Ecosystems

This first book by celebrated Senegalese practice Worofila addresses the challenge facing the African city of today: to build in a way that is adapted to the lives of current inhabitants without compromising those of future generations. Drawing on abundant but often ignored pre-colonial methods and models of building, Worofila create bioclimatic architecture based around local, non-polluting materials, ancestral knowledge, and democratic systems of construction and maintenance. Their work moves beyond the legacy of colonial-era architecture, imposed from other cultures and climates and frequently ill-suited, to recover and develop a sustainable African architectural language that reflects the continent?s climate, ecology, and identity.Ecosystems: A Contemporary African Architecture offers a survey of Worofila?s prolific work to date, with detailed explorations of the research, ideas, and techniques that structure it. Texts on the histories of building in Senegal and the pre- and post-colonial conditions of architecture on the African continent are accompanied by presentations of projects spanning housing, public buildings, infrastructure, landscapes, and experiments with materials. Together these propose a new typology of building in Senegal and inspire approaches to develop local and sustainable architectures across the world.