A tropical and cosmopolitan architecture for a museum in Ghana

Locate an architecture within a site doesn’t necessarily involve the use of local materials, or the replication of vernacular shapes. This principle is better embodied by the Nubuke Foundation’s extension in Accra, Ghana, by Baerbel Mueller with Juergen Strohmayer. The firms of the two architects, both based in Vienna and in the African capital, have designed the Nubuke Extended as a contemporary and “cosmopolitan” building, and yet one which is deeply rooted in its surroundings. The construction is fundamentally a reinforced concrete shell, a basically mono-material single bodywork, where all added components, such as window frames, tend to virtually disappear. While definitely radical, the building is far from self-referential: on the contrary, the Nubuke Extended responds with the uttermost sensibility to the information emanating from its environment.

While raising from the ground, it allows the park where it stands to blend into a concrete-paved, covered platform, functioning as a landmark highlighting the foundation’s entrance, and providing an additional area for exhibitions and events. The actual gallery which screens it is an open space, whose articulation is suggested by slight height differences. His long walls to the East and West feature no openings, to protect the interiors from direct sunlight, whereas the short walls to the North and South are fully glazed and can be entirely opened, to allow the typical local breeze to cross the building. These and other devices, including the roof-integrated rail system for the hanging of artworks and temporary partitions, demonstrate a straightforward and yet unusual cleverness. Alongside a more general inclination to reduction, to achieving the highest spatial and climatic quality with a minimum expenditure of matter and technology, it leads this design back to the glorious tradition of a late modernism, brutal and tropical, that finds in Lina Bo Bardi its most outstanding and celebrated protagonist.