On The Strange Habit of Bringing Home Buildings Instead of Ideas.
The Photograph Arrives First
It is almost never the brief. It is a photograph.
A client sits across from you, unlocks their phone and begins scrolling.
“I was thinking about Something like this.” Swipe. “Or maybe this.” Swipe. “This one is beautiful.” Swipe. And then, eventually, the photograph appears. A spectacular house somewhere in Bali. A hotel in Dubai. An apartment in Johannesburg. A restaurant in Italy. A resort in Greece. A house they saw on Instagram, saved three years ago and have now decided is the definitive architectural expression of the life they would like to live. “I want this.”
You look at the photograph. Then you look at the site. Then back at the photograph.
The site is in Mombasa, or Nyeri. The photograph is not. The beginnings of trouble. Not because the building is ugly; quite the opposite. It is beautiful, and that is precisely the problem.
We See The Answer, Not The Question
There is a particular kind of architectural excitement that happens after travel. You see something extraordinary somewhere else and, for a brief moment, the distance between there and here seems irrelevant.
You see a courtyard in Marrakech and imagine it in Kilifi. A dramatic glass wall in Dubai and imagine it overlooking the Kenyan coast. A timber house in the Alps and imagine the same language on a tropical hillside. A resort in Bali and suddenly every luxury hotel needs timber screens, rattan furniture, enormous roof forms and a vague commitment to “bringing the outside in.”
We bring home photographs, and sometimes, without realizing it, we bring home the place itself. We want to recreate the experience wholesale. Same look. Same materials. Same proportions. Same mood. Sometimes, even the same furniture and fixtures, as though Architecture was a souvenir.
Honestly, I understand it. Architecture is emotional. Nobody falls in love with a structural grid, or saves a screenshot of a beautifully calculated thermal-performance coefficient. People fall in love with light. With views. With the feeling of walking into a room and thinking, I want to live here.
We fall in love with the life we imagine happening inside the photograph, and increasingly, our exposure to Architecture happens through images. Instagram. Pinterest. Travel blogs. Property shows. Architecture magazines. Our phones have literally turned the entire world into a catalogue of possible lives and, of course, people want things they have seen.
The problem is that the photograph removes the context. It gives you the building without the weather. The façade without the sun. The materials without the supply chain. The technology without the maintenance. The beauty without the cost. The solution without the problem.
And perhaps most dangerously, it gives you the answer without the question.
This matters because buildings are never independent objects; they are responses to their environments. A building in Dubai, Copenhagen, or Bali is responding to its respective location.
Not just aesthetically; physically, economically, culturally and technically: The materials and skills available. The cost of energy, both for construction and for running the building. The amount of sunlight, rainfall and wind. The local building regulations. The way people live, cook, sleep and gather. How they use outdoor space. The things they can afford to repair. All of these things quietly participate in the Architecture.
We only see the finished building; not the thousands of decisions that made that building make sense. So, when we copy the building without copying the conditions, we, more often than not, end up with something that looks right while behaving completely wrong.
What We Call Alternative
This is where our obsession with alternative construction technology gets interesting, because Africa is currently being told, quite rightly, that we need to build differently.
We need cheaper, faster, and low-carbon construction. To use more locally available materials and have less waste. We need more resilient buildings with better thermal performance.
There are extraordinary possibilities, too: Compressed Earth Blocks, Rammed Earth, Bamboo, Engineered Timber. Prefabrication, Modular Systems, Recycled Materials, Agricultural Waste. There’s even 3D printing and Digital Fabrication.
There is nothing wrong about any of this, but here is the trap: we can become so focused on finding the next construction technology that we repeat the same mistake. We see somebody doing something clever somewhere else, we fly there, photograph it, and bring the idea back home. And then, instead of asking what the technology could become here, we ask how closely we can reproduce what they did there.
We have simply replaced one form of copying with another.
Now, here is the uncomfortable part. Some of the most “alternative” construction techniques we are discovering are not actually new to us. Earth construction, using local stone and materials, building deep verandahs or using sun-shading elements and courtyards are not new. Neither is natural ventilation or building with thick walls.
Buildings that respond intelligently to their environments are not new. Our grandparents did not have the luxury of ignoring their surroundings; their well-being depended on this very knowledge. They knew which side of the house became unbearable in the afternoon, and where to sit when the wind changed. They knew how a roof should breathe, and that shade was not decoration.
It was survival.
Suddenly it is innovation. But we've had this knowledge all along. Maybe we need to become better at recognizing intelligence when it arrives wearing a cloak different from what we expect. Because technology is not necessarily a machine, or a new invention.
Sometimes Technology is simply a way of thinking; knowing what material is available twenty kilometres away instead of importing another, with similar characteristics from five thousand kilometres away. It is designing a building that does not need to fight its environment every hour of the day, or using local labour because then, the building can actually be repaired by the very people who constructed it. Sometimes it is taking agricultural waste and asking whether it can be re-engineered into a wall, a board or an insulation material instead of becoming another mountain of rubbish.
Technology is pre-fabricated light-weight Steel structures, and then sometimes, it is mud. The sophistication is not in how exotic the solution sounds, but rather, how intelligently it responds to the problem.
The Client Is Not The Villain
Clients are not the only people who need to rethink this. Consultants do, too.
As architects, we have a responsibility to translate. When a client brings us a photograph from Dubai, perhaps the first question should not be, “How do I reproduce this?”, but rather, “What did you love about it?”
Was it the drama? The openness? The privacy? The light? The relationship between the house and the landscape? The sense of luxury? The materials? The feeling of being on holiday?
Because, just maybe, the client doesn't actually want a Dubai house. Maybe they want the feeling they had while standing in that Dubai house. And that is a very different brief.
Now the architect has something to work with. Now we can take the desire and translate it through the site, the climate, the client's actual life; through what is available, affordable and can be readily maintained.
This way, we stop copying the building and start designing the experience. That is Architecture.
This distinction, in my opinion, matters, particularly in Africa, because we are still negotiating our relationship with modernity. In our collective psyche, “modern” or, (sigh) “state-of-the-art” has too often been translated to mean foreign. Imported tiles and marble. Imported lighting and glass curtain walls. American kitchens and international hotel aesthetics.
The result is a building that could theoretically be anywhere. And by god, there is something profoundly strange about constructing buildings in Africa that seem determined to erase the fact that they are in Africa.
We flatten the climate, the culture, the material palette. We flatten the Architecture and call it international. But perhaps Architecture should not be international in the sense of being interchangeable, as it could, in the sense that ideas can travel while places remain distinct.
Travel, after all, is supposed to change the way we see, and that includes the way we see home.
Maybe the real gift of visiting a beautiful building in another country is not that we get to reproduce it. Maybe it is that we develop better questions to bring home:
Why does this courtyard work?
Why is this façade so deeply shaded?
Why does this building feel cool without feeling enclosed?
Why are these materials so effective?
Why does this house feel connected to its landscape?
Why does this space feel luxurious?
And then: What is the home version of this idea? Not the copy. The home version.
That distinction is profoundly important, because the future of African Architecture will not come from finding better buildings elsewhere. It will come from becoming more curious about the intelligence already around us.
The materials we stopped valuing.
The techniques we stopped teaching.
The craftsmen whose knowledge never made it into glossy architecture books.
The climate we keep trying to defeat instead of designing with.
The old buildings we photograph as heritage and then promptly ignore when designing new ones.
And, perhaps Alternative Construction Technology is not so much about building with something other than concrete, as it is about alternating the way we think about building.
LOOK AGAIN
So, bring me the photograph.
Bring me the villa from Bali, the hotel from Dubai, the house from Cape Town, or the restaurant from Copenhagen.
Bring me every beautiful building you've ever fallen in love with. Let's look at them. Let's dissect them. Let's 'steal' everything worth stealing.
But then, let's put the phone down. And look again. At the site. At the soil. At the sun and wind and the trees.
Look at the people who will build it, as well as those who will live in it. At what they can afford to build and maintain. Look at what is already here, within our reach.
And then ask the question that should have come before the photograph: What does this place need?
Because the point of travelling elsewhere is not to come home and build elsewhere. It is to come home and finally learn how to see here.
And maybe the most radical construction technology we have available to us is not a new materials, machines or even new building systems.
Maybe it is simply the courage to stop asking, “How did they do it there?”, and start asking, like our ancestors did, “What can we do here?”
