Beneath mango trees in the lush garden of the Palais de Lomé, an oceanside estate in the Togolese capital, dozens of students from the African School of Architecture and Urban Planning (EAMAU) were taking sessions on archiving.
Established in 1905, the palace housed German, French and British colonial governors in succession and then the Togolese presidency before falling into disuse in the 1990s. After a five-year restoration project, its doors were opened to the public in 2019.
These days, it houses an exhibition paying homage to records from across west and central Africa, as well as the Nana Benzes, the wax print merchants who ran the fabrics scene from the 1960s to the 1980s. There is also a discotheque and a 26-acre botanical park with sculptures.
The palace “was supposed to be a centre of power … and so the city was designed around here”, said Sonia Lawson, the founding director of the Palais de Lomé renovation and cultural project. “So that’s why we want to be a place of conversations around architecture.”
In November, she and Studio Neida, an interdisciplinary architecture, design and curatorial firm based between Togo and Germany, hosted the first Lomé Architectural Encounters forum.
In attendance were speakers including the British-Ghanaian architect Nana Biamah-Ofosu, who discussed her research on the African compound house. Beside the trees where sessions were held, an open-air red brick encampment housed an exhibition on tropical modernism, a style native to west Africa.
The restored Palais de Lomé. Photograph: Eromo Egbejule/The Guardian
Uncompleted and abandoned buildings are a regular feature of cityscapes in west Africa. Some have even become landmarks used in giving directions. The reasons for their condition are legion, but they include government mismanagement and inefficiency, and even incidents of relatives scamming members of the diaspora who want to build homes.
Many buildings remain uncompleted or abandoned for years.
“In my family, we had a building project that … was initiated in 1993 and it supposedly got completed in 2018,” said Dominique Petit-Frère, a conference speaker and co-founder of the design and research practice Limbo Accra.
The Palais de Lomé, an exception to the norm, is the case study that tiny Togo is presenting to kickstart a conversation on resuscitating and archiving architecture in Africa.
But as imposing as it is, the restored estate tells only half the tale. Less than three miles away stands a monument to Togo’s indecision about whether writing a new era of history involves reclaiming some parts but dispensing with others.
The majestic 216-room Hotel de la Paix was launched by the government in the 1970s and in its heyday quickly became a rendezvous spot for high-flying west Africans.
“Hotel de la Paix is an emblematic building which also bears witness to the history of Togo,” said the Lomé-based architect Sabrine Bako, who participated in the Palais de Lomè renovation. “In post-independence, when Togo wanted to give itself an international status, it was one of the first luxury hotels that was built … it was a glorious period.”
Two decades later, the hotel, which also faces the ocean, became a skeleton of its glorious self after mismanagement and state neglect robbed it of its shine. A new hotel now occupies part of the grounds, while the government has reportedly earmarked the main complex for demolition.
“There are solutions to preserve this architectural heritage,” said Bako. “That’s my opinion but it’s the politicians that decide.”
A meeting of the the Lomé Architectural Encounters forum at the Palais de Lomé. Photograph: Eromo Egbejule/The Guardian
For some, it is the Hotel de la Paix, rather than the Palais de Lomé, that represents the true state of archiving architecture across the continent. Olufemi Hinson Yovo, a Beninese architect who runs an Instagram account called @Cotonou.Architecture to catalogue disappearing relics, said many administrators across the region had a disdain towards heritage.
“All I see from all stand points of different west African cities and governments on heritage is ‘either it’s in a good place where there’s attraction to tourism and then we can renovate it, but if it’s not we just destroy it and and build something on top of it’,” she said.
“In Dakar, in Cotonou we wake up every day to a heritage building being destroyed …it’s like an epidemic.”
Even though there are architecture departments across west Africa’s many universities, EAMAU, which was established in 1975, remains the region’s major specialty college. Many of its graduates, like Bako, are well-known. But experts say the curriculum needs updating to better adapt to local needs.
The political will for long-term change is slow to come, but more private citizens are stepping into the arena.
Dakar, for example, is the scene of a growing renaissance of artists placing architectural relics at the centre of their work. At the conference, the Senegalese-Cameroonian architect Nzinga Mboup discussed one such initiative: Dakarmorphose, a tech-driven initiative by her and partner Carole Diop to map the city’s heritage.
There is also Limbo Accra, which works to transform unfinished buildings and has created a digital repository for them in order to “find new ways of mitigating what we’re dealing with in our cities”, according to Petit-Frère.
Yovo hopes these initiatives will spur others on.
“Renovating such a place as Palais de Lomé is a huge feat,” she said. “That I could take a taxi from Cotonou and come here three hours away from home and be with world-class architects, emerging world-class architects … it’s fantastic that it’s happening but we need way more than this.”
This article was amended on 14 December 2024 to correct the spelling of Sonia Lawson and Sabrine Bako.
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