Course Syllabus

Enrollment in this course is through an application process open to second-year HP and UP students. Please submit your resume and a brief statement of interest (2 paragraphs max.) to Sarahgrace Godwin (s.godwin@columbia.edu) by July 16.

Background and Aims: Earthen architecture is a form of construction found across the globe, but significant challenges characterize its historical and continued use. Multiple factors, such as colonization, urbanization, conflict, and attitudes toward the material, have de-valued earthen construction techniques and disempowered those practicing them. Modern building and zoning codes, government-led heritage policies, and architectural licensing practices compound this marginalization by undermining local knowledge and self-build traditions, but at the same time seek to support the continued use of earthen architecture through the development of material standards and professionalized education. Heritage interests and the climate crisis pose new opportunities for re-examining and redefining the role of earthen architecture in the built environment as both a socially significant constructive culture and a low carbon material and technology. How past and future intersect poses critical questions regarding the social justice implications of what we preserve and how we plan and build. This studio seeks to interrogate how constructive cultures using unbaked earth have been erased, preserved, and/or reimagined, so as to inform preservation and planning policies. 

“Sɛ wo werɛ fi na wosankofa a yenkyi.”

—There is nothing wrong with learning from hindsight (Asante proverb)^[1]

Case Study: The Asante Traditional Buildings, near Kumasi, Ghana, will serve as a deep dive case study. These ten traditional house shrines, spread across multiple villages to the north and northeast of the city, are all that survive of a once vibrant culture of constructing with unbaked earth. Kumasi’s rich landscape of traditional architecture was destroyed by British imperial forces in 1874, who targeted this center of Asante civilization to impose British rule and to claim new resources and economic opportunities after the abolition of the slave trade. Multiple historical factors influenced the rebuilding of the city and its environs, and the consequential erasure of earthen construction and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge associated with it.

Places of religious and spiritual significance, and adorned with reliefs of “Adinkra” symbols, the Asante Traditional Buildings were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980. By the mid-1990s, UNESCO expressed concern about the conservation of the structures. Field missions and training programs were implemented in collaboration with the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB), the International Centre for Earth Construction (CRAterre), and the International Centre for the Study of the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM). However, resources for ongoing maintenance were lacking, and by 2012 the Asante Traditional Buildings were included on the World Monuments Watch, to draw attention to their deterioration. World Monuments Fund (WMF) supported emergency repairs and engagement with the local community, but again short-term efforts did not solve the long-term problems of continuous care and maintenance. In 2021, UNESCO, in collaboration with CRAterre, sponsored another mission to assess conditions, and in 2022, WMF again included the Asante Traditional Buildings on the Watch.

This study seeks to examine histories of heritage practices and urban policies, to better understand why conservation efforts over the past decades have been inadequate. This involves deeply interrogating the evolution of Kumasi’s built environment and constructive cultures to understand how and why earthen building traditions were historically erased and devalued. Students will also explore how, based on comparative analyses of other contexts, re-investment in the Asante Traditional Buildings, and in earthen architecture more generally, might be advanced.

Methods and Outputs: This advanced studio seeks to develop student skills in researching, mapping, assessing, and integrating cultural heritage as an instrumental component of sustainable urbanization, international and/or community development, and social-spatial justice. As a project-based studio, students work collaboratively to collect and analyze data, and propose recommendations for future action, compiling findings in a collective final report (past studio reports, published by WMF, can be found here).

Students travel to Kumasi is anticipated ~ Oct. 14-21 to undertake fieldwork with local collaborators, allowing them to engage with the architecture and land use of the city, Asante heritage, and the surviving earthen buildings in this growing urban context. In the field, the studio team will engage with local institutions, including the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology’s (KNUST) School of Architecture, Town Planning, and Building. Established in 1958, it was the first school of architecture in West Africa, and it is currently developing a heritage conservation program. WMF, which is currently supporting a conservation project of the shrines, will likewise serve as a key collaborator. It is anticipated that fieldwork will focus on understanding the Asante Traditional Buildings, as well as other areas significant to earthen architecture traditions and histories. This may involve analyzing the social and spatial relationships that characterize their context, employing rapid field survey techniques, cultural-context mapping, comparative visual analyses, visitor/user surveys, and/or stakeholder interviews.

 [1] Quoted in Kevin D. Dumouchelle, Traditions of Modernity: Currents in Architectural Expression, Ghana Studies, Vol. 12/13,  2009/2010, p. 155.