When can architecture be said to be complete? The virtue of complete-ness, equated with the idea of permanence, continues to proliferate the view that design can only address the complexities of the modern world in a ‘final’ state – as imposed ‘solution’. However, in a world that is increasingly defined by precarity—colossal migrations as a consequence of growing inequalities in resource distribution and natural disasters exacerbated by the climate crisis, among several others—architecture can no longer hold on to the myth of its permanence.

What would an architecture that is by its very virtue incomplete, in the process of becoming, but never fully done, entail? This work of non-building, defined by flux and an ethics of mutability, forces us to consider design paradigms that are inherently adaptable; that grow with the needs of communities and contexts they are placed in. For TAELON7, an architecture and research practice led by Juergen Benson-Strohmayer, this condition of unfixity is a liberatory notion. Thinking of design as a catalyst for social and environmental transformation, the studio’s work with local communities in Ghana is rooted in context, dialogic and instinctively accessible in nature.

The design of public spaces, or more accurately, spaces for the public, for Benson-Strohmayer, is more the negotiation of thresholds—between visibility and erasure, permanence and transience, even outside and inside—than a response to fixed parameters such as function or programme. The architect has previously collaborated with Glenn DeRoché on Surf Ghana Collective, a project that enhanced an existing public building into a vibrant community space. Most recently, the interdisciplinary studio showcased its work in an exhibition at MAGAZIN, Vienna. Let It Become What It Needs To Be, the title of the exhibition, underscoring the desire to yield to uncertainty through flux as a method, displayed the studio’s ongoing collaboration with Ghanaian artist and activist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi. Focusing on a spatial intervention and an ongoing series of activations at Fiatsi’s studio in Kumasi, the showcase expands on the studio’s forbearing philosophy of architecture as process, employing fabric elements to suggest the ephemerality of their on-site intervention.

In line with this inclination to touch the ground lightly, the large-scale installation in Kumasi, At the Interstice, is striking in its bareness. The structure serves as a platform for Fiatsi’s work that champions queer, transdisciplinary and decolonial practices across the Global South, mirroring the queerness of Fiatsi’s programme in its materiality. The only ‘building’ in sight is a shade net fabric stretched across steel poles and block walls which manifests as an amorphous, floating canopy undefined by function. It mainly acts as a gathering place between the studio and an adjacent undeveloped plot for the region’s queer community. Turning an urban interstice into a vibrant marquee, the intervention becomes a site of resistance, holding space where it is not afforded to everyone. In the studio’s current work too, structures born from resourcefulness and necessity rather than desire, posit a collective (over a singular) reimagining of what it means to gather.

Dwelling on notions of ephemerality as a more inclusive way of building, and architecture as a tool for resistance and practising care, STIR interviewed Benson-Strohmayer on his studio’s ongoing interventions in Kumasi. The conversation highlights alternative ways of thinking and doing architecture, centring a state of fluidity rather than solidness. Edited excerpts follow.

Mrinmayee: Beginning with your ongoing urban intervention – the crazinisT artisT studiO compleX (TTOX); in the project literature, you note that it explores and reimagines the typologies of 'field', 'kiosk' and 'tower'. Could you elaborate on what these typologies signify in the context of Kumasi and how you redeploy them in your own interventions?

Juergen: The crazinisT artisT studiO compleX (TTOX) project is being developed by us together with artist and queer activist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, whose live-work studio has become a vital space for queer life and art in the region. Facing intensified threats, she invited us to imagine a new civic complex with her, shaped by the urgencies of visibility, resistance and support. This collaboration has been formative for us. Having worked across Ghana for over a decade, we have learned that new typologies must emerge from lived realities. The idea of reimagining ‘field’, ‘kiosk’, and ‘tower’ came from close attention to the urban-rural conditions of Kumasi, where peripheries exist within central neighbourhoods and formal-informal distinctions collapse.

The FIELD is an open inner-urban periphery, a space with rural qualities: spontaneous, raw and communal. It will act as the courtyard of TTOX, a place for gathering, rest, art-making, gardening and domestic routines. It is also the site of the LoveFeast, an annual open-house celebration of art and community organised by Fiatsi, which already brings 300+ people together. The FIELD makes this visible and central.

The KIOSK draws on the micro-infrastructures of West African street culture: small-scale, adaptable structures that support both economic activity and public life. Our design opens the ground floor of the future building toward a side street, which we plan to pedestrianise. It becomes a thresholdless space for performances, pop-up exhibitions, informal economies and street life, interwoven with infrastructural concerns like shade, flood drainage and planting.

The TOWER is perhaps the most radical gesture, asserting verticality as a mode of visibility. Midrise buildings are common in Kumasi, often built in stages due to funding. We are developing a structural system that embraces this – stacking floors that can be gradually inhabited and adapted over time. Inspired both by tropical modernism and the agility of local construction practices, the tower is meant to project openness and presence in a city where queerness is often under threat – a vertical claim to belonging.

Together, these three elements form a civic ecosystem that challenges the logic of closed compounds, heaviness and speculative development in urban design. Instead of permanence and mass, they propose lightness, porosity and openness: a different spatial order, one built from within the textures of everyday life.

Mrinmayee Bhoot: Could you elaborate on the spatial design of your recently concluded showcase at MAGAZIN?

Juergen Benson-Strohmayer: The exhibition design challenges the existing gallery space and creates an open, accessible and beautiful environment that can house the story of the TTOX project. The exhibition tectonics take their cue from our research and intervention in Kumasi. Slender poles form a field of visual accents and structural anchor points, from which a steel rope is stretched to generate dynamic, oblique circulation routes and vistas. A porous array of textiles generates a range of effects that reflect the spatial and lighting conditions we documented in Kumasi. Light is filtered through the gallery windows in the zone Thresholds of Light, which includes a visual catalogue of textile uses from Fiatsi’s studio and a 33-minute drone video mapping urban-rural thresholds.

Three thematic zones cut through the gallery rooms, evading the existing square geometry and enfilade to open up new ways of understanding the space. This echoes our textile installation At the Interstice in Kumasi, which bridges the two plots at an oblique angle, creating imagined and physical possibilities that were not there before.

The central zone, Temporal Structures, juts more assertively into the space, housing models, illustrations and an animation of the TTOX project. Toward the back, Lines of Action presents forms of activism, including the Kumasi intervention, a research desk and a filmed conversation with Fiatsi, which is also the source of the exhibition’s title: Let It Become What It Needs to Be.

Because the three zones are laid out tangentially rather than in an enfilade, they produce moments of intersection and juxtaposition, allowing for nonlinear and layered readings of the material on display.

Mrinmayee: The use of textile installations for the exhibition, mirroring their use in your urban design intervention, is quite fascinating. Coupled with the title of the exhibition, Let It Become What It Needs to Be, I am interested to know how a sense of adaptability in architecture (as also represented by the fabric) plays a part in your studio’s practice.

Juergen: [Through our work], we are aiming to create a sense of spatial civicness that is open, inviting, dynamic and lightweight. Textiles allow for this while also being resource-efficient, movable and accessible. Our interest in working with textiles has been part of our practice for more than a decade. In 2011, we fabricated a large tapestry from waste materials in a rural town in northern Ghana as a backdrop for a nighttime photoshoot with the town’s countercultural youth. In other contexts, we have seen mosquito nets and fabrics reappropriated to form porous enclosures for urban farms or as makeshift partitions in homes.

At Fiatsi’s current studio, this language continues. There is a fully equipped sewing workshop in the compound and fabric is constantly in use: for shelter, expression and performance. It is striking how often textiles find their place in subaltern spatial practices. They afford softness, impermanence and reconfiguration – qualities often excluded from dominant ideas of architecture but central to the ways many people live and create space.

Mrinmayee: Building on this idea of architecture as a reciprocal process, I’m curious to understand how this translates into the porous morphology of the installation in Kumasi, At The Interstice. Could we think of ephemerality as a dynamic lens through which architecture can be reconfigured to be less imposing and perhaps more inclusive?

Juergen: We have been finding momentum and joy in the spatial methods we see in [Fiatsi’s] current studio: lightweight and textile structures that create dynamic, ever-changing environments responding both to functional needs and to more ephemeral, expressive effects.

These architectures are performative, reactive and full of care – qualities we try to capture in our design work going forward. The first physical step in the TTOX project was At the Interstice. It functions both literally and symbolically, allowing for new spatial encounters and affirming presence on that land: a gesture of civic imagination for a marginalised community. We call this quality spatial civicness’—a concept still in formation—which tries to articulate the ways in which architecture can side with subaltern positions and remain open to temporal, collective inhabitation.

Mrinmayee: You also note that your studio's work hopes to reimagine 'architecture as a process shaped by resistance, care and temporal occupation'. How does this definition of architecture translate into your practice?

Juergen: Architecture, for us, is a way to interact with the world; it is a reciprocal process. In our practice, we take deep care in the people, communities and ecologies we work with and we are committed to imagining more equitable futures. This means engaging projects not just as objects but as relations. We accompany them through inception, materialisation and often long into maintenance, programming, or extension, as many of our projects unfold in stages. In some recent cases, it took us more than three years of site visits and participatory workshops before construction began. More recently, our work has taken on a more explicitly political and time-based dimension.