Media & Press

Eight international candidates have been selected for the second phase of the international competition to design two national public art memorial sites to commemorate the 2011 terror attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya.

On October 15th 2013, X Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo opened at SESC Pompéia featuring NLÉ’s African Water Cities Project. The exhibition is open until December 1st.

NLÉ is one of six interdisciplinary teams involved in MoMA’s Uneven Growth initiative, which will examine new architectural possibilities for six global metropolises: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York and Rio De Janeiro.

A couple of years ago, extreme floods in the commercial and residential areas of Lagos motivated architect and urbanist Kunlé Adeyemi to check out the city’s largest waterfront slum – Makoko – to see how its residents designed and managed their lives in the huge sprawl of communities scattered along the lagoon shoreline.

Makoko, a Nigerian shantytown on the marshy waterfront of Lagos, is not exactly Venice, but there are marked similarities between the two. Both are built on wooden piles driven into saline mud and tidal ooze. The streets of both are famously full of water. Both were settled by fishing communities, Venice – officially – in AD 421, Makoko at some time in the 18th century. Their populations are of a similar size – 60,000 in Venice, around 80,000 in Makoko – although no one knows for certain.

Rapid urbanisation and climate change are two key challenges facing the modern metropolis. The community of Makoko in Lagos, Nigeria, is overly familiar with both issues. Makoko is an aquatic community of some 100 000 people who live on housing units built on stilts in the water. There’s no land, no roads and no formal infrastructure… an informal Venice of Africa, if you will.

Makoko Floating School featured at the London Festival of Architecture 2013.

Atlas of the Unbuilt World, the British Council’s international exhibition for the London Festival of Architecture 2013, has opened at the Bartlett School of Architecture in central London. 60 architectural models gathered from across the world will be on display for visitors to investigate and compare. The exhibition is free and will be open until 27 June.

In Makoko, a sprawling slum on the waterfront of Lagos, Nigeria, tens of thousands of people live in rickety wood houses teetering above the fetid lagoon. It’s an old fishing village on stilts, increasingly battered by floods from heavy rains and rising seas. Because the settlement was becoming dangerous, the government forcibly cleared part of it last year. Kunle Adeyemi, a Nigerian architect, had a better idea….

The floating school of Makoko The Floating Public School by NLÉ architects, photographed by Iwan Baan, creates a new symbolic focus and identity for the Makoko fishing community (Lagos, Nigeria), where families live on stilt-houses in the lagoon of an ever-growing megalopolis. An architectural construction in local wood made using “techniques” developed by the community, and floated… Continue reading ABITARE – MAY 2013