Emmanuel K Ofori Sarpong is a practising architect and an academic from Ghana. A graduate of the Kumasi city’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the majority of his work has been in research and teaching whereas design projects have been speculative and exploratory. From kiosk estates and the possibilities for an architecture that prioritises mobility, witch camps, emergency response architecture, and low-income housing, Ofori Sarpong’s studio based research is grounded in the social justice questions of our time, especially as they pertain to marginalised communities. He also co-founded Sociarchi with his closest friend from architecture school, Kuukuwa Manful, where the two work for communities on the margins of political and economic interest. "I am very much interested in not just architecture for its own sake, but how knowledge from other fields feature in architecture and how architecture influences those fields," he tells STIR in an elaborate conversation that looks into his contribution to pedagogy and practice.

The following are edited excerpts from the interview.

Zohra Khan: We'll begin with your beginnings. Tell us about your childhood. What were some of your fascinations and fears back then?

Emmanuel K Ofori Sarpong: That’s an interesting question. To give you a bit of a backdrop, my father is a structural engineer, and as far as influence goes, I guess you can guess why I have ended up as an architect, even though, to be honest, he didn't necessarily push me into this field. Though he didn't discourage me, sometimes I feel he wished I had taken another path, especially because there were other possibilities. But in any case, I grew up in a house where I did see a lot of architectural drawings, and it did fascinate me quite a bit. The decision to pursue architecture didn't come up until much later, even though it was one possibility. I was very much fascinated by robots and machines, and at some point, I did think I was going to be a physicist of some kind. At the same time, I remember this episode which changed my mind—I had been to one of these big hospitals in Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana from where I did my schooling. I saw how much ‘human suffering’ there was in some of these spaces, and I was convinced I was going to become a doctor. I guess I was always to a certain degree moved by human suffering. This was one of the episodes that shaped my thinking. I grew up in two different cities, predominantly. Initially, we lived in Kumasi, and then my dad got transferred to Accra, so I ended up living there.

I think that one of the things that struck me was how very different these two cities were. And so, for example, in Kumasi, we could drive a relatively short distance to get to school as it was a relatively smaller city, but Accra was considerably larger, where there was more traffic, and bigger buildings. In a sense, just the sheer difference in the two cities got me interested in what is it that shapes cities in this way to emerge so differently. So broadly these were some of my interests.

To be honest, I don't remember having any fear. I think I was a very enthusiastic child, and very optimistic. I probably overwrote those in my memories. I don’t know. [laughs]

Zohra: You refer to yourself as "an odd fit" while you were in architectural school and that you found the place "equally exciting and heartbreaking". What was missing in school for you, and why you felt you didn't belong there?

Emmanuel: Before stepping into architecture school, thankfully at the time there were these internet cafes where you could pay some amount of money and go online. Of course, I knew about architecture because my dad is a software engineer, but I wanted to do my independent fishing around to see what architects do. Back then if you google architecture, you probably would see names like Santiago Calatrava and many other western architects. One of the things I had at the back of my mind was the question of how these people do what they do.

So maybe just to backtrack a bit, I think my biggest challenge was the assumptions that lay in the training, which were never examined. In my early days of architecture school which began in the year 2006, we were given design assignments, and the assumption was that people knew how to design somehow. Of course, there were a few seminars presented to us that talked about how designers think, but I always felt as if this was all. Or if there was more to it? Because it didn't seem to me as if anybody was telling me, when a very prominent architect like Zaha Hadid sits down and starts to draw, what is it that runs through her mind that makes her produce what she produces versus somebody else like Francis Kéré, and why are their outcomes so different? I was very interested in questions which were psychological rather than architectural. I thought that the assumptions were there, but I didn't see them being confronted. Closely related to that were questions of, ‘Where did this curriculum come from?’ and ‘Who gets to determine why this is the way we have to approach things?’

I was very excited about architecture and the possibilities it had for changing society, but on the other hand, I always felt as if there was never enough time to interrogate the questions that I felt needed to be interrogated. For me, that always felt like tension because I spent a lot of time trying to answer those questions for myself before proceeding to tackle the issues. That meant that I was always running behind in the class which felt like an office to me. There's not much time to interrogate the questions.

Zohra: Could you elaborate more on the decontextualised curriculum in college and where particularly did you find dissonance while you were studying?

Emmanuel: To be fair, I wouldn't go as far as to say it was entirely decontextualised. To give some background here, there had been a fair bit of effort in the post-independent era, in the 50s and 60s, even amongst European architects working in Africa, to try and answer the question of how do we fit our ideas into this context. There were a lot of Ghanaian architects like Victor Adegbite and John Owusu Addo, who in a sense, took over from the first generation.

There was a lot of effort, in a sense, to ground in our context what they had learned from other parts of the world, from both East and West. There is a long history of Eastern European architects working in Ghana, especially because of the first president of Ghana's attempt to pivot towards the east, in an attempt to balance his Non-aligned movement ideas. There was also a generation of architects who tried to ask themselves and to answer the question of how can we embed this within our own social, cultural, and historical realities. Where the disconnect was is that a lot of this work, for what it's worth, was not documented or maybe was not written about as much.

By the time we got to architecture school, much of what we were reading or being asked to read was probably not written by people who were from here. And not that that was necessarily a problem, except that those perspectives were lost on us. There was a disconnect between trying to work here, but reading books, text and ideas which are predominantly produced elsewhere for other times, for other groups of people and not trying to ask or to answer the question of ‘how do we make this relevant to us?’ Or does this even matter to us at all? This is what I found the most difficult.

A classic example would be, and this comes back into practice, where how architects fetishise over the architectural drawing representation. We are so in love with representation and drawings, and for us, the drawing, as the outcome of a design process, is inherently valuable. But this does not mean that it's the same for the ordinary person on the sheet. And it seems to me as if perhaps we should be thinking about architecture from the perspective of the users and the people we are trying to serve. And maybe architecture theory should be rethought from the perspective of our own historical context and cultural values. And this would be an example of that kind of disconnect.

Zohra: You worked for one year as a teaching assistant after graduation instead of going straight into practice. Why?

Emmanuel: I think back in school, even the people in my class knew that I’ll end up as an academic because if everybody just went on with a design, and you spent the first 70 per cent of the time reading texts and trying to interrogate their assignments, everybody knows that this person doesn’t belong to practice. But in any case, there was a lot of self-reflection where one asked, 'what makes me the most fulfilled?’ and where can I make the most contribution?’ A lot of that comes from self-reflection, but also from the people closest to you observing you and commenting on how they think you are and where they think you would fit.

Once I was done with school, a teaching opportunity came, and just because I had been thinking about it, I was quite inclined to say yes. I also didn't feel I was ready for practice if I'm being totally honest. I felt as if I had set myself a target of learning certain things which I didn't feel like I had completed. Also, I don’t think I had found the kind of architectural practice and professional I wanted to work with whose values and approach to practice aligned with my own. And that kind of practice is very difficult to find in Ghana. I thought waiting one year would allow me to maybe look around and think more carefully, and to a certain extent it did work out because I ended up working with a design office which I found over three months after I had finished teaching.

Zohra: What were some of the concerns that you felt strongly about which your time at the School of Architecture and Design (SADe) in Central University, Ghana, helped you in investigating?

Emmanuel: I think some of that is what has informed the work I do now. There were a lot of questions that are better grounded in other fields, such as development studies or sociology. Let’s say if somebody were to decide that they wanted to intervene in a community, what is it that makes them think that their solution for their community is the best. This was one part of it, but for me, the most important part was questioning ‘what it means to practice architecture in post-colonial Africa’, and ‘to practice architecture as an African in our time’. Similar to what happened when we were in school where people could just get on with their task, I found myself struggling to get on with practice until I had answered some of these questions.

I could have also just gone about with a task and produce designs, right? Which most people do. And I am not saying there's any problem with that. I am just saying, for me, I needed to answer those questions. Being in the academy at the time allowed me to step back from practice, to answer these questions and to work with my students in investigating some of these issues. If you look at African cities, which most scholars would say, about 50 to 70 per cent are informal. What does it mean for a place to be formal versus informal? And if this is the condition of the city, how is this reflected in the way we think about and do architecture? So these are the kind of questions that I thought needed to be answered somehow. And I did not at the time see anybody in the academy in the Ghanaian context answering these questions. I thought, I'll just take them up and try to deal with them.

We don't have enough people, at least as of now in our context, willing to do the important groundwork that needs to be done. – Emmanuel K. Ofori Sarpong

Zohra: What are some of the most significant challenges that African architecture is facing currently, in education and practice?

Emmanuel: In both places, I would say that the resource challenge is real. And here’s what I mean. I've shared this often with friends that I remember the first time I went to London and I was living close to Kings Cross. For those who know London, this is like the centre of the British city. While taking walks around Kings Cross and looking at some of its buildings, I could tell that there's a real difference in a place that has resources. The kinds of materials, finishes, and design freedom a person has when they have all these resources and clients who are willing to do it. It was very obvious to me. I would see a building built entirely in I-section beams and wonder what happens if you specify one such beam in a project constructing in Ghana. The entire project could collapse because that would be the entire budget of the client and end of story. We have started to think about working within resource constraints like what people like Kéré are doing, as a way to show innovation. But even with that, there's a resource underpinning. I think one of the biggest challenges, in education, is the fact that students might have limited financial ability to travel, to see architecture locally as well as in other parts of the world. There's also a certain gap in knowledge production which is not happening, and a certain relationship between the academy and practice which should itself be based on knowledge production is not happening. Within the academy, there's a lot of historic research that is yet to be done. And because of that, not as much ‘raw material’ is being handed over to those in practice to work with. These I think are two of the key challenges. We don't have enough people, at least as of now in our context, willing to do the important groundwork that needs to be done.

Zohra: What change do you seek to bring through your work?

Emmanuel: Considering my work in the academy, I hope that what I am doing now is helping students think more deeply about what they do, what the relevance of what they do is in the real world, and to ask questions that have not been asked. I think for me, this is where politics comes in. Just to piggyback off of what I have said before, a lot of us like to think about architecture as purely technical; at least this is how we were trained, and it's all about the technical production of an object when in fact there's a lot of political maneuverings that determine what gets built. So you might think that you just went to the market and bought a tile, but the decision to buy the tile because it's available is itself conditioned by, conditions of world trade, which are themselves embedded in global political networks constituting who has to keep their market open to whom, who gets to manufacture the tile and who does not, given the various political and economic theories.

I think architecture has the capacity to subvert some of the unfavourable set of not just global but also local political conditions that we need to subvert in order to serve those who are most in need of architecture. I hope that over time, this is what my work can contribute.

Zohra: A lot of your work has been collaborative and developed for marginalised communities. How do you combine pedagogy and practice?

Emmanuel: For the last five years I have taken a step back from doing things to thinking and researching a lot more and trying to answer for ourselves some of the same questions that we were just talking about. Pedagogy and practice are not disconnected at all. It is because of this interest in hopefully starting to implement some of these ideas that I work with some students where we look into something like witch camps. This is predominantly in certain communities where certain women accused of witchcraft are banished from the community and made to live in isolation in their own communities.

For two to three years, just before I started my PhD, I did continuous work with students who stayed focused on investigating the subject. The way I see it is that a lot of the work we are doing now in talking to communities, understanding how they live and the conditions of their lives, is in a sense going to feed into what will become real practical applications later. For me, the research and the academic work feeds directly into what we do in practice.

Another project we have been doing is training local builders to read architectural drawings to understand what it means. A lot of the work we do is not necessarily disconnected from teaching and research and pedagogy. The two are really intertwined.

Zohra: What are some of the projects that you are working on?

Emmanuel: Right now, I am looking at the politics of new cities in Africa. There's been a trend in the Global South to build cities from scratch as a way to solve economic developmental challenges. The idea has been that the old cities are so problematic and difficult to fix that you can potentially build new cities, which would be properly designed and will have the principles of sustainability embedded within them. And then if you could do that, people would move into these new cities and once they have experienced a good example of it, it would be easier to fix those from the old ones. This is one argument. There are many more arguments, and of course people are building new cities even as a way to deal with population increases across the world. I am looking into the phenomenon in the African context and I am particularly interested in the involvement of multilateral organisations. I am looking at the UN in this case, to some degree the World Bank, and how the roles they play in making these new cities. Beyond that, I'm also looking at, what I think is potentially the disconnect between the ideals that they put forward as what makes a good new city, and the master plans they draw and the realities on the ground when it comes to implementation. This also includes looking closely at how the ideas of those who imagine and make these new cities might deviate from those on the ground who actually have to make them happen or have the power to implement them.

For my cases, I'm doing a comparative case of the Accra city extension, which was designed in collaboration between five Dutch architects with the UN habitat. And then I'm looking at the Kalobeyei New Town which is in Northern Kenya —the first of its kind, and is designed specifically for refugees and host communities. This is a rural community which, since 92, has been hosting refugees who have come from different parts of East Africa as a result of conflict. I think the interesting thing there for me is to look at two contexts where, on the one hand I could say that there's a lot of control by the local government and the state, and on the other hand, there's a lot of control by international organisations. I am trying to see what their outcomes are in both contexts and to compare how they differ, with a particular eye in trying to understand how new cities affect marginalised communities.

Zohra: You said in the beginning that your father has been a key figure in your journey, but is there someone else who you’d say has been of great influence?

Emmanuel: I have definitely been inspired by a lot of contemporary architects either working in Africa, or not necessarily from Africa but working in the country. No one person but a group of people that collectively really helped my thinking and to settle a lot of turmoil in my mind are some of the African philosophers from the 80s and 90s and the philosophical debates from the time about the question of African philosophy and if there was such a thing. One of them has been Kwame Anthony Appiah, the British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher.

Zohra: What do you anticipate is NEXT for African architecture?

Emmanuel: I wish I could predict the future. I think, and maybe you get the sense as much as I do that we are in a very interesting moment, especially following the Venice Architecture Biennale with Lesley Lokko and her move towards starting a new architecture school and the African Futures Institute. I think I would say that African architecture is on the map in a new way than it has ever been.

I think we are in a very interesting moment where there are questions being asked of the continent and of its design. This goes back to what I was talking about resources where one resource is also somebody creating the opportunity to share your thinking, and that opportunity to share is going to itself result in better dialogue across countries for at least more actively now than ever. I anticipate that there's going to be a lot of cross pollination across borders, and these opportunities to dialogue is going to create a lot of new ways of thinking about architecture. It's going to open up new ways of answering some of the questions that have been plaguing me since the beginning.

Zohra: What is NEXT for you?

Emmanuel: I feel I have done about a decade of thinking and experimenting, and that I am in a place now where I am trying to consolidate all of that. I think in the next couple of years alongside my PhD, I'm definitely going to work on consolidating some of my ideas on African philosophy and politics and share it more widely, and letting that inform the kind of teaching that I do.