SOCIAL MEDIA ZEITGEIST

The African Futures Institute has established its permanent home in a former tile warehouse in Osu, Accra, choosing the adaptation of an existing industrial building over a purpose-built institutional landmark. Newly published details of the project show how the retained warehouse volume has been reorganised as a flexible setting for teaching, research, exhibitions, making and public events.

Exposed roof trusses remain visible above shared spaces inside AFI’s adapted warehouse headquarters | Photograph: Alix McIntosh

Founded by Lesley Lokko in 2021, AFI operates as an experimental platform for architectural education, research and cultural programming. Its new headquarters has been developed by a team including Lokko, Patrick Gentilezza, Patti Anahory, Laurence Lord and Fred Swart, with the existing structure deliberately retained to preserve its large, adaptable interior.

At the centre is the Urban Room, designed to shift between lecture hall, studio, cinema, exhibition space, workshop and gathering place. The building will also accommodate AFI’s team, archive and research activity, alongside programmes including its Nomadic African Studio, residencies, screenings and public events.

The building can operate as a school in the morning, a studio in the afternoon and a public room at night.

That flexibility is particularly significant for an organisation concerned with experimenting with how architecture is taught and practised. Rather than giving each programme a dedicated room, AFI has treated spatial adaptability as part of the institution’s operating model. Its headquarters therefore becomes an architectural expression of the organisation itself: open-ended, multidisciplinary and able to accommodate programmes that may continue to change.

The project also points to a useful proposition for architects working with cultural and educational clients. Where budgets, programmes or long-term requirements remain fluid, the opportunity may lie less in designing a highly specialised new building than in identifying existing structures with enough volume and resilience to support multiple uses.

For cultural institutions with evolving programmes, designing for operational flexibility can be more valuable than designing for a fixed brief.

AFI’s conversion is modest in scale, but its development model is transferable. As institutions reassess construction costs, embodied carbon and the certainty of their future requirements, adaptable reuse can offer both a spatial strategy and a clearer expression of organisational values. For architects, that creates work not only in designing buildings, but in recognising which existing buildings can become institutions in the first place.

Further information

African Futures Institute

AFI Nomadic African Studio

Workplace Design: African Futures Institute unveils new Accra hub