What do you inadvertently ponder as you sit down to sip or munch on your evening beverage or snack? What do you discuss with your friends, partner or family? For a major chunk of individuals who would or could ever chance upon this essay, the response to the previous questions would end in a mumble. It’s because we are all mindlessly scrolling. You know where.

Moreover, even as our hyper-digital lives continue to isolate us, there is little scope for the working-class, especially young individuals living away from home, to venture out and find affordable joy and easy company. Hence, even as the chase for a successful professional career continues to draw people to urban lands, especially metropolises, their infrastructures fail to proffer dignified living conditions and congregational public spaces at affordable prices. The result is an isolated life within houses that are getting smaller and smaller by the day.

Against the reality of the loneliness epidemic ostensibly gaining a surge globally, imagine a group of friends residing in a disused hospital in London, as property guardians. As eerie as it may sound, the proposition of sharing a spatially untempered expanse with friends in exchange for a considerably low rent and the possibility of equitably splitting chores and responsibilities can set the stage for sustained communal interactions, an affordable cost of living in a big city and some unhinged—albeit entertaining—drama, just as one witnesses in the British show Crashing (2016). Similarly, a contemporaneous Korean series by the name of Summer Strike (2022) pivots the journey of the protagonist, a 28-year-old woman who quits her job to initiate an unfamiliar journey of self-discovery, at a rundown billiard hall within an abandoned building for an enviably low rent.

In both these scenarios, the characters of the respective shows are afforded space and company without the debilitating pressure of unloading enormous funds every month. Further, these narratives drive home the ample potential that abandoned structures hold. Now, this practice may seem attractive for the average salaried individual. However, despite ample vacant structures dotting our cityscapes, property guardianship is not recognised as a formalised programme in most countries around the globe. This inadvertently places the onus of activating, using and repurposing such abandoned spots and structures on architects, design practitioners, artists, cognisant citizens and the development sector.

Call it hitting multiple birds with one stone, but Ghana-based spatial design practice Limbo Accra’s vision and intent manage to not only activate dead and uninhabited spaces and structures in Accra and beyond but also dilute the stigma of failure associated with such buildings. Additionally, it leverages the power afforded by technology to connect people with abandoned sites existing hundreds of miles away.

Limbo Accra was founded in 2018 by Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip as a direct response to the high number of vacant and unfinished buildings scattered across West African metropolises. The studio, hence, derives its name from the state of limbo that such abandoned buildings exist in. The studio strays away from conclusively denominating their work under specific architectural archetypes and focuses, instead, on approaching both research work and spatial projects in a need-based and collaborative capacity.

So far, the studio has activated various historically relevant sites as well as abandoned structures in different parts of the world. Among these is the ‘Scott House Preservation’ project undertaken at the eponymous residence designed by the erstwhile architect Kenneth Scott. Credited by Limbo Accra as a structure that “stands as a living archive of Ghana's evolution", the site was used by the studio, in partnership with Black Discourse, to launch Architecture Is A Party, an activation featuring exhibits, food, a sound installation and space for futuristic conversations. Limbo Accra’s 2018 project Adjiringanor Activation, on the other hand, was staged within an unfinished luxury estate. The exhibition, which included artistic responses to the site by various creatives, highlighted the potential that such spaces--seemingly stuck in a limbo--possess.

The studio further staged significant enquiries on African architecture and its socio-political implications at IKEA’s former research and design laboratory, SPACE10, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Their exhibition at SPACE10 served as an extension to the studio’s work in Ghana, particularly Accra, ushering new audiences to witness the potential of abandoned sites. In the same vein, Concrete Limbo, an exhibition staged at Haus der Statistik in Berlin, Germany, served as an exploration of the anthropological weight and unexplored potential of limbo spaces, while also presenting the opportunity to ‘observe and stage the transcontinental parallels between the role and use of spectral concrete structures – from Ghana to Germany’.

More recently, Limbo Accra presented the installation SUPER LIMBO, created in collaboration with Super Yaya and architect Annelisa Agossa, at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 in Sharjah, UAE. Responding to the overarching curatorial theme, The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability, Limbo Accra offered a reflective exploration of the prevalence of unfinished architecture spanning from West Africa to the Middle East. The messaging of the exposition was further enhanced by staging it within one of the Emirate's largest unfinished building projects, the Sharjah Mall.

Further, Limbo Accra’s Duho Pavilion, completed in 2024 in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, is a monumental landscape installation inspired by the ceremonial meditation stools of the Indigenous Taino people from the Caribbean. Set amidst various abandoned buildings, the concept and presence of the public installation gratifies the studio’s approach of engaging with the in-between and transforming it into something novel.

In the arena of slightly heavier spatial transformations, Limbo Accra served as the architectural lead for designing Freedom Skatepark in Accra. The skatepark, designed with the mission to "deliver afro-utopian spatial justice for all," satisfies the studio’s core goals of sustainable, redistributive and community-led development.

Since the studio avoids restricting itself to specific disciplines, it isn’t surprising to find their contribution in furniture design with the Canto IV collection, a series of limited edition wooden stools. The collection’s inaugural piece, Euclid Stool, was presented at Prada Frames during Milan Design Week 2024. “Inspired by architectures in limbo and Dante Alighieri's infamous poem La Divina Commedia, the Euclid Stool stands as a symbolic gesture of a seat in limbo, inviting guests on a layered journey across time through literature, architecture and design,” the studio shares.

Limbo Accra’s work further spans various lectures and presentations that the studio has conducted in many cities across the globe. These discourses serve as an educational supplement, an engaging and profound exploration into the realm of unfinished architecture in Africa, as well as an expansion of the understanding of liminality and its transformative role in shaping Africa's architectural and imaginative future. Some symposiums that the studio has participated in include The World Around at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Sharjah Architecture Triennale 2023’s talk programme, 'Building the Future - Architecture and AI' at SPACE10 in Copenhagen, Aarhus School of Architecture’s OPEN23 event in Aarhus in Denmark and the multidisciplinary symposium Prada Frames in 2024 in Milan.

The studio’s interdisciplinary approach is further appended by The Liminal Archive, an initiative that seeks to archive abandoned sites and structures worldwide. Envisioned as a participatory platform, the studio envisions its usage by architects and the common populace alike. Cited as ‘a digital repository of incomplete building projects and modernist ruins from Africa and across the globe by the founders, The Liminal Archive utilises photogrammetry to virtually create navigable 3D images of a given site, to allow individuals seated elsewhere to read its architecture and propose a purpose for it.

The studio’s latest initiative is the Limbo Museum and the Limbo Architecture Lab. Founded by Petit-Frere and Grip, with Lennart Wolff, the AA Visiting School and Diallo Simon-Ponte, the museum, which will platform various exhibitions though the year. Staying true to its ethos, Limbo Accra utilised a two-storey 600 sqm unfinished concrete neo-brutalist estate in the Labone neighbourhood in Accra for the museum. The Limbo Architecture Lab, on the other hand, serves as a research-based pedagogical initiative aimed at exchanging and implementing ideas on transforming and activating liminal spaces.

Click on the cover video to understand the studio’s ethos, incentives, inspirations and processes in honouring and enriching the state of spatial limbo pervading metropolises.