Media & Press

Designed for a flood-prone area of Nigeria, this school would keep students in school even after the heaviest rains.

Their canoes drift on the water as piles of rubbish float outside their shacks.
Shabby shacks on stilts, floating waste and rickety boats fill the expanse of murky water.
But for the thousands of poor people forced to live in Nigeria’s infamous Makoko slum in Lagos, this is their home.

For the community of Makoko of Lagos, Nigeria life on the water is nothing new. Prone to flooding, residents have dealt with encroaching waters for generations by building houses on stilts and using canoes as their main source of transport. Now, with the threat of sea level rise from climate change, and developers who want to tear the community down, Makoko is in a state of uncertainty.

On Saturday, June 3, 2006 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Oldcastle Glass will co-host a one-day symposium at the museum entitled “Contamination: Impure Architecture” on opening day of the special exhibition Zaha Hadid, on view at the Guggenheim through October 25, 2006 – bringing together leading architectural theorists and practitioners to discuss the theoretical notion of contamination and architecture. The following roster of international architects and designers are participating: Kunlé Adeyemi, Elizabeth Diller, Zaha Hadid, Sanford Kwinter, Greg Lynn, Gabriele Mastrigli, Alex McDowell, Farshid Moussavi, Patrik Schumacher and Bernard Tschumi. Kunlé Adeyemi’s article ‘Urban Crawl’ was published in the Log Journal 10 of Summer/Fall 2007.

Respite appears to be on the way for sacked residents of Makoko area of Yaba, as an architect, Mr. Kunle Adeyemi, Thursday said he had concluded plans to build a three-story school out of the 16 floating platforms lashed together to enhance the educational needs of the people of the area.

In the waterfront slum of Makoko in Nigeria’s largest city where shacks stand above the murky, fetid water on stilts of cast-aside lumber, an architect thinks the neighborhood should float.

Nigeria architect, designer and ‘urbanist’, Kunle Adeyemi of NLÉ in partnership with the Heinrich Boell Stiftung, has proposed plans to build a three-story school out of 16 floating platforms lashed together, capable of holding 100 students and teachers, in the waterfront slum of Makoko, area of Yaba, Lagos.

Nigerian Architect, Kunle Adeyemi Brings Hope to Makoko Slum with the Floating School Project

Kunlé Adeyemi is appointed as 2011 Callison Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of the University of Washington, teaching and researching ‘The Modern City in the Age of Globalization’ in Chandigarh – India’s first planned modernist city.