The Agenda
A collective and immersive enquiry modelled on the mandatory after-school lessons favoured by Nigerian parents, these quasi-academic studies aim to brush up your knowledge of architectural history and contextualise it within today’s Lagos.
Oh and before you ask why put up a picture of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai when we are talking about Lagos Simple! It’s all to do with juxtaposition. Time and place are juxtaposed in this enquiry. As creatives juxtapositioning the word ‘LAGOS’ over an image of Shanghai, is our deliberate and liberal opening statement.
- My Wife Belongs to the Kitchen and the Other Room @babaoladeji It is Women's History Month and I haven't got over President Buhari's "My wife belongs to the Kitchen and the other Room" remark, right beside one of the most powerful women in the world, the German chancellor Angela Merkel. 2020 is not the year to brood, so I consider it healthy to convert holy anger to some utility by investigating the spatiality of the President's quip(?), teaching through it and plugging our insights directly into a residential project for a feminist in Lekki. This will not happen easily, but rather disruptively by drawing up a body of evidence and constructing the case for a Feminist House, or like my friend and co-tutor Desola Mako puts it, to question our assumption that the Kitchen is the home of the house and possibly its last surviving room should the notion of a house perish in today's hyper digital world. Like prosecution attorneys or investigative journalists with some drawing skills, we will aim to soak up the room, build our case, with evidence from ground up. How? By simultaneously plotting the changing power balance in marriages with the changing positions of the Kitchen beginning from the pre-Colonial architecture of the Yoruba where what we now call kitchen was detached from other building mass/es. My hope is that any enrolled student may throw in the 1800 ? power (im)balance of hunter-gatherer husband home maker wife and their detached Kitchen and a courtyard. That another might throw in how a chain of events: Beijing 95 proliferation of American cable television, SAP-induced free fall, rampant armed robbery has driven the vanishing of courtyards, hopeless burglarying up of the entrance door, and adoption of the kitchen door as new entrance. A Generation Z temperament may drive it further, throwing up the splitting of family units: a daughter hopping to Lagos for the golden fleece, living with an aunty in Lekki, bedrooms wired in Netflix and chill think, a lifeless living room but a congregational kitchen at least. Some other student may lean on behavioural psychology for the influence of C N Adichie s quotes, lyrics of Beyonce's Flawless, Hillary Clinton's attenuations and anti-climax with a rising breed of feminism that copes by mirroring the 'tactics' of masculinity, cue King of Boys by Kemi Adetiba or King Tonto. In all the filibuster that may take place, we have to produce new work so I may gently nudge our studio's students nay investigators to the traditional architecture of the Yoruba/Hausa-inspired proposition of the architect James George where he rethinks the plan as a section in tight urban spaces like Lagos. I will tell them this is one north star among others they suggest, hoping we don't stray but coast toward climax with a rain of happenstances, revelations, visions, epiphanies and the lot for us to lean on.
- Date Post Corona Virus Lagos Lockdown
- Location Online
- Principals Baba Oladeji, Koku Konu