Aga Khan Program Lecture: Tosin Oshinowo, “Aṣẹ: Intentional Contextuality and Adaptability in Design”

Lagos-based Nigerian architect, designer, and curator of the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial  – Tosin Oshinowo is renowned for insights into socially-responsive approaches to urbanism and design. In her talk for GSD, she will address the importance of considering context in design and embracing local solutions, which have roots in often overlooked techniques and traditions that have been with us for centuries.  She questions how these techniques and ways of understanding the world  from the global south can lend themselves as solutions to the global challenges posed by resource extraction and climate change.

The 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial, titled –  The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability, explores how practitioners across the Global South employ contextual and contemporary techniques to build a world that is can be more sustainable, more equitable, and more community-oriented than the standard practices celebrated by the canon. Tosin will unpack some of the core themes emerging in the development of the Triennial, spotlighting architects and designers who will be included and whose work is emblematic of the approach to materiality, adaptability, and impermanence that is a cultural imperative across the Global South, and a fresh perceptive for the field at large.

Exploring techniques, materials and concepts from her context in West Africa – including the Yoruba philosophical concept of Aṣẹ, which references the order to effect change and adapt as a fundamental principle for our existence – Oshinowo will demonstrate how she considers context in her designs, share her inspirations, and give insights into how a more intentional approach to design can build a collectively progressive future for us all.  Illuminating her own local inspirations, she will delve into historic and often overlooked examples from indigenous solutions and tropical modernism, including the work of Alan Vaughn-Richards, alongside building techniques and design traditions from her native Yoruba culture, demonstrating how these influences have impacted her practice from high-end residential projects, to furniture design, to her work with the United Nations Development Programme in Northeast Nigeria, building an entirely new community for a village displaced by Boko Haram.