I am memory’ is her first book.

Links:
http://eyinjuodu.blogspot.com/2008/11/jumoke-verissimo-her-sweet-fart-at.html
http://www.african-writing.com/four/olajumokeverissimo.htm
www.canopicjar.com/Canopic18/j_verissimo.html
http://onyekanwelue.blogspot.com/2008/11/interview-with-jumoke-verissimo.html
Out Now from DADA books! http://www.booksng.com/search.asp?Searchfor=jumoke+verissimo&Searchcriteria=BkAuthor&Submit=Go+%21

Blurbs for I am memory
“Whether confronted on the page, or at your seat in a room where Jumoke is in one of her spellbinding performances, these poems are unrelentingly lively and lyrical. Hold them in your hands, in your heart, and let them be what she has created them to be: brilliant torchlight to guide you across previously unlit landscapes of memory, of murdered dreams, of desire, of guilt and of loss; territories from which you will not emerge untouched”
- Tolu Ogunlesi (Author, Listen to the Geckos Singing from a Balcony)

“I am Memory is a long awaited witty and courageous work that tackles both the bitter past and contemporary uncertainties head on. Its quality is both as nostalgic as a yam, and as refreshing as a kola nut.”
- Niq Mhlongo (Author, Dog eat Dog and After Tears)
“Jumoke Verissimo’s poetic voice is imbued with a consciousness of African history and an awareness of the socio-economic realities of modern Nigeria with its legacy of colonial plunder, its pathetic attempts at self-governance and the brutality of its military dictatorships. she balances the despair she sees all around her with a degree of stubborn hope and an enchanting lyricism which echoes the style of oral African poetry.”
- Funso Aiyejina (Critic, Poet and Professor of Comparative Literature)
“Confident, passionate, sensual...a gripping collection...a powerful debut. I was hooked from the first page to the last."
- Biyi Bandele (Author, Burma Boy)
“In this her first collection of poems, Jumoke Verissimo, remakes language beyond mere lyricism to uncover the roots of pain and the passion that will heal it. She addresses communal hurt as a personal fate that awaits an assured balm….This poet will travel."
- Odia Ofeimun (Poet and critic, author The Poet Lied)

Onyeka Nwelue
Born in 1988 in Nigeria, Onyeka Nwelue travelled extensively to Asia, particularly to India after graduating from High School. He has received a grant from the Institute for Research on African Women, Children and Culture (IRAWCC) and is a contributing reviewer of Farafina magazine. In 2004, he was described in the Guardian as a 'teenager with a steaming pen'. His writings have appeared in The Sun, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Kafla Inter-Continental and the Guardian. He's presently a student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Though The Abyssinian Boy is his first novel, Onyeka has already made a name for himself, particularly on the internet through his blog (www.onyekanwelue.blogspot.com) and other websites where he has posted his interviews with writers from different parts of the world. Now taking his time to work through his second novel while savouring the history surrounding the idyllic Nsukka campus, Onyeka will travel again in 2009 to attend different literary festivals around the world and to promote his first novel.

Links:
http://worldinurpocket.com/?p=163#comments
http://www.nathanielturner.com/onyekanweluetheabyssinianboy.htm
http://onyekanwelue.blogspot.com/2008/12/wedding-of-medina.html

Out Now from DADA books!

Blurbs for The Abyssinian Boy
"Unique style... very interesting imagery"
-Clare Dudman, author of Edge of Danger and Wegener's Jigsaw

" A young writer with immense imagination and vision... an authentic narrative that will grip the reader. He has not only dared to dream, but also focused inexorably on the complexities of modern family and its history in an uncompromising, fast changing world"
- Uche Peter Umez, author of Sam and the Wallet

"Onyeka has written an ambitious novel which blurs not only geographical lines but other lines too. It reminds us (or ought to) that what unites us, our humanity, is much more than those that seek to divide us"
-Chika Unigwe, author of The Phoenix

"The Abyssinian Boy not only treats a universal theme; even the characterisation of the novel is universal. Excellent!"
-Lanre Ari'Ajia, author of Women at Crossroads

"Onyeka Nwelue is an interesting new voice. For one so young, he shows rare insights into the lives and sensibilities of people faced with racial intergration; a concern as relevant today as ever before"
- Jude Dibia, author of Walking with Shadows and Unbridled

The characters in Mr. Nwelue’s delightful world move between concepts and continents with a gentle humor, compassion and sensibility that will readily appeal to all citizens of the global village at large.
- Arun Krishnan, author, The Loudest Firecracker
Get your DADA books now!
DADA books are available through www.booksng.com, at TerraKulture, Tiamiyu Savage Street, Victoria Island Lagos and at 1st Floor, 95 Bode Thomas Street, Surulere, Lagos.
For more information, please call: 01-7451990 or mail: dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com
Coming soon from DADA books!

A fistful of tales by Ayodele Arigbabu
Ayo’s muscular, playful language is assured, versatile, and stuffed to the gills with energy and joie-de-vivre....his subjects and voices range over a wide field – but never lose their grip, or their power to entertain.
A Fistful of Tales is a small collection but it packs a mighty punch. Ayodele Arigbabu is a writer to watch.
- Liz Jensen (author, The Paper Eater).

Thanks for your time and for quietly enduring our creative exuberance thus far, what to expect from the Dream Arts & Design Agency in 2009? Well, while not trying to limit ourselves, we will publish more titles through DADA books, crank up our interrogation of the design space through DesignPages, keep you informed on the Crown Troupe of Africa, engage in more design adventures through architecture and production design and we shall establish a web portal to streamline our marketing communications efforts for our activities and those of our partners on a unique platform, and to augment our blog (www.designpages.blogspot.com). We will also be cranking up the film department with a couple of crazy short films…do stay tuned!

Special thanks go to our partners and supporters and associates, especially in the past year, who sometimes without knowing have added to our momentum:
Ojoma Ochai + Olamipo Bello / British Council
Segun Adefila / Crown Troupe of Africa
Committee For Relevant Art (CORA)
Sola Alamutu / Children And The Environment (CATE)
Toni Kan / Visafone
Mr. Taiwo Odutola / Fitting Finishes
Toyin Akinosho / Africa Oil & Gas Report
Mr. Greg Bolujo / Caleb Prints & Packaging
Ayoola Sadare / Studio 868
Sewedo Nupowaku / Revolution Media
Inner Core Publishing
Azu Nwagbogu / African Artists’ Foundation
Manali Shah + Nike Fagade / Give Network
Jumoke Verissimo
James George
Aderemi Adegbite
Onyeka Nwelue
Fitzgerald Umah
Jahman Anikulapo / The Guardian Life
Honourable Sam C. Nwelue
Jude Dibia
Deji Toye /
Muhthar Bakare / Farafina
Tunde Kelani / Mainframe Productions
Yohanna Bako
Agatha Osewa
Femi Olowoyeye / Quest Global
Prof. Arigbabu / Salas Group
Deji Bamidele / Image Studios / Animation for Africa
Aibe Elukpo
Kyra Lee Steyn
Theo Lawson + Yemi Odeinde / The Lawson + Odeinde Partnership
Kunle Siwoku
Ayodeji Arigbabu
Tokunbo Esho / Laminated Calendars Ltd.
Constanze Fischbeck & Daniel Kotter
Peter Winkels + Carolin Berendts / The House of World Cultures
The SeekProject
David Orimolade
Boma Nnaji
Jummai Ekele
Alexander Akaahs
Debola Omololu / Debonair Book Company
Particular thanks go to our special volunteers who made things happen in many ways:
Yinka Coker, Nike Fagade and Fola Kareem.
And Thanks to Shylle Shonoiki / Extreme Creations Media for the wizardry that has made this newsletter fly and will make the web portal explode in a few weeks time…
Till then, ta-da! And do have the best of 2009…keep it DADA!

Contact DADA:
Satellite Station: 1st floor, 95 Bode Thomas Street,
Surulere, Lagos.

Telephone: 234-1-7451990

Mobile: 234-8033000-499

email: dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

blog: www.designpages.blogspot.com

Design doesn't need an enabling environment. - Patrick Koshoni.

2008-07-16T15:42:00.003+01:00

Patrick-Waheed had run their design firm for a year already from the 10th floor address on Boyle Street in Lagos Island, yet the space remained as uncluttered as if they had just moved in. A tell tale sign of hard core modernists if you needed any and as Patrick Koshoni admits, they're not apologetic about it. Their portfolio bears him witness. Koshoni had run a thriving business as an interior designer prior to the formation of Patrick-Waheed, however, the new partnership with its broadened scope encompassing architecture and property development was an opportunity to break new grounds. The design sleuthe tracked Mr. Koshoni down to Boyle Street to investigate. Nike Fagade joined in on the questioning.

From law to design, there’s got to be a story behind that shift...why interior design?
Before law, there was a passion. And the passion came out as a hobby or likeness. The likeness was for making interiors interesting. I never knew anything about the fact that what I called interest or passion was actually a whole service industry because there were no similar industries that I was aware of at that point in my life which was post- secondary school. In secondary school, I thoroughly enjoyed technical drawing and fine arts.

Your design training did not follow a traditional trajectory; however, short courses are gradually becoming the norm, especially for the creative industries. How well would you say your training has prepared you for practice and what tips would you give anyone desirous of following that route?
I haven’t had any formal training in interiors. What training does is to define a process but it doesn’t give you competence. Competence for me is more or less a natural ability which I believe I have. If I have to give anybody advice about design, I will advocate they go through a formal training but if they haven’t got the passion, they will never be able to get the competence. Apart from the fact that I have the passion, I’m self taught. I read loads of books on design and did a lot of practical experimentation. More importantly, I gave up every other opportunity of income in the confidence that I had what it takes to earn more income from my passion.

Will you say this decision to focus on your passion has paid off?
It has, really, it has given me a source of income, an opportunity to be productive using my inate skills.

After 12 years in the UK, you came back to set up shop in Nigeria. From your experience, would you say Nigeria, with the recent swell in the economy and general air of optimism- is ripe for a truly vibrant design industry?
Yes it is. Design doesn’t need an enabling environment. Design is using what you have to get what you need in a simple, functional and aesthetic way. Those three things are important, for example, to make a smarter looking, more effective motar and pestle. That could be redesigned. You don’t need a certain enabling environment to make more use of rafia and cane while working hand-in-hand with local artisans. All these are on an elementary level.

It’s not usual to find an interior designer collaborating with an architect to run a practice in these parts. How well would you say this model has worked for Patrick- Waheed?
It has worked very well for Patrick- Waheed because regardless of the differences in our skills, there is a similarity in purpose and focus and more importantly, what we term good design. Interior design is more or less a recently used term in Nigeria. What you have more in Nigeria are interior decorators. Interior design isn’t part of our national curriculum at any level neither is interior architecture. That would be one of the reasons why there doesn’t seem to be any collaboration between interior designers and architects because there’s no educational forum for them to meet.

Talking about interior designers and interior decorators, could you explain the difference in their roles?
An interior designer will handle technicalities of interiors with regards to things like space planning, the type of floor to use, the type of lighting system to use, how the space would be divided to meet functional and aesthetic requirements. An interior decorator on the other hand, will deal with details in terms of decoration. You might talk about the colour of carpets, the color of rugs, types of furniture and all in an advisory role. The interior designer will execute the configuration of an internal space to meet safety, aesthetic and economic considerations.

Design has more or less remained berthed in the modernist idiom for the past couple of decades, despite attempts to forge new directions with high tech and green architecture e.t.c. however, front liners like Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry amongst others have taken Mie’s straight line modernism into the dormain of expressionism. As a relatively new firm, where does Patrick- Waheed place itself in this global context?
We stick to simple, minimalist, workable design. I would say we have a bias for contemporary and modern design, taking into account requirements and limitations of executing such designs in Nigeria. We are anti- traditional in terms of design.

What have been your most embarrassing and triumphant moments as a designer?
I can design...and I design. But I’m technically not an interior designer because I haven’t gone through a formal training to obtain the qualifications that would allow me to be referred to as an interior designer. That hasn’t stopped me from enjoying the provision of design services. I have done architectural design, interior design, graphic design and I have even dabbled into product design. My best moment is yet to come and thankfully, there has not been any embarrassing moment.

Where do you see design and architecture in Nigeria in the next 20 years?
If I knew where I was going to be in the next 20 years, I would probably have become very rich before that time. In less than 20 years... about a quarter of that time, design as a holistic skill, whether architectural, fashion, graphic e.t.c. will become a singularly most valued requirement for commercial success.

And Patrick Koshoni? What will you be up to in the next couple of decades?
I should be resting and enjoying design at my leisure.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

Graffiti City

2008-06-13T21:29:00.008+01:00

Nigerian-German School, Apapa

The Cape Town Journal 2

For someone whose interest in graffiti (or graphiti if you like) had been long undernourished by the few pieces encountered in Lagos like that long wall you see at Igbosere while riding from CMS to Obalende (is it still there?) and the hidden wall bordering the football field at the Nigerian - German School at Beach Land Estate in Apapa, ariving at Cape Town to see a city richly embazoned in tags (stylised signatures), pieces (large colourful images with 3D effects), throwups (large tags with outline and fill colours), top-to-bottoms (pieces that cover the entire height of railway cars), bombs (paintings that cover many surfaces), burners (large and elaborate pieces) and insides (tags or bombs done inside trains, or buses) was like hitting a state of nirvana, where street walls, factory buildings, trains and fences bore testament to the creative energies of young people. But when excited enquiries as to how to engage some of the proponents of the street art are met with embarassed -are you serious?- sort of stares, you drop from cloud nine and confront the vandalism component of the art form which makes most of its audience wince with discomfort- train stations, railway / street signs and the trains especially are tagged and bombed illegally, and often times, maliciously.

can2 (courtesy www.hiphop.co.za)

Graphiti grew into contemporary consciousness, according to Wikipedia as the fourth component of the hip hop (youth) culture, the other three being rap music, break dancing and disk jockeying. But the act of scratching inscriptions and illustrations on walls has been traced as far back as ancient Rome and even the Egyptian hieroglyphics that adorned ancient Egyptian temples and palaces can be deemed as precursors to the modern and diverse forms of graphiti which are now widespread. Being a youthful preoccupation with vandalism rooted in its history has helped taint the art form as yet another manifestation of juvenile delinquency, what with individual property owners, private enterprises and government agencies expending huge sums to repeatedly remove offending tags, pieces and other exotic species of graphiti that continuosly deface the public space.

However, thankfully, like rap music, graphiti is not just about juvenile delinquency. There is a strong art content and an even stronger social consciousness running between the lines that delineate the textual and illustrative motiffs within its make up. While design has evolved a trend called critical design that puts more demand on designers to be sociopolitically relevant and the boundary between designers and artists is getting thinner with more design pieces approaching terrains traditionally and thematically reserved for the visual arts and vice versa (in the esoteric realm of art installations), graffiti has for the past few decades been at the forefront of that meeting of the two immense frontiers of art and design and had begun finding acceptance in mainstream art circles especially in the United States and in Europe since the late 1980s. An artist like the UK based Banksy for example has assumed a legendary status for his socio-political satires (a mural depicting a hole through the Isreali-Palestinian wall with a tropical paradise on the other side), witty remarks about pulp fiction (literaly, his mural of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson holding banana pistols) and subversive art interventions (creating witty mock-up of well known art works and sneaking them into museums to mount beside originals) fueled further by his hidden identity even as he publishes books and holds exhibitions on his works. The genre has spawned off competitions, exhibitions, workshops and other events and its exponents have continuosly courted and won the support (in some cases) of government agencies and private enterprises in using the art form as a tool for positively engaging the youth by giving them a (legal) platform through organised events and competitions for expressing their joys, pains frustrations and general world views.

sky1, seesmo & weels (courtesy www.hiphop.co.za)

While South Africa struggles to live down the embarrasing throw up (no pun intended) of xenophobic violence that has swept through some of the nation's townships in a complicated reaction to built up political and socio-economic pressures, traces of the frustrations being felt by the nation's young population can be gleaned off the ubiquitous presence of graphiti, especially in cities like Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, though it is yet unclear whether the black youth engage in graphiti as much as their white and coloured mates. Names like Faith47 (Cape Town), Mak1one, Falko, Cade (Durban), Rasty and Dekor are not pet names for luxury yatchs, rather, these are monikers by which the leading proponents of graphiti in South Africa are known. These folks have taken their art to and represented their country in different parts of the world and thus have the priviledge of being able to stay 'legit' with their passion.

However, for the majority of young South Africans (like their mates across the globe) bitten by the graphiti bug, their canvas is stretched across the streets and their work hours fall within the periods of darkness when they can scurry to the underside of bridges, facades of abandoned buildings, parked railway cars, and other areas in the public realm with potentials for lots of human traffic to ply their trade away from prying and disapproving eyes.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.

The definition of RUDE

2008-06-10T18:32:00.005+01:00

With an acronym that could be easily misconstrued to promote a subversive youth culture while in reality standing for Reveal Ur Determination and Energy, Peter Uwaifo's Rude Clothing Company has creatively hatched out a niche for itself in the ever growing Nigerian streetwear design genre. There are massive potentials for street wear labels in Nigeria, given the large youth population, the expanding music and film industries that have built a following across the globe and the patriotic zest that has coined a generic and much touted 'Naija' brand. Peter's Rude Corp has tapped into these dimensions by bringing a unique design essence to streetwear using strong graphical motiffs right since his undergraduate days at the Covenant University and now as a postgraduate student of architecture at the University of Lagos, he seems set to take his clothing label to higher grounds. Meet Peter Uwaifo as he chats with Nike Fagade on Rude Corp and more.
-Ayodele Arigbabu

WHO IS PETER UWAIFO?
I am from Edo State, born in the UK and lived there till I was 8 years old. I am a 24 year old graduate of Architecture from Convenant University. I am working on my Masters Degree at the University of Lagos.

HOW AND WHEN DID RUDE START?
RUDE started in 2003. It started as just play, I wasn’t thinking of making a profession out of it then.

DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER TRAINING IN GRAPHIC DESIGNS?
No. I taught myself Corel Draw and a bit of Photo Shop. My Architectural background also contributed to my design skills. Everything graphics is related to architecture.

DO YOU THINK NIGERIAN DESIGNERS CAN COMPETE INTERNATIONALLY?
Nigerians have a particular trend in style. We sure can stand up to international standards though in our own style. Like myself, I try to portray Nigeria in my work while at the same time keeping it internationally accepted.

DO YOU DO DESIGNS LIKE OTHER PEOPLE SUCH AS CUSTOMIZING NAMES?
RUDE is a brand, it is a branded clothing name. I’m not into customizing people’s names on T- shirts. A lot of people like EFFIZY, NACK, ABBETON e.t.c. have their own unique style. I have mine and I use vector designs for geometric shapes and forms.

SO WITH YOUR TALENT AND ALL, DO YOU PLAN TO MOVE ABROAD LIKE MOST YOUNG PEOPLE WOULD?
I don’t have such plans. I don’t plan to ever live in the UK, Nigeria is my home.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOUR ARCHITECTURAL CAREER?
My plan is to go into both architecture and T. shirt designs.

ARE YOU IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ANY BODY?
I’m into partnership with a couple of people who market my brand. I like to refer to myself as creative. The sales are handled by a couple of friends because I’m not a very good sales person.

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES LIKE?
People don’t pay- up. Tailors don’t keep up to time. Another major challenge is that of getting tailors to give quality that matches with international standards.

TRIUMPHANT MOMENTS?
There’re always new concepts. You see things on television and try to match it with T- shirt design. One can get inspiration from a whole lot of places such as magazines, TV, internet e.t.c.

WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 10 YEARS FROM NOW?
I plan to develop RUDE Corp. as a media company that entails clothing, graphic arts, web designing, advertising and production.

WHERE DO YOU SEE THE DESIGN SCENE IN NIGERIA 10 YEARS FROM NOW?
I always know that change is the only constant thing. The design of today might not be versatile by then. We should improve on what we have, we should never remain stagnant. There will also be other designers involved from all over,

Architects benefit from an organized society- Ben Eboh

2008-05-25T11:14:00.003+01:00

Ben Eboh

Time it was when it was thoroughly unfashionable for arcitects to attend monthly meetings of the Lagos State chapter of the Nigerian Institute of Architects (NIALSC), often enough, there was so much despondency going round at the J.K. Randle Hall venue of the meetings, you'd rather spend more time chasing your next big break. Nowadays, there's still despondency in the air (why are architects so melancholic anyway?) but there's been a bit more energy, zest and encouragement from the center (the executives) to pull all practitioners up by their bootstraps to march on to the zenith of their calling. Two personalities stood out in that effort: Arc Ben Eboh, the outgoing Chairman and Arc Bimbo Ajayi, erstwhile Secretary to the association, who takes over from him as Chairperson. Ben Eboh's go-getting spirit in tackling the state government on collapsed buildings and town planning issues while challenging his peers on professional practice stand him in good stead, while many an architect will associate Abimbola Ajayi's name to those breezy and informative emails that kept you abreast of affairs, from the professional (meetings and conferences) to the social (funerals and birthday parties) engagements that mattered.

Little wonder then that the chapter's 2008 Biennial General meeting that held at the Agip Recital Hall of the Muson Center on Thursday the 24th of April, where Abimbola Ajayi was elected as Chairman, had an unprecedented attendance.

Bimbo Ajayi

The subsequent dinner / inauguration / awards night that held on the 25th of April at the Sheraton which almost doubled as a 'starchitects' parade saw the award of Best Architectural Expression in Bank Branch Development going to Guaranty Trust Bank (when will other banks get the message?). The Lagos State Ministry of Housing nabbed an award for Corporate Professional Best Practices in Housing Deliver (huhn?) and the University of Lagos got an award for Best Exhibition of Students Works amongst the exhibited works by students of the three schools of architecture in Lagos State (up school!).

With a smooth execution of a change in guard, the NIALSC seems set to face the challenges of inspiring, guiding and promoting the practice of Architecture in the fastest growing megalopolis on the continent. In the coming months, Bimbo Ajayi will have to prove her mettle in standing up to that onerous challenge, meanwhile, NIKE FAGADE sat Arc Ben Eboh down for questioning on his career and life after the NIA, he gave a good account of himself and is hereby summarily discharged and acquited!

-Ayodele Arigbabu
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

WHO IS BEN EBOH?
I am an architect and up until a few days ago, was the chairman of NIA, Lagos State Chapter. I run my own practice and I am married with kids.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
I am a pioneer student of Command Secondary School, Kaduna. I moved on to The Polytechnic, Calabar and graduated with a distinction in Architecture- HND level. I did my professional exams with the Nigeria Institute of Architects and obtained a Masters Degree in Project Management from the University of Lagos. I have attended a couple of conferences abroad. I was at one by the Royal Canadian Institute of Architects, Toronto in 2007, in South Africa for another conference in 2006, and Ghana. All these under the hospices of my being the chairman of the NIA, so within that period, I was privileged to be in the delegation of the institution at a lot of these conferences.

WHY ARCHITECTURE?
Architecture is one of those professions where you tend to know if you have the flare for it or not. In terms of the fact that it is a combination of the arts and the sciences. So in as much as you may be a brilliant student and you score high marks in chemistry, mathematics and all that, you must also have a creative mind and that's what stand architects out from the crowd. You know, not just the intelligence. Early in life, I was able to discover that I have the potential and I knew I’ld do well in architecture because I thought I had a creative mind. It has paid off.

HOW DO ACHITECTS IN NIGERIA COMPARE WITH THEIR INTERNATIONAL COUNTERPARTS?
As Nigerian Architects, we have lots of potential but they hardly materialize due to very hostile operating environment that we are in. Creativity requires a great deal, you must have sacrificed a great deal of your basic needs for you to think properly and bring out the best in you. But that is not to say the Nigerian architects cannot compete in a gathering of other architects. Like i said, the operating environment and secondly, the way we practice architecture in these parts make it difficult for us to go far. For instance, most of our firms are not large enough to be able to handle the kind of job that will give us the satisfaction we require as architects. It is the same as what we had in the banking sector a few years ago. People were satisfied with just having their small banks and doing their small business until their eyes were opened to the fact that if you were a bigger bank, you could do bigger business. In most of our architectural firms in Nigeria today, I can confidently say that more than 70% of them have not more than two or three key people- that's a collection of two or three principal people between sole proprietorships and partnerships. Whereas abroad, you have firms that have as many as 70 architects in one office, with several offices across the world. So in terms of capacity, such firms are able to handle much bigger jobs than a firm that has just one or two people. Maybe it's social or... I don't know, but we seem to have a problem of trust. Even when we have partnerships, they don't last, we have one person who feels he's doing all the work and the other one is 'eating' all the money and attending all the parties and before you know it, they break up. Even the younger ones don't like working in architectural firms because they don''t see a future there for them. If I'm working for an architect, I'll be asking myself that- 'where do I want to be in the next five years?' Chances are that that architect I'm working for is already grooming his son to study architecture so that when he dies, his son becomes the CEO of the firm. And I wouldn't want to watch a kid that I saw when he was born, several years after come and become boss over me. In bigger firms, especially abroad, you can rise to the position of partner and you even retire and you still collect royalties for your works or other benefits while the younger ones take over the business and run it. That’s why our growth seems to be stunted because we haven’t explored our full potentials.

FOR HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN A MEMBER OF THE NIGERIAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS?
I have been a registered architect since 1994 as a full member of NIA and even before then, I had been an active member. Looking back, it’s been 15 years now.

UP UNTIL NOW, YOU WERE THE CHAIRMAN OF THE LAGOS STATE CHAPTER OF THE NIA FOR TWO TERMS. WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
It was really challenging. Before then, I was the secretary. And while I was the secretary, I performed so well that I didn’t have to contest with anybody for the post of chairman because it was as if there wasn’t anybody else that could fit in better than I could. The Lagos State Chapter of the NIA has the largest number of architects and the best architects are here in Lagos. And for one to be chosen amongst these people was a challenge because I thought from amongst my peers, I didn’t think I was the most suitable. And I wasn’t even from the South-West. For this, I took it upon myself that I had to prove myself and shouldn’t disappoint people's trust. And now, looking back at those years, I can beat my chest and say that I did so well.

HOW HAS IT BEEN DEALING WITH OTHER PROFESSIONALS IN THE INDUSTRY?
Architects have had cordial relationships with allied professionals in the field such as the town planners, quantity surveyors, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, estate surveyors and all. Although we have areas of disagreement once in a while, we have ways of resolving them because we believe that everyone have a role to play. We have mutual respect for one another, it’s just like in human relationships, you must respect yourself as an adult for others to respect you, especially the younger ones.

YOU RUN YOUR OWN PRACTICE, ARE YOU INTO PARTNERSHIP WITH ANYBODY?
I am, with my wife- she’s also an architect. I do cheat her a lot, though she understands (laughing).

MOST EMBARASSING MOMENT?
I won’t call it an embarrassing moment. Life is always a testimony to the fact that whatever you set your mind to do, you’ll do it and do it well. I recall my days in the Polytechnic- HND, it downed on me that the system in Nigeria makes it difficult for people with HND qualification to aspire to the top of their career. I was then a Polytechnic graduate with distinction and I knew I was above average and so, I told myself that I was going to rise. Unlike other professions, the starting level is a Masters degree to be called an architect. With HND like I had then, one will have to move on to get a Masters or spend longer getting the professional exams. When I started the professional exams, I was somehow embarrassed as I wasn’t sure of whether I’ll pass or how long it was going to take me to finish. During my final exams, I prepared so well and not only did I pass, I also won an award for two out of three papers in those times. I was about 26 years old then and after passing the exams, I was challenged to have done so well in the exams and thought of proving myself. I was in Calabar and so, I thought of relocating to where it was happening and then moved to Lagos. I wanted to work with the biggest firm but I wasn’t computer literate so I enrolled in a computer school. I was so focused on learning that within a short period, I became so good that my boss them gave me more work to do than some of the others. By then I was working so I wasn’t thinking of the money I was getting paid, rather I saw it as an investment in myself. They were 'using' me there but I wasn’t that bothered. I remember one of the guys I worked with then saying to our boss ‘why is it that you take work from the people who run from work and give to those of us who work very hard?’
Then it became my philosophy in life that you do unto others what you want them to do unto you and the way you do others' work, so shall others do yours.

TRIUMPHANT MOMENTS?
What motivates me is the thought that I could be the best in whatever I want do. Even when I see obstacles, I look beyond them. After my OND where I had an upper credit, I told myself that I wanted a distinction in my HND. It was like a joke but in my first semester (HND), I almost had 4.0 but for a course in which I had a credit. I moved on and I graduated as the best all round in my final year.

Also during my final one of NIA, I had never seen anyone who passed at one sitting. There were people much older than I was then, who come back to do such exams and all that. But at the end, I came out as the best all round in the last exams to become an architect. That was a really joyous and triumphant moment. Another is when I was elected as the secretary of NIALSC. I contested against someone who had more going for him than I had and was incubent. He schooled here (South-West) and had more friend here than I did. I don’t know what I said or did but I won the contest. And after that, I was encouraged to go on for the post of the chairman and no one felt it necessary to compete with me because people knew of my record and thought no one could match me. Then again, I was encouraged to go for the 2nd term. People even thought I should move on to a third term but I thought I’d done enough.

WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT THE NEW CHAIRMAN OF NIALSC- ARC. ABIMBOLA AJAYI?
She had been my secretary for two years and she is one of the reasons I went this far. She’s extremely hardworking and every member of NIA would attest to this especially to the fact that when it comes to doing the right thing at the right time, she’s one to reckon with. She’s also great when it comes to managing people and now, she’s in the forefront, no longer at the back. The point I know of her, she’s someone who motivates those around her. She’s compassionate and caring, otherwise, I wouldn’t have encouraged her to move on to her present post.

HOW DO YOU SEE ARCHITECTURE IN NIGERIA IN THE NEXT 20YRS?
There are a lot of clauses tied to the fortune of Nigeria's economy. If the economy is to be resuscitated, one of the barometers of any economy is the construction industry. If the construction industry is bad, then the economy is bad. Architects see themselves more as professionals than business men. They need to break the jinx and see it as business. They should look and invest their money in the stock exchange, real estate and so on. Once they are involved in other things which can bring them money, they can stay afloat. Another thing is that once the environment is re-organized and things are done rightly, professionals generally and not just architects, will benefit from the order in the society.

WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 20YRS FROM NOW?
By then, I’ll be about 60 years old and I shouldn’t be working. So, I’ll say 10 years from now will be one of consolidation for me. I’ll pay more attention to business and lay a good foundation for my retirement and have money work for me, not otherwise. I’ll have reached the peak of my career and have made a name for the things I’ve achieved. I can’t rule out a stint in politics. I’ll look for avenues for self fulfillment, not financially. I’ll look at the hierachy of needs in sociology that says –once an individual has achieved basic needs, he will dabble into others.

The Cape Town Journal

2008-05-20T06:14:00.003+01:00

Episode 1.

You fall prey to the fellow with the pathfinder international stickers at Muritala Mohammed International Airport who wonders why you say you are going for a short course when your visa says you are on a visit...and then adds ruefully that you might want to put something in the envelope he's handed you to make your journey through passport control easier. The Custom officers in turn put on the squeeze, your JJC status must reek all over you like a skunk's spray because the police in Jo'burg do the same. You will not be fazed on your next trip.

You lose close to five thousand Naira with panache at the Jo'burg airport due to your naievety about the exchange rate and the going price for a sim pack. You vow not to cry over spilt milk, but remain close to tears...your Naija blood hates being upended in a bargain, foreign soil or not!
Johannesburg looks bejewelled from the night sky at 27,000 feet, the streets glow as if they are paved with gold and the buildings glitter like diamonds. Very apt you would say considering South Africa's history with precious stones and the fact that the inflight magazine you browsed through at the beginning of the flight kept talking about design as if the word was limited to the cutting and shaping of diamonds. The imagery of a jewel splattered landscape wouldnt have come up however if the design sleuthe wasnt such a third worlder...nay, a beleagured Nigerian who cant fathom how an entire city can run with all its lights blazing at night. ALL its lights, including street lights (hence the golden streets)! But this is not about J'oburg which was only experienced through one long and cold walk by a weary traveller from the arrival terminal of the O. R. Tambo International Airport to the departure lounge of the domestic wing. This is the Cape Town Journal.
Cape Town feels claustrophobic from 30,000 feet. Sequestered between an endlessly rolling rocky terrain and the Atlantic Ocean, it looks like you would have nowhere to run if something major happens to the city. You remember the missing plane that's still not been found in the Cross River mountains and wonder how long it will take rescue choppers to find this plane if it decides to find nest between one of the mean looking rocks below....perish the thought.
Cape Town's exceptional blend of mountain range and extensive waterfront makes it a choice spot for tourists from all over the world. Its location on African soil nonetheless,Cape Town is a veritable firstworld city with its city center being served by a plethora of coastal towns like Muizenberg, Simonstown, Fish Hoek and Kalk Bay at the southerly end of the city. Cape Point, the very tip of South Africa that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, is the southernmost tip of the continent and is renowned for........... The city offers game reserves, boating and surfing....about the surfing, most of these coastal towns have surfing as the major attraction for their largely white resident and tourist population. Sharks are said to attack surfers at the beach every once in a while, but the dedication of the white folks to surfing is nearly religious, they keep walking with their surf boards headed to the beach as if for prayers. They have shark watchers posted on the rocks to watch out for sharks with binoculars but the sharks still find prey occasionally, the bathers only leave for a while and come right back the same day. The city center is a 45 minute train ride from Muizenberg where the design sleuthe has set up a mission control center. The surprise is not the fact that it is a beautiful city from the suburbs straight through the city center, but that the beauty is sustained over a great stretch, on and on without signs of strain in the system. Even the graphiti that the street kids do all over the place and is considered an act of vandalism looks beautiful (another story for another day), telling of a latent creativity that explains why our adverts and now our music videos are being done in South Africa.

So it's not just about beauty, it's ultimately about sustainability. One actually feels sorry for the Lagos State Government, watching LAMATA paint and repaint the curbs on Ikorodu Road only for them to turn from white to brown to black within a few weeks. The amount of dust that swirls around the atmosphere in Lagos is amazing, how do you keep things pretty with all that dust? Here, where most surfaces are either tarred, paved or grassed, you do not see large expanses of exposed earth, except its a construction site, or a nature reserve and of course- the beach and even those have things well sorted out. There is also a certain quality to the atmosphere and the weather that seems to have a preservatory effect, making the design sleuthe muse that ff houses are organisms in which we live, then putting them up in a cold climate should be like keeping a kilo of meat in the fridge (or freezer as the case may be)- it doesnt rot as fast and thus gets to last longer. Little wonder that the buildings, no matter how old still look pristine, even the run down ones still stand with some dignity, tucked between more 'advantaged' neighbours and well ordered landscapes as they are. The Fashola Government seems to have caught on to this though, with the rate at which the Ministry of Environment is deploying landscaping initiatives across the state. One lingering memory of Lagos is that of a market woman in a bus on Oshodi bridge, looking upon the stretch of land below the bridge where a section of the market had been demolished by government.

She sighed and intoned: "Now they will come and plant flowers here"- her sympathies obviously with the traders whose livelihoods had been destroyed by the Urban renewal drive. Urban Renewal is never an easy task and should not be about whether landscaping / beauty and the therapeutic benefits / tourism it brings to residents and visitors alike is more important than the livelihood of the inhabitants who will be displaced or otherwise adversely affected by the change or vice-versa.

The shanty towns on Cape Town's city precincts have tarred roads and electricity and are better ordered than some of our middle class neighbourhoods (yet another story for another day) all because the government found it a matter of duty to intervene...Urban Renewal should be about mutual trade-offs and the good of all, which with deep soul searching, is not so impossible.

-Ayodele Arigbabu
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

Meet the Animator.

2008-04-25T10:13:00.002+01:00

He has lived the dream that remains in the realm of wishful thinking for many of his generation, training as an animator and working with some of the best in the industry.
Oladeji Victor Bamidele studied Civil Engineering before signing up at the Media Village, Kalk Bay, Cape Town to train in 3D communications as an animator. After working on several projects with South African animation houses like Character Matters Animation Studio, Ambient Animation Studios, Telegenic Production amongst others, Deji- who has been privileged to work with the likes of Tom Roth (from Disney) and Eric Lessard (Dream works) among other South African animators- came back to Nigeria for the first time in three years in January to run some workshops in 3D communication and to create awareness for his training programme in Cape Town –Animation for Africa - whose six months training and internship programme at Image Animation Studios has kicked off this week with four Nigerians in attendance.
With intelligence reports indicating that he’s keen on cooking up a storm on these shores, the design sleuth tracked down the mild mannered animator for questioning while he was on a cross country awareness / training tour of duty before heading back to Cape Town.
Ayo: What are the early influences that led you down the path of animation?
Deji: As a Kid I used to be fascinated by cartoons like Voltron, Ninja Turtles; Tom and Jerry; they were so captivating that I would remain glued to the TV for hours watching them...growing up; then life became more interesting with the introduction of video games and 3D cartoons like The Incredibles, and Toy Story. I was always wondering how those things were created...and why there wasn’t anyone in Africa producing the movies…so, I decided to take a dive into the world of 3D.
Ayo: Despite your training as an engineer, you still went ahead to learn to be an animator, has the career change been worth it?
Deji: I feel fulfilled and excited; frankly speaking I think its related; because the work of an engineer is related to creating things and making them work; the difference would just be that as animator we do everything on our computers. Animation gives you more flexibility to express your creative ideas which could be easily viewed around the world, thanks to the power of media. However, my background as a Civil Engineer has really been helpful in working in 3D space, drawings and modelling.
Ayo: The animation industry in South Africa is fairly young isn’t it? So Why Cape Town?
Deji: When I was leaving the country (Nigeria) in search of an animation school, I couldn’t find any in the country; my search led me to some schools in the UK, United States (of America) but they were quite expensive. I then started looking for options in Africa. When I discovered that Cape Town was offering some affordable animation courses, and that most of our good visual effects or animated commercials where done in Cape Town, South Africa, it became my natural choice.
Ayo: Talking about Cape Town, does the city really live up to its billing of being one of the finest in the world? What do you think gives Cape Town its edge…the natural scenery or the design scene out there?
Deji: Hmmm…believe it or not, its one of the most beautiful places in the world; I mean the combination of white sand beaches and lovely mountains just make it a place to visit. And for a fact, it’s one of the floral kingdoms in the world; nice scenery; certainly a great place for animators.
Ayo: In what ways would you consider 3D modelling and animation to have contributed significantly to the growth of critical design in fields outside of the film industry like engineering, architecture, product design and even graphics design globally?
Deji: Tremendously. It has now become a language; its the best way to communicate to clients, I mean you can walk through your structure before it’s built; it has also given artists confidence in their creative licence...today if you can imagine it, you can create it, then see it. That’s why we can talk about and design futuristic structures and models. It has taken the world of design to a new level.
Ayo: The 3D fever has really caught on in Nigeria over the past few years, but 3D Max has been the benchmark platform to work with for most modellers and animators. You on the other hand work with Maya. What are the features that make Maya so unique?
Deji: I have also worked with Lightwave for my modelling and Messiah for animation. They are all good software, don’t forget it’s not the software; it’s the artist; the man behind the software that makes the difference. It’s like your preference for different cars, someone might prefer a Benz to BMW; its all about the artist choice and what he/she is comfortable with but my preference in based on the fact that Maya is the industry standard; it’s quite robust; from animation to visual effects it’s just excellent; it’s an oscar award winning software; which is evident on works like Spiderman; Happy Feet, and Final Fantasy....another reason any one might want to work with Maya is the fact that you can hardly be stranded using it because of tons of tutorials and materials available online.
Ayo: With your experience in South Africa and having worked with animators from frontline American animation studios like Dream Works and Disney, what future do you see for animation in Africa, especially when you consider the infrastructural and technological challenges - like poor power supply and ICT facilities - faced in these climes?
Deji: We will take the world by storm; because Africans are hardworking; we are about to join our colleagues in the rest of the world but our greatest challenge now is more of the infrastructural than the technological side of things because we have the resources to acquire any technology we want; but we cant go any where without constant and stable power supply. God- the first thing He created was light...it’s the beginning of everything. We need electricity; once we get it right in this sector; the opportunity will naturally roll in; it will change the face of Africa.
Ayo: Bringing it home to Nigeria now, knowing that animation is a particularly laborious, time consuming and expensive art form, whether 2D or 3D and keeping in mind the path the film industry in Nigeria has taken in finding the fastest and cheapest techniques to tell our stories, what chances do you see for the evolution of a cheaper and faster style of animation in Nigeria that makes it easier for the African story to be told to the global audience by Africans themselves?
Deji: Usually when you opt for fast and cheap techniques; you end up compromising your quality; if we must make impact on a global scale then we can not afford to rush our productions; believe me it always reflects in the work of the artist or producer- those times of research, bringing in a talented crew, right setup and fine tuning. We must put in those quality hours to get the desired quality out; which translates to good wealth. We are at an advantage because we have the stories that the world is waiting to hear; and the only way we can attract a global audience is to push up our quality. I look forward to a time when our movies will première in about 3,000 cinemas in the US and Africa while yet produced locally, mind you, it’s already happening in South Africa. The last movie I worked on - Lion of Judah, you can check it out on www.lionofjudahthemovie.com - will be showing in about 2,000 cinemas in the US because of the quality of work we put into it. It’s taken us about 2 years to produce, so we must look at the big picture and go all out for it.
Ayo: Where do you see the animation industry heading to globally in the next twenty years?
Deji: Wao! It’s going to be crazy and scary; photorealism and hyper realism will be the order of the day; we would have found cheaper and efficient ways of doing things; the motion capture technology would have been perfected; and I think traditional animation would also return; we would see combination of 2D, Stop Frame, 3D animation in a single shot; and a lot of African countries would have joined in the global trend of events.
Ayo: Where do you see Oladeji Victor Bamidele in the next twenty years and what would he most likely be doing?
Deji: By God's grace; I would be concentrating more on family and purpose; developing other areas of my life to full potential.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

Ten Design Lessons from Richard Branson.

2008-04-14T13:52:00.002+01:00

image courtesy www.woopidoo.com

It might seem odd drawing design lessons from one of the richest men in the world but if you read Richard Branson’s lessons in life and business as contained in his autobiography- Screw it, let’s do it (published by Virgin Books 2007), you will see how apt it is, the fellow simply lives a designer life! Couple that with the fact that design is after all serious business, then you begin to understand why you need to pay attention here, but just in case this still doesn’t make sense to you after reading the ten design lessons on offer from Branson, go get the book and read for yourself…what more can one say?

1. If you can’t get the boat house, get the woman who owns the boathouse.

His car broke down on lonely roads too (what a consolation, so billionaires once suffered minor indignities too!), Richard Branson (while his wealth was still in the making) wanted a boathouse but couldn’t get planning permission to get one. Luckily for him, his broken down car led him to a rare discovery- good old Mandy who was ready to share her boathouse with him and then some…yeah the relationship might have panned out after a while, but young Richard did end up buying the boat house from her didn’t he, he even ran his business from there for a long time. Lesson learnt? Don’t allow planning officials (or other designated obstacles to your design progress) to kill your dreams, rather, employ some lateral thinking and if your lateral thoughts throw up a helpful female, grab her with both arms, as an old professor once told the design sleuth and a bunch of student designers in design school, ‘My only advise to you all as you venture forth on this torturous route? Marry a rich wife.

2. Don’t muck with well established brands.

Virgin has maintained its brand identity since the company’s first music store was launched in 1967. It is not by accident and not due to some outmoded creative lethargy. Branson asserts that he belongs to the school of ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’. Ever wondered why corporations sometimes spend millions undoing a well loved and well accepted, time worn brand identity in favour of a lack lustre and ill contrived alternative? Well wonder no more, just ignore all the corporate speak they spill forth to convince us that they know what they are doing, Branson has said it plainly – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you really must fix something then go redesign something that really needs fixing and leave that darn logo alone!

3. Play up the sex appeal

Yes, the truism has been over flogged that sex sells, but you can’t overemphasize the fact that that singular act on which the future of the entire human race is hinged is a most effective means of getting people to pay attention. If Branson can get away with a name like Virgin and he can dangle from a crane in a ‘nude’ bodysuit with his crotch covered with a Virgin cell phone to promote his line of mobile phones, if his airline can get away with a pay off that reads: ‘we’re better in bed’, then surely you can get a bit more sexy with that design…throw in a curve or two, make it seductive…if its not going to be attractive, then why are you designing it? Branson has shown that sex appeal is serious business. The design sleuth contends that it is a vital design tool.

4. Design for the environment

It really is infuriating that while third-worlders like us are yet to tap properly into the industrial revolution and all the accruable advantages- albeit that we are like a century late on all that- the first world is now making so much noise about global warming and the need to cut down on CO2 emissions. But think about it, the entire hullabaloo could be to our advantage. Unlike the first world economies who have continually deployed massive infrastructures around the existing energy models and would therefore incur more costs in converting to more efficient energy models, we third-worlders can shift to ‘green’ almost immediately at a fraction of the cost. Richard Branson, after listening to an impressive presentation from former US Vice- President Al Gore, has embraced a more environmentally conscious approach to business which he calls Gaia Capitalism. To the forward thinking third-world designer out there, big business is going green, design to anticipate a change towards environmental conservation, not only will you help the environment, soon, with a bit of luck, you’ll make a lot of money from your environmental conscientiousness, because where big business (like Virgin) leads, big money folloows.

5. Break conventions

If God didn’t break with convention, the universe would still have remained a dark formless void. He must have looked out at a particular point in eternity and said to himself, what the heck, everything can't just keep looking so dreary, let there be light and etc and etc and all the funky stuff you now know started to come into being. Branson might not believe in God, but he sure does borrow one or two gimmicks from him. If you’ve got your sights on being a great designer, be like Branson, nay, be like God, break with convention…who cares what stuff always looked like before you happened on the scene. Create something fresh…that’s your job.

6. Not being a gifted designer should not hinder you from being a gifted designer…if you’ve got the guts to dare.

Okay, this one is contrived I agree, but really, Richard Branson was dyslexic, had no prior experience about journalism and publishing and was just a secondary school student, yet he went ahead to publish Student magazine, his first ‘real’ business venture from which he grew the Virgin group we know today, without the benefit of an MBA or some other grand nod of approval from ‘the establishment’ that he could go ahead and take over the world. He dreamt it and he worked hard at it…two major ingredients on the path to being a great designer, don’t you think?

7. Design must be fun!

And Richard wasn’t stuck up and pretentious at the money making game either, he emphasises over and over again, the importance of upping the fun factor in whatever one does, so business stops being a meaningless, gruelling drive for money that ends up in disillusionment, but an exciting adventure into the unknown with lots of rewarding surprises all the way. When fun becomes a lifestyle, it tells in the products you churn out. Who wants dreary clinical products anyway, when you can have all the fun in the world with outlandishly exciting designs??? Designs are for people, design for lifestyles and not the other way round.

8. Diversify, be a design-preneur.

Richard is fast on his feet, he hits the ground running, at least that’s what you gather from his author biography. As Student magazine was losing revenue, he started up a mail order music business, as a postal strike crippled that venture, he opened his first media store, from selling music, he started a record label, and ultimately an airline…now there are over 200 companies and 50,000 staff worldwide. Businesses are meant to make money, but entrepreneurs start new businesses all the time and thus have a chance at surviving failed attempts. Don’t be a dinosaur unless you have a taste for extinction. Be nimble, try out new things and be one step ahead of your peers. There is always room for a new idea.

9. Screw it, just do it….but remember- take only calculated risks.
He took up dangerous challenges as a way of life, from foolhardy hot air ballooning exploits and risky sea faring adventures to unsolicited interventions in the potentially dangerous politics of the middle east. Branson’s businesses were designed with a similar daring spirit. If he thought an idea through and was convinced it could work, he followed through to a logical conclusion despite all opposition and discouragement. Yes, he didn’t give in to fear but he is human enough to advise – take only calculated risks. How he calculated the risk each time he took off on his hot air balloon misadventures, me - I can never understand, but somehow, his calculations worked out and he didn’t lose his life. If your design career is not worth risking something for, then you’re not worth being a designer, for this is a risk laden enterprise, but remember, improve your mathematical abilities, calculate those risks.

10. Reach for the skies...always

According to Richard Branson, Henry Ford’s Model-T automobile was initially designed “to run on fuel made from hemp” and was built with “hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was ten times stronger than steel, drawing further from the fact that the Diesel engine was initially designed to run on vegetable and seed oils like hemp, Branson went on to suggest that “If the Feds hadn’t banned hemp crops in the 1930s instead of petrol, cars might have still been running safely and in an environmentally friendly way on marijuana”. A fantastic thought Mr. Branson, but the design sleuth wonders if ‘an environmentally friendly way’ includes or precludes having the generality of the populace being high on second hand marijuana smoke from automobile exhaust pipes, now that’s a thought - lets save the environment by all getting high - depending on what side of the ‘ganja’ divide you belong to! On a serious note though, now in his sixties, Branson is not relenting, he has bought the rights to build a fleet of space ships and intends to pioneer space tourism, and is investing in comics, games and animation. For one whose principal at secondary school once told: You would either go to prison or become a billionaire (he’s accomplished both) Branson has come a long way and is still not relenting, so what excuse do you have for limiting your imagination???

-Ayodele Arigbabu
dreamarts.designagency@gmail.com

Whatever happened to the CIA?

2006-07-07T21:12:00.000+01:00

The spawning of new movements is often wrought with a synergy of like minds, all focused at the same goal within the same creative space. Thus the city invariably becomes the stage for such acts. Take for example, the Werkbund and the Machine Aesthetic which gained grounds in Germany in the early 20th century. Having undergone rapid industrialization under a military aristocracy, Germany soon dominated world politics and thus set the pace for world architecture.
Germany embraced the machine for all it was worth and instituted an organization (the Werkbund) under the architect Peter Behrens to bring together designers and industry for the creation of efficient designs for mass production. Architecture and the machine were married and the machine aesthetic was born. This new machine style was to be developed by three young architects who worked with Behrens on the Werkbund: Walter Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, whose contributions to architecture and design still influence current thinking today.

Several decades later, in Lagos Nigeria, another collective of bright minded individuals reared its head and seemed set to change the architecture and design scene. Dubbed the Creative Intelligence Agency (CIA), the collective had an impressive list of collaborators in the building design and art sectors and operated on an informal structure towards the elevation and refinement of creative thoughts and processes in design related matters. In an astounding show of enthusiasm for multi-practice and multi-disciplinary collaboration on creative matters, frontline architectural firms like MOE, James Cubitt Architects, Design Group, A T Onajide, Adeniyi Coker Architects etc, talked shop with Brand Specialists- Alder Consulting, Metal Work Artist- Olu Amoda, Landscape Designer- Fatima Lawanson of Kiosque Vegetal, Photographer- Jide Adeniyi Jones, Stage Set and Marketing Support Specialists- Total Consult, Lighting Consultants- Konu and Morrow amongst others.

Tackling a conceptual Millennium Urban Renewal brief for the Marina and Broad Street stretch of Lagos Island (tagged Lagos 2000+) as its first major exercise in June 1999, the CIA collective led by the energetic Koku Konu, (then of Konu & Morrow) engaged 55 students of architecture, design and allied sectors from the University of Lagos, Yaba College of Technology and Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, together with 23 professionals from the different collaborating firms (working together in 14 different units) in a series of intensive and interactive workshop sessions that dovetailed into a joint presentation session where each unit’s intervention was subjected to a grand jury.

Prior to that, the practitioners had made first contact with the students a month before at a student workshop where they (the students) had been assigned markers, cardboard, copper wire, pastels, adhesive and etcetera with which to interpret in their own way, an excerpt from Olaudah Equaino’s memoirs. Needless to say that the professionals found most of the student responses rather prosaic and spared no pains in saying so….but that was the whole idea!

Lagos 2000+ was well received and got exclusive coverage in Glendora Review. Though the proposed Millennium Publication that was to wrap it all up did not come through eventually, the CIA was not done yet.

In February, 2000, the collective had two representatives go to the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife to run a one day workshop at the instance of the students of the Department of Architecture of that University. Again, an assortment of materials: foam, rubber, nylon, netting, rope, pins, straws, glue, etc were handed out with twigs from live shrubs. The challenge was to create accommodation for a specific type of activity within the twigs (signifying trees) within 4 hours. The resultant ‘installation’ pieces were queer in appearance but heavy on philosophy in most cases.

The following month, back in Lagos, a brief was circulated for what was to be a follow up student workshop to the Lagos 2000+ project of the previous year. For two intense weeks, three units explored the deconstruction of Olu Amoda’s metal work as a signifier (hopefully) for fresh architecture, an urban renewal effort to turn Allen Avenue in Ikeja into a chic, modern high street, and a brain wracking attempt at connecting the different proposals that had come out of the previous Lagos 2000+ endeavours. These (highfalutin) projects were followed through to different levels of completion, like all other CIA projects, they were exercises in ‘mind over matter’…the process (as opposed to the product) was the big deal.

Then, the big clincher, in August 2000, Koku Konu led a posse of students on a study tour of Europe which took them through major cities, buildings, museums, and design studios. The week long exhibition of their efforts which followed the three weeks of intensive travel, study and analysis was not sufficient to capture the euphoria and relevance of the experience for the students and their coordinator. In fact, as if the last impetus had been exhausted by that tour, the CIA went relatively silent after the Euro-Tour.

Yet, all the programs organized by the collective within the first two years of its existence had afforded the students and professionals a rare chance for free interaction, aided by an abundance of food and drink. Like minds connected and alliances were made, which have endured over time with many of those students first having their internship with the same professionals they had course to interact with at the workshops and then going on to work for their firms at the conclusion of their training in school.

Five years after, the dust has settled, every one is back to the old grind of getting that next (big) job and earning a (bigger) living ….but every once in a while, the mind courts with reminiscences, a gleam comes to the eye and the question is asked….whatever happened to the CIA?

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
arigbs@gmail.com

John and Jill Godwin…septuagenarian architects, still married in love, profession and practice.

2006-05-17T12:12:00.000+01:00

Our collective amnesia as a people has been the bane of our corporate development as a nation. In every field of human endeavour, the design and engineering fields in particular, we find higher institutions churning out graduates into the job market who are always trying to reinvent the wheel. There is a lack of continuity in research and development efforts, thus the lesson learnt, say in a research paper delivered sometime in the 70s continues to gather dust on a long forgotten shelf somewhere while those same age old issues are engaged afresh from first principles three decades later, by somebody else…..nothing is updated, none of the ‘brilliant’ discoveries find their way into mainstream applications and to compound this waste in intellectual enterprise, most prescribed texts are imported from other climes...we willingly trade up on the value of our own experience. Enter John and Jill Godwin, the oldest and longest serving trained architects in Nigeria today who have jointly built up a formidable portfolio of work and a priceless wealth of experience in the profession in their 51 years of practice in Nigeria.

In the 1998 ‘souvenir’ to John Godwin’s 70th birthday, a 160 page collection of tributes, anecdotes and articles aptly titled John and Jill…along the line, a great opportunity was missed to jumpstart a much needed process of documentation. Arc Tunde Kuye who (together with Mrs. Biola Fayemi) now runs GHK Architects (of which the Godwins were at the helm of affairs until last year) wrote in the souvenir as editor that: Mr. (Steve) Rhodes insists that it must not be a book; I could only say “Yes, Sir”. He prefers it to be a souvenir. This tribute has taken off on a seeming tangent; however that tangent itself validates the need for the tribute. John and Jill Godwin are iconic figures in the history of architectural practice in Nigeria whose efforts demand proper documentation, the sort that goes well beyond occasional mention in newspaper & magazine articles or limited edition anniversary ‘souvenirs’ at that.

John Godwin was born in 1928 in Chalfont St Giles, Bucks to an AA trained architect father who worked for the Ministry of Works. He had his secondary school education at the Wrekin College in Shropshire before proceeding in his father’s foot steps to the Architectural Association School in London where he was trained from 1945 till 1950 under a Leverhulme Scholarship. He concluded his training as a Diploma par les Governement Medalist, a Societe des Architects and Bratt Colbran Scholar. The five years spent at the AA were fruitful in other areas too, for there did he meet his future wife- Gillian Hopwood, (born 1927 in Rochdale to a pair of Electrical Engineers) to whom he was summarily married in 1951 after they had both graduated in 1950. That their relationship was initiated and consolidated during those years of training in architectural school is of great significance, as Frank Mbanefo a long standing colleague and associate of the Godwins puts it in John and Jill…along the line: It is difficult to talk about John without mentioning Jill. You see, they are married in love, in profession and in practice.

Sam Odia, the architect well known for his Architectural Support Services and Archi-Mart magazine puts it more playfully this way:

John and Jill went up to school
To learn to draw a line or two
John fell in love & lost his heart,
And Jill came tumbling after…

John Godwin (JG) hardly ever talks about his period of national service in 1951 at the end of the 2nd World War. It must be the pacifist in him that would rather forget that season of conflict (this writer once saw him fume in annoyance when a party of expatriates he had invited for an excursion came along with a couple of menacing looking, armed mobile police escorts). But John is made of tough stuff. Len Stevens (a quantity Surveyor, formerly of Tilyard) recalls being extremely impressed with John’s ability to drink Star lager all evening and still be able to pick up a heavy chair, one handed, whilst kneeling down and eating ground nuts at the same time. (This writer again recalls once seeing JG tackle a wooden bench at one end -at age 72- lifting it from one end of a room to the other, while other younger ‘men’ looked on with jaws hanging. Felix Ohiwerei (of Lever Brothers and Nigerian Breweries fame) wonders if the generous intake of Star over the years might be responsible for JGs boundless energy.

The long sojourn in Nigeria began for the Godwins with JG’s arrival in Lagos in February 1954 as resident partner of the multinational architectural firm – Architects Co-Partnership. Gillian Hopwood joined him in March 1954 and before the year ran out, there was an addition to the family in the person of the young Tony Godwin, born in Lagos, Nigeria. An independent and questing spirit led the Godwins to open up their own practice in 1955 as Godwin and Hopwood Architects at 8 Oil Mill Street, Lagos. By 1959, their daughter Carey was born and within the same year, they moved house (residence and office) to 27 Boyle Street Lagos, which since then has remained strongly linked with their personalities. Assignments carried out for Police Colleges and other institutions in the North saw G&H opening offices in Kaduna, Kano, Jos and Maiduguri, between 1961 and 1973. By 1974, JG had embarked on two Sahara expeditions and the couple had opened an office in Ikeja, Lagos. In 1980, a Warri office was opened to facilitate work for the Shell Petroleum Development Company. In 1981, JG embarked on a third Sahara expedition and between 1982 and 1986, Tony Godwin (who later went on to head Godwin & Hopwood, London and the Commonwealth Association of Architects, UK as Executive Director) signed on with G&H as architect, Carey Godwin joined the firm as an interior designer while the up country offices were closed one after the other due to the depression in the Nigerian economy. In 1988 Godwin and Hopwood merged with Tunde Kuye and Associates to become Godwin Hopwood Kuye, the name by which their practice (which since 1998 has operated from Somolu in Lagos) has been known till date. Through those years of active practice, the couple have to their credit an impressive oeuvre that includes: The Northern Police College, Kaduna, New Nigerian Newspapers Head Office, Kaduna, Bookshop House, Lagos, Phillips Radio Factory, Guiness Breweries Factory and Office, Ogba, Metalbox Factory, WAEC building, Yaba, Metalbox Flats, Faculty of Science Complex, University of Lagos amongst many others.

In appreciating the unique abilities of his old friends in John and Jill…along the line, Frank Mbanefo who worked with the Godwins in the early days and had the rare privilege of having JG and GH as Associates of Frank Mbanefo and Associates in 1964 admits: I am still amazed by John’s depth of attention to architectural details, both in design and building execution, and Jill’s power and capacity in architectural administration. What a combination! Knowing them has been the best thing that has happened to me as an architect; they exhibit a great deal of discipline in their life and work… It is only natural therefore, that we all, the first architects of Godwin and Hopwood, modeled our offices on G and H ….I don’t know of any other architects in and outside Nigeria who have done as much for Nigeria as John and Jill Godwin…they have done more buildings in Education, housing, Industry, Religion and Commerce in Nigeria than anybody else in the architectural profession. They have certainly earned a place of importance and honour when the history of architecture in Nigeria comes to be written.

Henrikas Teris, another of the early ensigns to the G&H boot camp who now practices in Sydney shared his own reminiscences: I soon discovered that to do the job well (Quality Assurance) John and Jill had, over time, perfected systems and procedures of running an office and a job, that were better than I had experienced in any other office. Starting off with the Job Diary, where all on going facts, dates, fee agreement, consultants appointments are recorded, the multi-coloured files, A, B, C and D for the four principal parties on a project, instant copies of Site Minutes, standard details which had been perfected over time, all combined, if you followed them to the letter, in doing the thing that mattered as much as good design, and that is doing the job well! Needless to say, when I returned to Sydney after nearly five years with John, I had the system off pat and still use it now, computer or no computer.

Femi Majekodunmi, another old time associate of the Godwins remembers the couple for giving his own practice (which now has an outreach in Botswana) a much needed boost after he left G&H and he remembers JG for his invaluable contribution to the education of other architects in Nigeria through his involvement in the activities of the Nigerian Institute of Architects. Of that body, the couple became members in 1969 and became fellows in 1980 and 1985 consecutively. Prior to that, they had been admitted to the body of fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1963. They both registered with the Architects Registration Council of the UK (ARCUK) in 1950 while they registered with the Architects Registration Council of Nigeria (ARCON) in 1970.

But for this couple, architecture was just not enough for their boundless energies. They were keenly interested in the human and indeed the Nigerian enterprise. JG was at different times a trustee of the Lagos Yacht Club (his love for sailing is legendary) and Vice Patron of the Nigeria Britain Association. His interests in nature and conservation found expression in his tenure as council member of the Nigerian Conservation Foundation and through his pet project LEGACY, the Historical and Environmental Interest Group, he actively informs advocates and provides consultancy on sites, buildings and objects of historical and environmental value to the country. Not a man to shy away from the social circuit, John Godwin is a member of the Oriental Club in London, the Lagos Dining Club and is a Commander of the Order of the Peacock of the Island Club, Lagos. In 1978, he was appointed an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) John Godwin remains a firm believer in the interconnected destinies of Nigeria and Britain and the need to constantly seek ways of extending the mutually beneficial opportunities that first showed themselves during the early contacts in the late 20th Century. His wife Gillian on her part was President of Soroptomist International of Nigeria in 1990, Governor of the Lagos British School in 1995 and President of the Nigeria Britain Association in 2003. They were both given chieftaincy titles: Baakole of Owu and Erelu Baakole of Owu in 1999 to round up the honours.

Mr Akintola Williams (with whom JG has served on many committees) testifies to JG’s strength of character: I learnt from John the art of conducting committee meetings properly – compelling punctuality on the part of members and keeping strictly to the time allocated for the meeting and its agenda……..What John does not know about Nigeria does not exist. A much seasoned traveler, he found Nigeria too small a territory for him to ‘conquer’ as a result of which his adventurous spirit propelled him to traverse the Sahara Desert in a Landrover.

Mr. Steve Rhodes, music impresario and cultural icon (with whom JG serves as trustee of Glover Memorial Hall) also testifies to JGs tenacity: What pulled me to John, almost immediately, was his dogged tenacity once he got his teeth into a project. In the period since we met, we have worked together on a few projects where the conditions were less than the most conducive, and John’s tenacity really came to the fore. We have since then become quite firm allies in fighting the status quo.
Between GH and JG, there is such keen concentration on how building components come together and how spatial programming meets up with user demand and comfort. This primary focus is so strictly adhered to, almost to the exclusion of all extraneous ornamentations and other whimsical add-ons that give buildings character. GH and JG get away with this austere design approach by the sheer logic of their resolutions. Their buildings eventually come together to speak an incontrovertible truth that calls to mind Mies Van Der Rohe’s popular dictum that God is in the detail.

Interestingly, apart from his return to the University of Lagos to continue teaching MED (Masters in Environmental Design) courses on a part time basis, John Godwin’s recent preoccupation is with the documentation of the works of his old time friend and well admired ‘master builder’- Demas Nwoko. John Godwin is an unabashed fan of the former member of the Zaria Art Society (Zaria rebels) and the Ibadan based Mbari Writers and Artists Club. In fact, JG has been a long time champion for the promotion of Nwoko’s work, taking photographs of the artist’s buildings and getting them published on the internet. Despite his high taste for expressionism and preference for generating his buildings on site as opposed to JGs total devotion to the complete resolution / documentation of a building’s design through drawings, Godwin still considers Nwoko to be one of the finest architects ever to come out of Nigeria. Always one to act out his convictions, John Godwin has undertaken to write a book on Demas Nwoko’s architecture to coincide with his friend’s 70th birthday annivesary. Commissioned by Farafina and due to be published in 2006, the book will find pride of place in being about the most important book on design thinking to be published in Nigeria in this decade.

But then, who documents the outstanding works, thoughts and processes developed by John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood in their five decades of professional practice in Nigeria and the United Kingdom, as their 80th birthday anniversary approaches? The challenge is out to their close associates, colleagues, friends, students and admirers….not a half hearted souvenir this time….please lets have a solid, meaty book, for the Godwins and for posterity.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
arigbs@gmail.com

published in The Guardian Life Magazine, Dec 11-17, '05.

EARTH IN THE CITY

2006-05-17T00:53:00.000+01:00

Arguably the most extensively used building material over time and across cultures, raw earth has been found expedient for building construction by ancient civilizations due to its ready availability and easy maneuverability. The current trend of ‘return to earth’ is ironically championed by industrialized / developed nations, France in particular. This is because current research has found the material to be viable economically, and technically. It also allows for a decentralization of the construction industry, thus empowering more individuals with the ability to directly meet their own housing needs.

Adoption of raw earth technology provides a broad spectrum of opportunities for national development. The local availability of the basic raw materials and skilled / unskilled labour cuts down effectively on the cost of importation of services and materials which have been a significant drawback for the construction industry in developing countries. This draw back particularly affects concrete as a material which has been at the vanguard of modern building construction. In Nigeria, 60% of the components of cement are imported by most cement factories. The cost of materials accounts for about 40% of production costs while energy costs account for 30-40% of the total production costs. Coupled with transportation costs which inflate the unit price of cement bags in direct proportion to the distance; these costs have made the deployment of cement based construction for affordable mass housing rather difficult.

In response to the problems posed by modern construction methods, research in raw earth construction has gone a long way in showing the versatility, functionality and cost effectiveness of earth as a construction material. Development programmes geared towards the harnessing and development of this technology for architectural application in the past have provided an avenue for:

1. Expression of cultural identity in traditional building techniques
2. Initiating development plans which are not capital intensive but labour intensive. Such cost effective schemes would help developing nations with effective debt management.
3. Technology transfer and inter boundary diplomacy between developing nation states and advanced countries which have pioneered the adoption of raw earth architecture.
4. Maintenance of the ecological balance while cutting down on the unemployment figures of developing nations.

Modern cities and settlements executed in splendid styles and versatile forms by the CRATerre group in affiliation with the Grenoble Architecture School in France show just how raw earth can be applied to exquisite modern taste. City blocks and housing schemes in Mali, Morocco and Saudi Arabia, executed with raw earth, show how relevant it is to developing states and how well it fares in competition with other construction methods.

Raw earth structures have been existing in practically every state of the country for several centuries. The obvious reason for this is the basic nature of the material, its ready availability and easy manipulation and durability even well and above that of stone or timber structures. The flexibility of the material is well exhibited in the variety of expressions of earth forms across the cultural, religious and climatic regions or terrains of Nigeria. The northern regions have the tradition of using conical sun dried earth bricks (tubali) for their residential houses and monumental structures like mosques and palaces, characterized by domed roofs. The central and south – eastern parts of the country are known for clustered huts made of puddled earth laid in wet courses. Colonnades are common to support overhanging thatch roofs which protect the earth walls. South - western Nigeria is known for houses and palaces built around spacious courtyards with earth walls and thick columns linked by strong beams. Down south, raw earth is padded unto linear wood structural frames to form composite walls which could easily be load bearing.

The different zones exhibit a uniqueness in the application of the material, based on their varying climatic and cultural characteristics. Up north, the walls are left exposed and are even decorated with motifs which remain for several years. This also makes it possible to experiment with different molded forms for the walls which are the most prominent building elements unlike down south (with higher annual rainfall) where the overhanging protective roofs dominate. Walls in South eastern Nigeria are sometimes decorated with incisions or with indigo coloured pigments (Uli) while buildings in south – western Nigeria could have their earthen columns sculpted into caryatids or other interesting forms.

True ‘return to earth’ will require a study of the traditional building systems in earth technology that evolved over time, to gather basic evidence of their successes and failures which can then guide the material’s usage in a modern context.

This need to research our traditional building forms must have informed the creation of the Museum of Traditional Nigerian Architecture (MOTNA) in Jos. Set within the sprawling 80 acre boundary of the Jos Museum, MOTNA is a live project that replicates at full scale, the major types of traditional built forms (all in raw earth) from across the different regions of the country. Of the 48 models intended, over one third have been completed, including models of well known structures like the ancient Kano city walls, Zaria Friday Mosque, Pategi Compound, Mbari Shrine, Rukuba Compound, Benin Palace, amongst others. This rich store of cultural and technological information has turned the Jos Museum into a choice tourist destination. MOTNA commands attention for its daring scale as an open air museum, a classification it shares with very few others in Africa. It is instructive to note that Jos Museum is of major relevance to the revival of earth construction in Nigeria, not just because it houses MOTNA, but also because Jos Museum in the past has been host to technical workshops on earth construction methods that exposed museum staff and interested professionals in the building construction industry to modern possibilities in raw earth construction.

A visit to the Lagos station of the National Museum, where the bamboo huts that once characterized the craft village area are being replaced with raw earth structures; would show how some of those possibilities are being explored today. According to Messrs Folaranmni Adebayo and Festus Owojaiye, technical officers of the museum attached to the project, the new buildings are being erected with solid compressed earth blocks of 4 inches by 12 inches which are made with a molding machine and technical knowledge brought in from Jos. The compressed blocks are made from cement stabilized earth: 19cm³ of cement to 4 wheel barrows of laterite (red) sand. The resultant blocks are rock solid after curing for 7 – 10 days and can then be laid in courses like regular sand-crete blocks or burnt bricks. Sourcing the laterite sand of the correct consistency could be a challenge in Lagos where sandy and loamy soils are prevalent. For the current project which complements the popular Museum Kitchen that has continued to stand tall with its earthen walls through generations of use; laterite soil had to be source form the Mowe – Ibafo area, right outside Lagos at the cost of N8,500 per tipper as against N1,500 which would have been obtainable up north where the soil type is more prevalent. Though this makes it difficult in Lagos to benefit from the cost savings that should have been the norm when building with earth, it is not the case in other parts of the country (or other parts of Lagos for that matter) where red earth is readily available in abundance.

Another perceived deterrent to the widespread adoption of raw earth building construction in rainforest regions like Lagos is the fear that earth walls would fail under the constant influence of driving rain and floods. However, that fear is unfounded when earth buildings are conceived with the right design considerations for the regions where they are to be erected. With a good hat (effective roofing system) and a good pair of shoes (a secure / raised foundation) raw earth walls would hold their own against all odds in regions with high annual rainfall. Many buildings have been standing for over a hundred years in those regions to lend credence to the fact.

Through the current project, the Lagos Museum hopes to increase awareness for earth construction and to provide technical consultancy for individuals and organizations that show interest in adopting the building material and techniques.

So, mud house….anybody?

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
arigbs@gmail.com

published in The Guardian Life Dec 04-10, '05

Invisibility remains their claim to fame.

2006-05-08T23:36:00.000+01:00

For a company that boasts of 800m² of office / production space in a choice industrial area, a staff strength of 30 odd skilled persons, and a client list that reads like a random sampling from the Corporate Affairs Commission’s directory, Total Consult has certainly come a long way from the fledgling company that once operated from a 3 bedroom flat in Iwaya, Lagos back in 1992. Yet, 13 years after, the company that set out as an integrated design and build service provider with unique competence in the area of stage sets, merchandising units, specialized furniture, exhibition stands and other outdoor advertising support solutions still insists: ‘Our invisibility is our claim to fame’

In this exchange with Ayodele Arigbabu, Total Consult’s Managing Director – Theo Lawson (a 1985 graduate of the prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture – AA - in London) lifts that veil of invisibility for one rare moment as he talks on design, entrepreneurship and the total architect.

AA: Total Consult has emerged market leader in advertising and marketing communication / merchandising support services. What factors are responsible for leveraging the company in this area of market specificity?

TL: Firstly all blessings are of God and thanks be to him. I would like to think our success has been due primarily to the fact that we enjoy what we do and any one that joins catches the bug. The Advertising and Entertainment industries offer a lot of stimuli with ever changing products and packaging. Integrity is also quite important; never promising what you cannot deliver.

AA: Your company has worked for several clients and executed a large volume of design and build assignments since inception….which client(s) would you recall as being most memorable, which assignment(s) were most challenging?

TL: Design and ‘implementation’ as opposed to ‘build’. The latter is more likely to be linked solely with Building construction which still falls under implementation. The most memorable projects would be the first. My first completed building was for my brother Dr. Lovett Lawson in Jos circa 1984. It was 3bedroom brick bungalow designed on a hexagonal matrix while I was still in school and was envisaged initially as a guest house. I first saw the building after it had been completed and felt really proud. My first stage set was for a pair of fashion designers that wanted to host a fashion show with a difference, so in 1990, I designed an architecture influenced stage and catwalk. I worked with Duro Oni on lights and everyone including myself thought it wasn’t bad. We have had many great jobs, a few good jobs and a very few near disasters and in all we give thanks to God.

AA: ‘The Impossible - we do right away, miracles take a bit longer’…have your clients really come to relate with this Total Consult mantra…or does it remain an aspiration in service delivery?

TL: It’s become more like the cross we bear. Clients always leave commitment to last minute but still expect a successful service delivery, on time.

AA: ‘Take care of your tools, they feed you’. That is another of your maxims…to put it bluntly, how have you taken care of your tools….how have they fed you?

TL: It started off with investment in mechanical and electrical tools to enhance our productivity; we then went electronic with computers, cameras, walkie-talkies, lights etc which gave us that extra edge. In Nigeria, we lack a maintenance culture and if we didn’t consciously address this issue, our tools would stop working for us and we’d starve. I have started to look at the concept of human tools also; so the adage for me now is “take care of your tools/people, we feed each other.

AA: For two years now, you have ventured into a separate practice – The Lawson + Odeinde Partnership which offers traditional architectural consultancy…does that indicate an ascendancy of ‘permanence’ over ‘temporariness’ of built forms in your design oeuvre…have you left stage sets and pavilions to ‘the team’ at Total Consult?

TL: I got into marketing support quite accidentally and developed it as a hobby before it became our bread and butter; but as an architect I crave for that great project, that building or monument that will be my legacy, my statement. It probably will not happen for many years yet so in the mean time I keep practicing and building stage sets.

AA: You trained at the Architectural Association in London that puts you in the same league with the likes of Prizker award recipient – Rem Koolhaas and the avante-gardist – Zaha Hadid as alumni of that legendary institution. 20 years after leaving the AA, would you say you have found the creative space in Nigeria to exploit the full potential of your prodigious training?

TL: Both Zaha and Rem were lecturers when I got into the AA and considering that Zaha’s first major built project is only say 3years old and Rem is more famous for building shops and writing philosophies, I think I still have time to play catch up. A problem however is that our palette is not as rich in materials and budget…but this also throws up interesting challenges which may stimulate creativity.

AA: As a member of the Nigerian Institute of Architects, with a strong entrepreneurial background, what future would you prescribe for Design education in this environment where the designation of ‘supplier’ commands more respect than that of ‘designer’?

TL: Successful firms should take on lots of interns in some type of informal apprenticeship programme where interns are exposed to both design and managerial skills. Most firms today have diversified from core architectural consultancy; some are ‘project managers’, fashion and brand identity designers etc and the successful firms should help prop up our failing educational institutions.

AA: Your wife is the executive director of the frontline entrepreneurship development organisation- FATE Foundation…..based on your own pedigree, do you see yourself playing a key role in Design and Entrepreneurial training as empowerment ‘tools’ for young people….or have you ceded all such matters to your better half?

TL: My wife was the executive director of FATE Foundation; she resigned 6months ago to become an entrepreneur as well, so now I can give her lectures on how things are in the real world. I am sure when we’re a bit more settled; I shall extend my current office based intern training to the universities.

AA: Still talking family, you have a brother and a cousin in the advertising business – Billy Lawson of JWT (formerly LTC) and Shola Lawson of UB40….What influences were you exposed to as kids? Or is there a creative gene in the family?

TL: My father was a civil servant, Sola’s father was a soldier; both were retired before they reached their zenith. Me, I swore never to work for Government and preferably for myself. I can assume this for Billy as well but I’m not sure of Sola’s sickness…(laughs).

AA: What you do now, does it tally with what you envisioned 20 years ago upon graduation from architectural school? Where do you see Theo Lawson and Total Consult in the next 20 years?

TL: When my elder brothers graduated, there were job offers waiting, cars were affordable, life was easier. I came back with optimism into a Nigeria that I later found to be feeding on itself, all the value systems and infrastructure were disintegrating; so to survive required strong faith and dogged hard-work. In 20yrs, I see TC going strong and pushing boundaries in design with a new crop of young designers. Theo Lawson will be the barman (ever ready to chat on design issues) in his little boutique hotel somewhere….maybe in Badagry.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.

Published in The Guardian Life- Nov 27-Dec. o3 '05.

Why we must push Design in Nigeria.

2006-03-22T15:02:00.000+01:00

Lanre receiving IYDEY award

25% of Britain’s Economy is powered by the design sector….while Nigeria battles with mundane issues like erratic electricity supply and an unbelievable level of apathy towards good design.

Yet, despite opportunities that abound abroad for bright, energetic, young minds, especially a designer of his caliber who recently got critical acclaim as the first International Young Design Entrepreneur of the Year (IYDEY) in an international competition organized by the British Council in collaboration with 100% Design, UK; Lanre Lawal insists on plying his trade from these shores for the foreseeable future.

Why? Perhaps because the socio-political and economic dysfunction presented by this country (Lagos in particular) serve as cerebral stimulant for this intense young man.

In this session with Ayodele Arigbabu, Lanre (who now waxes his offerings in 3D Modelling, Animation, Multimedia, Web Design, 3D Architectural Visualisations, Video Compositing, and Branding & Graphic Design under the trade name of Design Jockey Sessions) opens up on design issues that pulsate daily through his very arteries.

Lanre's visualization of Mbari Project

AA: From your recent experience in London, to what extent would you say the design industry there affects the daily life of the average Londoner?

LL: Tasteful design is the norm, not the exception. From an advertising standpoint, mature creativity is everywhere on every route. The commerce is tied very strongly to graphic presentation. Certain streets in Glasgow and London were a negotiation between a graphics coffee-table book, and a trend-setting exhibition.
Design and commerce exist in a mutually beneficial relationship. The instinct is to package whatever you do across pleasing font, color, lighting and material before you present a product for sale or use.On a public level, The Design Council on Bow Street, founded by Churchill in 46, was looking at ways of re-aligning the National Health Service through ingeniously designed question cards, which patients have to sort everyday according to their diagnosed ailments.

AA: Talking about design as a tool for national development, what are the possibilities you see in this country?

LL: I’ll give a few examples:Architecture: Learning from The Bilbao Effect as its so termed. So let’s rework the National Museum into a state-of-art multimedia center with unique architecture.The results for identity orientation and commerce will teach its lessons.Design Fairs: 100% design in England, Design Indaba South Africa…a design event showcasing our services and products in all design related fields. Cuisine: Packaging local fruits, herbs, beverages in sophisticated modules – Print labels + TV ads + e-commerce equals wider acceptance within the country, incredible sales outside the country.It will help to have a Design Council co-coordinating product and packaging design from the 36states and facilitating its marketing within and outside the country.There’s innumerable ways design can boost the economy so both image and revenue issues have a great chance at improvement. Quality Design/ aesthetic charm has a way of warming people / buyers to your products. The investment possibilities are huge.In business, it’s a good thing to get your products noticed. That’s why powerful firms like Nike, Apple, Habitat and others hire designers to invent or re-invent their communications. They see the need for designers to work creative MESSAGES to be delivered to their target market with maximized impact. As proved by the IPOD, firms that respect and utilize design make tremendous profit.Design positions your campaign, company, culture or country in the sequence of:Positive impressions – Higher perceived value – Increased sales / preference.Its major impediment here, is manufacturing and in some cases production.Furthermore, design thrives in a situation where a market is ravenous for exotic things of good quality. For quite a large chunk of the populace, the issue is survival, not design. And that’s where it can be made relevant – good yet affordable design for the masses. I encourage its development as a lingua that’s distinctively ours yet assuredly urban - particularly within the field of new-age design - mainly product packaging, electronic visage, and design paper-centric print. We need design schools.

AA: Is there any benchmark for progress in the design sector…in quantifiable terms?

LL: Design is quite wide in Nigeria. Architecture to Products to Video to Fashion. On the whole it’s quite staggeringly substantive. But design could even exceed that description with a more vibrant economy, which it ‘s helping to bring about anyway…
I don’t quite know how to put the question to shame. I am particular about the economics of it all, and video seems to have made the most quantifiable progress toward a benchmark. Fashion is on the upswing as well. Graphic Design is taking no prisoners in different nodes of genre-specific renaissance. Suffice to say, for those sectors that need a benchmark, their development has no way to go but up. Rock-bottom, with regard to identity, can’t be gone beyond these days…

AA: Your award was won not just for your abilities as a designer, but also as an entrepreneur – first with Home Made Cookies and now with Design Jockey Sessions. You have worked closely with architects in the past, what level of involvement have you had in environmental design – architecture, interior design, and urban design and in what ways do you feel you can impact still on this vital arm of the design sector?

LL: There was a lot of 2D CAD to 3D conversion work in the early days. Improvisations in Model / Environment-Representation and Virtual Reality Architecture Coding + multimedia at HMC. Of the few urban design projects I have worked on, I was proudest of the MBARI intervention project; a series of post-afro centrist performing venues & artist residence prototypes aimed at reviving the movement via an arts village.
Urban Design-wise, I am interested in making intelligent buildings; electronically wired up so they ‘interact’ with the inhabitant among other stuff.Each room, a computer of sorts interfaced by presence or presence + manual play. I hope NEPA permits it.

More Lanre's visualization of Mbari Project

AA: I understand your presentation in London was largely based on your multimedia creation for Glendora’s impressive book – ‘Lagos: A City at Work’, you appear to have keen interest in the urban conurbation called Lagos…after working on the project, what is your own angle to Lagos at work?

LL: Lagos works on a survival principle, at a ‘makes-you-have-to-stick-with-the-hustle’ level. Across 5 urban blocks of tension, choke, release, small hope, big hope, a survival dynamo perpetuates its existential kinesis, relevance and consequence.
Functions, because the folks living in Lagos make do with what they got. And they extend the music. Like Fela might work a 7-scale transliteration into fifty contortions before horn section cascade.As the music / desire physics causes the dance / survival, the dance rouses the ire of the tempo.It featured largely video Interviews with the proletariat and authority within experimental graphics. The interactive section is a compilation of point-location audio recordings, stock footage and photography.

AA: How does it feel sharing credits for the book with great thinkers like David Aradeon, Rem Koolhaas and Odia Ofeimun? You must have been the youngest of the lot!

LL: That happens often. Even among the IYDEY finalists in Nigeria, I was second youngest.In the UK, I was the youngest finalist. I turned 27 in Glasgow.To be sharing credits with these people? I feel honored of course.

AA: You have in the past articulated your determination to continue working in Nigeria despite all the drawbacks – incessant power outages and depressed economy to name a few. What informs this missionary zeal of yours not to contribute to the nation’s brain drain?

LL: Zeal dies. Sober hangs around. I’d like to work with other like-minded people to improve the design/presentation culture particularly within public interfaces, if it won’t get us in corners… I’ll give it a good shot; then we’ll see. I have never been unaware of the difficulties of working here.Its not me…its us. It’s a large image/perception problem. Little or zero new media refinement where local content is concerned in. …Graphic Design, Packaging, Film/ Cartoons, Motion Graphics for Television, Animation, Special Effects for Film...It affects the internal and external assessment…and the kids see that and progressively calcify all sorts of false assumptions as identity…

AA: But as a designer, how do you hope to advance your work through conception and prototyping to finish with the dearth of cutting edge technology and skilled labour in the industry…or is the said lack purely illusory?

LL: At some levels there is a lack. At some others…it’s illusory. It’s a question of sponsorship and to a high extent, entrepreneurship. I met the guy from India, Neil Foley…from Bangalore. It was not so much that they had all the equipment in the world; but that there was a will to make money and expansive futures out of what they had. The problems are advisory, equipment+infrastructure, training and marketing.
The solution, I foresee as being largely a private initiative; holding talks and possibly getting government participation. Its open and the challenges are for anyone willing to create. That’s what I figure for now. Mutations can be very busy here.

AA: So what does it take to ‘make it’ as a design entrepreneur in Nigeria? What would it take to build the design industry to critical mass in this country?

LL: Providence.I could say guts, good thinking, compassionate billing, brother-and-sister pro bono, being on time, alertness but in my personal experience, Lagos slaughters all those things with ridiculous ease from time to time. Though that’s not to downplay these victims as totally useless.Honesty is particularly important. If you are honest, you are reliable. Everybody needs the reliable person.
Beyond that, it’s useful to have a will to see through what you started, no matter the skewering financial repercussions. Education and Exposure are particularly vital.My background had about 5 distinct periods of education and output -Water coloring, sketching, mathematics, designing with the computer and finally Filming. Luck with no limit background really.
But that is just one trajectory to my specific design competence. You’ve got jewelry, fabrication, craft, fashion etc.So there needs to be a school, with a syllabi, which while also teaching antecedent theory and practice, is also carefully synchronized with current trends; in electronic, fabrication and print techniques. At any given time, its syllabi must be at par with what is taught in foreign design schools and more.
I must really stress ‘current trends.’ There seems to be a constant stagnation in a lot of these sectors. You get the usual maverick that’s at par with no training whatsoever now and then, but there are so few of them.
2nd question: Entrepreneurs. Pockets of them, across the years, networking with government & private industry can attain critical mass and offset the seeming jinx. It’s the good hunch I have, from my distance of 27.

AA: Where do you see Lanre Lawal and Design Jockey Sessions in the next 20 years?

LL: You force me to be immodest again.Well, Alive and Younger.
Also, if exciting ideas, patience, good intention are still so relevant like today, I will like to have a lot of it. If they are not, I will prefer having a lot of it still.

(Published in The Guardian Life Magazine, Nov. 13 - 19, 2005)

related link:
www.thedesignjockeysessions.com

Old Glover… back in the Lagos hustle.

2006-03-22T13:31:00.000+01:00

Located right in the heart of the Central Business District of Lagos Island on Customs Street, somewhat sandwiched between the parallel axes of Broad Street and the Marina, Glover Memorial Hall is a short distance from the popular Tinubu Square and other notable buildings like Stallion House (the tallest building on the Marina with which it shares a fence), Central Bank, General Post Office amongst others.

The foundation stone of the first Glover Memorial Hall is recorded to have been lain in 1887 on the parcel of land donated by the legendary activist – Madam Tinubu as a memorial to Governor Glover’s achievement in the extension of the Marina, the construction of Broad Street and the creation of a settlement in Ebute Metta for Egba refugees.

The old hall, built in the fashion of the colonial architecture of the time, was pulled down in 1961 and the present hall was erected further back on the same piece of land, thus giving up its former position right on the Marina. The new hall, designed by Watkins Grey in 1963 can be located in the same post independence era that saw the development of other buildings like Mandilas on Broad Street, Police Headquarters on Moloney Street, Alagbon building on James George road amongst others. These buildings were typified by the clean machine finish of the modern movement and tropical architecture later derived from it and the work of the designers of the Glover Memorial Hall show an active involvement in the prevailing architectural trends of that era.

While the old hall enjoyed prominence on the Lagos Skyline in the early 1900s, being right at the edge of a much less congested Marina, the new hall, though well integrated into the growing urban conurbation of the 1960s, has fallen out of context forty five years later. In the ‘60s, the new buildings being done by firms like James Cubitt and Partners, Ronarld Ward and Partners, Nickson and Borys, Godwin and Hopwood, amongst others were all done within the same architectural context, with a limited number of multistory buildings erected within that period of development - spurred on by the euphoria of national independence, a development that has panned out into an impressive proliferation of high rise buildings along the Broast Street / Marina stretch. Glover Hall is now trapped in the midst of these imposing towers, hidden in their shadows especially with the presence of the abutting 30 odd storey Stallion House – the tallest of their league which was incidentally built on the spot where the old hall once stood on the Marina. To make matters worse, the hall has had to contend with the stifling choreography of a high density Central Business District and the attendant issues of noise, traffic, parking and security. Add to that the steep competition being posed by much younger and more nimble venues like the MUSON Center and Terra Kulture, the Glover Hall seemed to have had its day.

But not anymore. In a concerted drive at restoring the glory of Old Glover which picked momentum at its Centennial Celebration exactly five years ago, Glover Memorial Hall has gone through a face lift. Under the supervision of GHK Architects, the stage has been expanded, the acoustics improved and the general outlook has been updated. Now Old Glover, which once fell so low as to have open fires made within its confines by ‘buka’ operators is back to its rightful place as a front line events venue in Lagos, playing host to high profile theatre shows and corporate functions.

Glover Memorial Hall with its one hundred and five years of history in Lagos remains a testament to the significant role of buildings as important participants in the unfolding of a people’s history. With the recent commencement of a 15 billion Naira urban regeneration project in the Lagos Island Central Business District by the Lagos State Government, the State’s leadership seems to have come to the realization that buildings and the streets that tie them together can be harnessed to foretell a prosperous future.

-Ayodele Arigbabu. (Published in The Guardian Life Magazine Oct 30-Nov 5, 2005)

Shrine Architecture meets Science Fiction.

2006-03-22T13:21:00.000+01:00

……Riddle.
“My sculptures are houses,
my gates are trees,
my walls are forests,
my shrines are sculptures.”

- Adunni (Ulli Beier, Return of the gods, Cambridge London, p.94)

Suzanne Wenger is an Austrian by birth. Better known as Adunni to those familiar with her history at Oshogbo, her role in the becoming of Oshogbo as a prime tourist site is of such major significance due to the level of her involvement in the art, culture, traditions and religion of the people, definitely beyond the level of mere interaction. Upon the recent celebrations of her ninetieth birthday, (which was perhaps crowned by the adoption of the Osun groves as a world heritage site by UNESCO), her phenomenal work on the sacred groves demand and deserve deeper explorations.

The younger Suzanne Wenger was every inch a modern European artist though even then her strong will was wont to make her deviate often enough from the bare norms of the creative environment she existed in, which was often in conflict with the workings of her inner spirit. With an early life that saw Suzanne surviving the Nazi excesses in Vienna and subsequently exhibiting her works in Vienna and Paris; fate would later see her heading for Nigeria in the company of Ulli Beier (when he came to take up his university job) with no pre - planned notions of her future roles. Soon enough, her interactive forays into the lives of the people amongst whom she lived saw her absorption into the religion not just as an adherent but even as a priestess of Obatala, perhaps culminating in her work for the preservation of the Osun sacred groves. The danger lay (and still lies) with the encroachment of hunters, farmers, loggers and property developers into an area that was vital not just for the spiritual activity but also for the culture and tradition it harboured.

Adunni’s work entailed the delineation of the site of the grove and the restoration of crumbling shrines and altars, an exercise which presented new platforms for Adunni and her workmen to explore their artistic selves in sculptures of organic form and relief murals. Adunni approached her shrine architecture as “an invocation of a future for the gods” deriving beauty from the decay and collapse of ancient clay buildings (Brockmann & Hotter: ‘Adunni, A portrait of Sussane Wenger’, Machart, Germany, 1994). However, Adunni claims her work is not Yoruba art since she has never deviated from her European origins. Her belief in syncretism might account for this paradox, for Adunni sees the same human basis behind all cultures across their different dimensions. Thus the ancient Yoruba, Tibetians or aboriginal American Indians have common baselines of spirituality spread out through time.

But how does Adunni’s architecture engage with modern architecture? She refers to the order in disorder from a non scientific, albeit an animist’s view point when she says: “If you sit in this Oshun forest, you know this forest exists through its multiple forms, through its immense variety - an unorganised beauty where every detail is tremendously strong”.
- (Ulli Beier, Return of the gods, Cambridge London, p.34)

This perspective gains currency though when appraised through the prism of modern science as represented in this contribution by Feigenbaum (one of the pioneers of the new science of chaos theory as recorded by James Gleick in the book ‘Chaos, Making a New Science’ Penguin, 1993) to the discourse:
“One has to look for scaling structures - how do big details relate to little details…. The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.”
Again, applying this perception to art, Feigenbaum comments on the “zillions of details” put into Van Gogh’s early work, the ‘definite interplay between the softer textures and the things with more definite lines” in the Dutch ink drawings of around 1600. He comments on the works of Rusdael and Turner, where “there’s some level of stuff, and then stuff painted on top of that, and then corrections to that.” Organic forms adopt new meanings when viewed from fresh perspectives. The multi layering of views, perspectives and meanings is what results in the ‘indescribable’ emotional response elicited from the observer.

In essence, organically blended art is not pristine or clinical like the products of the icons of the modern movement in architecture: Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus ideals or Le Corbusier’s ‘machine’ houses. Rather it comes as a product of layers of influences, layers of emotion and application. Having said that, it would be foolhardy to totally reject the ideas which brought about the modern movement and machine aesthetic as propagated by the likes of Gropius and Le Corbusier. Recent history makes plain that fact. Industrialisation and the era of the machine have come to stay. Daily, new methods and new technologies are being discovered, much so that architecture can not keep pace with new developments. That has always been the bane of innovation, a lingering attatchment to the old ways which have been tried and tested while new realities outweigh their means.

In trying to rationalise the chaos of natural disorder in Adunni’s work with the straight line tenets of Euclidean geometry as typified by the modularised construction of machine components, the question arises, how do the structured principles of science meet with the organic philosophy of Yoruba culture and religion as exhibited in Oshogbo art? Are they really divergent philosophies or do they intercept at the frontiers? It should be remembered that industrialisation or mass production is not unique to man. Nature is industrialised. New components and new parts are being mass produced constantly in the continuous process of regeneration. Man mimics nature. Indeed man is part of nature. From the perspective of Yoruba culture, modularisation finds justification in the Ifa corpus. The Odu of 16x16x16 is a classical grid for the repetition of a pattern: a layering of rhythms. However, each odu is unique and the entire mantra is organically blended. How is that for architecture? There is modularisation in the leaf, yet it looks unstructured. Enter the theory of chaos and fractal dimensioning. Disorder is order we can not see. Disorder is beautiful. Suzanne Wenger must have been referring to this reality when she posited that:

“You will notice that we cannot build straight walls any more. If you follow the line of a shrine wall, it is like a man who is excited or moved, a man who wants to express something and whose face is formed by these emotions. The shrines thus become like our own excited features…..What we are doing now is expressionistic architecture.” (Ulli Beier, Return of the gods, Cambridge London, p.94)

-Ayodele Arigbabu. (Published in The Guardian Life Magazine, Oct 23-29 2005)

‘Differentiate or Die’.

2006-03-22T04:47:00.000+01:00

Identity Assets – The next level in Architectural Service Delivery.

Nigeria is fast catching up with the globalization induced trend where nation states are controlled by a knowledge driven economy as opposed to the skill driven economy that typified the 19th century and was formalized in the 20th century with the professionalisation of most skill based endeavours. With the myriad complexities of the emerging 21st century, modern day professionals have found themselves facing new challenges in keeping up with new technologies on the international scene, maintaining relevance with local clientele (vis-à-vis the extended need to nurture new / foreign clientele) and staying at the top of the food chain…a position that requires the ability to deftly adjust to change and creatively evolve favourable scenarios out of every situation.

MOE - Identity Assets strut their stuff at Terra Kulture, the new
hip art venue on Tiamiyu Savage Street in Victoria Island.

Architects in Nigeria can no longer afford to sit back as master designers, twiddling their toes, waiting for the next major client with the right project and the right purse to feed the ego and pay the bills. Bills are ever rising – multiple taxation, increasing rent / utility bills, staff salaries, etc – and quite frankly, there just aren’t enough super clients to go round. The few available ones are keenly competed for …and even at that, the ability to compete effectively with the best is no longer sufficient. Architects must tap into the emerging knowledge economy by refraining from thinking in reference to the box - whatever box, within or without. To borrow from the popular marketing communication maxim – ‘differentiate or die’… that is the key for tapping into the next level of service delivery where space is limitless and there is plenty room for anyone daring enough for intellectual gymnastics.

Enter the Mosun Emeruwa led MOE Identity Assets, a front line Lagos based firm that has repackaged itself with a unique angle to service delivery and an unusual determination to push the design envelope to another level.

In recent sessions with MOE’s Goke Osibodu, the extent and relevance of the firm’s vision was unraveled. Operating originally in the traditional mould of the architectural firm offering consultancy services to clients, MOE had since 1991 built a decent portfolio of work with an impressive list of clientele. However, in an environment where clients typically viewed architecture as a necessary (and often avoidable) evil and most architects were trading their vital roles as design consultants for more lucrative roles as builders and project managers, the firm’s principal associates were not satisfied with the status quo. Thus after four years of analysis, research and introspection, a period that could have earned an average student a decent degree from a university as Osibodu opined, the firm redefined it’s approach to service delivery and adopted the framework of Identity Assets as a channel for effecting the changes in the environment that they desired.

The tag – ‘Identity Assets’ is not just a hip suffix attached to a corporate identity. The phrase touches on what Osibodu identifies as the ‘soft stuff’. Thus the motive is to build what is inside (the essence, the substance of the client / organization’s identity) first before defining the exterior environment (building envelope) which is the traditional preserve of the architect.

The exciting suspension bridge notion at Terra Kulture which
single handedly sets the tone for the art house’s unique identity.

Identity Assets refer to the intangible assets of an organization which are the organization’s vision, culture and identity. By tapping into the organization’s corporate genetic make-up, MOE then help articulate their clients’ ‘Big Idea’ (emotional essence that unify people, vision and strategy) and arm them with ‘Guideline Manuals’ to further aid the mining of their attributes into profitable assets. These Guideline Manuals could be for the environment - buildings and landscape, or for communication - a template that influences what advertising agencies will eventually churn out.

‘This is not Branding’ says Osibodu when asked further, its not the same thing that advertising agencies do, neither is it the same thing with what Alder Consulting (for example) does because MOE tends to go beyond the corporate identity (logo) and does not pretend to offer advise nor competence in the areas of day to day management / work processes of their clients. However, if having the receptionist wear a red shirt and smile at every guest would help communicate your ‘Big Idea’ a lot better, they are going to tell you about it.

Osibodu agreed that the idea somehow tallies with what the American architect - Frank Lloyd Wright did with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel where the architect’s attention to detail, the foolproof structural resolution employed (that helped the building survive a major earthquake), and design involvement in the furniture, light fittings, napkins and other accessories could not have hurt the hotel’s profile and brand equity. Same thing with OMA’s work for Prada stores where Rem Koolhaas, the revolutionary Dutch architect collaborated with Bruce Mau - a front line graphic designer, to effectively fuse the building’s design and style as expressed in its different elements, as vital contact points for the brand. In other words, architecture does serve a key role in the global positioning of brands. Unfortunately, like most areas of human intelligence, this potential remains widely untapped in Nigeria.

However, differentiating does have its hassles. It becomes a lot more difficult handling staff recruitment since a basic architectural education (yes they still favour architects) is no longer sufficient basis for placement with MOE. The firm has its work cut out for it finding freshly trained architects with the sort of well rounded outlook that suits MOE’s new bill, this led Goke Osibodu into an impassioned discussion on the state of design education in our architectural schools. It’s a typical preoccupation of most firms trying to break into new territories. Koolhaas for example took up a Professorial chair at Harvard when he realized that OMA’s in house research and development initiatives always got distracted by the demands of the firm’s ongoing projects. In Nigeria too, it is becoming fashionable to give back to the system, as professionals like John Godwin and Femi Majekodunmi have intervened by becoming actively involved in the University of Lagos.

Another cause for worry is the inevitable hostility from Advertising agencies over the perceived infringement on their territory. Osibodu insists that when presented with more information, advertising agencies get to realize that they are not being faced with competition; in fact their work could be made easier by MOE’s Guideline Manuals and collaboration on projects could be fruitful for all parties, the client especially

MOE still remains an architectural firm and they still offer architectural consultancy. So what’s new? Not much really, architecture has always been involved in total design and like Bruce Goff – arguably Wright’s greatest protégé - who attests to no highfaluting architectural style except ‘Client Style’; a more – than - surface understanding of the client’s total make-up is a prerequisite to having a successful building. What seems new is MOE’s involvement in Identity Asset Management – the corporate resource tool for managing the intangible assets of organizations; tools deployed to good use in work done for National Bank and Standard Trust Bank (for example) in ground breaking Communication / Environmental Guideline Manuals.

The firm identifies intangible assets as - major sources of wealth creation that are often the most valuable dynamics of global market penetration and alliances. And this differentiation into Identity Assets and Design Management as business tools for improving productivity and brand equity - it doesn’t hurt the bottom line at all, especially with the unwholesome refusal of clients to pay professional fees for architectural consultancy while they map out sizable budgets for sustaining their brand equity through traditional means– it does make economic sense to differentiate… Osibodu smiles in agreement. Where would all these lead, 20 years hence….? ‘Interactive Assets’, he retorts without batting an eyelid…like it didn’t just take a thousand words trying to come to grips with Identity Assets in the first place.

So, differentiate or die…what’s your own angle?

-Ayodele Arigbabu. (Published in The Guardian Life Magazine, Nov6-12, 2005)

related link:
www.moeidentityassets.com

What’s your favourite building?

2006-03-08T06:11:00.000+01:00

What’s your favourite building?
In Lagos?
In Nigeria?

How do people perceive Architecture and Design in Nigeria? Since January, calls have been made in The Guardian Life Magazine, (a supplement to the Sunday Guardian) for nominations for the best Design Person and the best Design Product for 2005. A few entries came in before the February 19 deadline but not enough to generate the sort of interest in design that was intended. Of the seven nominations received two of them are published here not as winning entries, but as samples while the others are listed for readers to see. So in essence, we don’t have a winner? Not yet, but things are about to get more exciting. Just read on.

Ceddi Plaza, Abuja.
Ceddi Plaza is a 20, 000m2 mixed use Retail Entertainment Centre, located next to FSB and a short distance from the Central Bank Headquarters in the Abuja CBD.

Taking its inspiration from the groundnut pyramids of the North, Ceddi Plaza looked to the past for inspiration, while being uncompromisingly 21st Century in language and aspiration. Ceddi will ensure that Abuja’s CDB does not just close down after office hours, by offering workers a choice of shopping, cinema, restaurants, gym and other leisure activities to wind down with.

Project Cost: $ 16 million
Designed By: Taiwo Aina, Managing Partner B+TIC
Project Architects: B+TIC

Ceddi Plaza courted a little controversy when it was initially wrongly credited as having been designed by the “white man” who served as Project Manager on this project.

Status: Completed and operational. Tenants include Nu Metro Cinema and Media Store.
- Yetunde Aina.

GTBank Lekki.

You were right on the money in the penultimate issue of Gaurdian Life as per Banks, Branches and Architecture, I'd always been perplexed with the Zenith phenomenon and enamoured with the GTB design ethos.

It's really nice to be able to look forward to design commentary, especially in Nigeria and of Nigeria!

Thanks for providing info on the particular Firm that got the Commission for GTB Lekki, I had been stumped for a while (I guess you now know which building is getting my nomination for "Best Design Product 2005", can't fill the slot for "Design Person" though, still giving it a thought).

More grease to your elbow!

God bless

-Yohana Bako

Unlike Yetunde Aina’s posting which was the only nomination that came with photographs and was packed with information to boot (not surprisingly, if she is related to Taiwo Aina, the designer) Yohana Bako’s posting simply expressed her enthusiasm for the GTBank branch in Lekki. Running into Goke Osibodu of MOE at an exhibition recently, we got talking and it came out that Plural House on Oyin Jolayemi Street in Victoria Island which currently serves as GTBank’s headquarters was not purpose built for the bank by MOE. It was just an office block that GTBank took over. That easily explains why Plural House pales beside some other GTBank branches especially the Lekki Branch which could easily be mistaken for their new head office building. The Lekki Branch which stands opposite Shoprite, the new shopping mall on the Lekki Expressway is designed to incorporate art like other branches but there is a space experience there that is central to the GTBank strategy which you must go there yourself to feel, Goke wouldn’t go beyond that. MOE had a tough time pushing their quirky roof (which can accommodate an extra floor internally without being dismantled) through with the client, but the bank’s eventual willingness to see how the designers’ idea would turn out has paid off in the long run with the likes of Yohana.

The other nominations that came in for Design Product of the Year for 2005 include:

*The Mike Adenuga Towers on Adeola Adeku Street, Victoria Island, Lagos. Nominated by Emma.
*The ‘Structure’ of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife?
*IBTC Place, Walter Carrington Crescent Victoria Island, Lagos.
*National Christian Center Abuja designed by Darchiworkgroup who also designed Olumo Rock Abeokuta. Nominated by Soji Adeyemi.
*Government House, Port-Harcourt, Rivers State by Late Arc. Cookey-Gam.

At a preliminary sitting, the Lagos Circle of Design Critics (an amorphous group of armchair critics) resolved that the nominations received within the stipulated time-frame were insufficient for a rigorous judging process. The group also realized that to do justice to the buildings nominated, a panel of judges would need to critically evaluate each building beyond just driving past them or studying photographs. The panel berated this writer for not thinking about these logistics before calling for nominations. Thus in encouraging more public discussion and participation in design matters, an internet blog spot is currently being developed to power interactive exchanges on these nominations and others that are expected to tumble in, in the next few weeks. Participants will have a chance to delete a particular building from the list which they do not find worthy (by stating the reasons they find the building drab) or to campaign for another which they want to win (by explaining what they find compelling about it) through blog postings and SMS entries. Blogging makes this process more worthwhile by providing architects, clients, builders, the general public and more importantly the users of the buildings a rare chance to air their views in real time and to react to other peoples’ postings. Winning entries will be decided by a democratic process, and that is the attraction, after-all, despite all the third-term brouhaha, we are still in a democracy! Regular Guardian Life Design readers will be constantly updated on these pages of current debates on the blog. Watch out for more information.

-Ayodele Arigbabu.
arigbs@gmail.com

Coming soon, posting from the Guardian Life Design Page archives. Stay tuned.