atelier masōmī’s urban projects contextualise discarding the single story

In her 2009 TED talk, titled, The Danger of a Single Story, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie elucidated the insufficiency of overarching narratives, often explicated as 'universal truths' of a people, society or culture. Adichie explained how, historically, in literature (storytelling), like in many walks of life, this universal truth is either Eurocentric or derived from a European or American perspective, leading to the creation of stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes, she says, is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.

The consequence of a single story, Adichie says, is that, “it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar." Through a series of life experiences that exemplify this perception—both at the dispensing as well as the receiving end—she explains how the rejection of a single story also has the potential to act as an agent of change and empowerment. She concludes, "When we reject the single story, when we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”

Nigerien architect Mariam Issoufou Kamara extracts this 'paradise' through a similar rejection of Eurocentric metanarratives of the architectural canon. Raised in Niger, Kamara’s work projects an identity that is annotated by concepts and gestures, which have their roots, not in mere iconography, but in place—both in academia as well as in practice.

Through her teaching process, Kamara facilitates a discovery of missing or inaccessible DNA, which discloses narratives that have hitherto been dismissed by colonial interventions. Both at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), as well as ETH Zurich, her studios—Designing for the DNA of a Place, and the Studio on Architectural Heritage and Sustainability, respectively—uncover lost (indigenous in the case of GSD) stories, which results in a design solution of material, form and program rooted in the place it finds itself in.

Based in Niamey, Niger, her studio atelier masōmī similarly manifests an architecture that illustrates the genius loci of the context it is built in. Her design philosophy, influenced by the works of Indian architects—BV Doshi and Charles Correa, is manifested through the elimination of placelessness—a philosophy reminiscent of the Critical Regionalism practised by the Indian modern architects.

Informed foremost by the local climate, the built form is derived from an understanding of the culture of living. Scale, material, form, orientation, porosity, are also exhorted by identities—whether gender, religious, or ethnic—of the bodies that are meant to occupy the spaces.

Speaking with STIR, Kamara mentions that she believes that architecture is a form of storytelling that unveils a set of narratives, context, history, geography and culture of the place it occupies. Additionally, it is inadvertently a reflection of intangible peculiarities that make a place—people, power, ritual, love, social fabric, global domination, and agency (or the lack thereof). Akin to Adichie's analogy of storytelling as an agent of change, Kamara believes that architecture has the ability to create social change and can act as a tool to reject the 'single story'—a by-product of colonialism—that has marred the architectural canon.

Tap the cover video to watch the full conversation with Mariam Issoufou Kamara.