Richard A. Aina

Richard Adetokunbo Aina is a multidisciplinary designer, and a known researcher with strengths in spatial design, architectural writing, furniture craft, and conceptual film-making. He coined the term “afrorevivalism” which talks about amalgam typologies and liminal space and explores contemporary West African aesthetic expression.

He was awarded the 2021 RIBA President’s Dissertation Medal for his thesis “A Culture of Craft: West Africa (UN).

What experiences in your life carved your concepts into your practice and paved your path for Architecture?

With a keen eye for craft and furniture, why did you choose Architecture and what made you stay in the design realm?

From a young age, I was very energetic and I remember being a capable football player. But at the age of 13, I was badly injured during the game and that kept me away from the matches. It was during the recovery period that I started leaning towards design. It all started with a sketch of a chair that fit in the most uncomfortable corner of my dorm room. That chair that I designed grabbed a great deal of attention from my tutors in the school by which I was exposed to a variety of design skills.

For the rest of that academic year, whilst still injured, I used to spend my spare time with them to carve and improve that chair design, which later came to be known as “The Rib Chair”. All these things that I kept learning fuelled my love for design. Over the next four years, I designed more chairs and developed professional skills like dealing design with respect to spatial organization.

Pursuing architecture seemed quite a creative path that bound all my interests & skills. Being a person from a family with interests in art, there was never a question of not having a creative career. It was just “when are the opportunities gonna delve into these aspects” and realize this is the path for me. For me, I see more reasons towards success in architecture to be more achieving as it fits in the whole nexus of design and creativity.

Why “Culture” as a medium to speak your ideology and what challenges did you face in the process of expressing it?

When I was researching in my fifth academic year, I came across a subject that I’ve never explored before, i.e. projects of West African origin. I spent most of my time in London, causing me to miss the exposure to something that was personal to my culture. I spent time digging about the traditional cultures of west African tribes which led me into the world of architecture and construction practices of west African tribes and this allowed me to comprehend the extremes and richness that is embedded within them in relation to west African identity. I immersed myself into how they let spirituality be real and tangible in the physical world, how their ritual practices, languages, and architectural principles are intricately intertwined.

The initial challenge for me has been to look beyond my preconceived notions, which are an integral part of my own belief systems that are part of my own identity. To immerse myself within the essence of my culture, I originally belong to. I questioned, “Can I ever understand the true essence of some other cultures if I wasn’t born into it?”

How would you explain your work approach for the ideal design framework that you employed in your thesis, attempting to reflect on your recent design and research?

My thesis is formulated in two parts. Part one is the “Introduction” that informs the framework. It looks into why and how West African objects are hugely important. I look into the Lobi Tribe in particular and used that to convey the inexplicable day-today culture, life and community that exists. Then looking at how these objects, through millennial insurrection, disrupted cultural practice for the Lobi people and other West African groups, beginnings of ethnography.

This began to walk the very belief system that was centered through these objects, how these objects that were tangible hybrid forms for mass production began to lose their sacred value in relation to art markets and contemporary art Industry. The first part ends looking at how the ownership of crafted objects or how creativity through crafts can somehow be harnessed, can somehow lead to the other future and how maybe this can be a craft based commercial practice or community practice for the West African groups within themselves and give themselves some kind of creative based strength and cultural reinvigoration.

The second part is a direct response to part one, and the project deals with designing a space where these objects (when returned by the famous international museums), more importantly the “Batebas” (figure like objects which are of very personal importance to the Lobi culture) can be preserved as well as provide the people of Lobi tribe with an opportunity to serve their deity figures and live their heritage. These objects could be in some kind of very structured framework. I then began to look at the site through various aspects, which allowed me to show how vernacular construction could exist within the site, looking at the vegetation, the geology, and the makeup of the hill. It almost felt like a proof that vernacular construction could occur through the use of natural materials and traditional techniques that are available locally.

The interesting thing is, I didn’t design the space with the conventional architectural aspects in mind but the final design happened through cultural agents playing their part i.e. key traditional figures of the Lobi culture, where I allowed the architecture to thrive. So essentially the building becomes an architectural conveyor belt that provides conditions for the returned “Batebas’’ from the museums by which each of these agents can represent their identity as objects of cultural importance. Within this, you realize how the building in of itself, whilst being a “Bateba conveyor belt”, also acts as a way in which these “Batebas” are virtually reinvigorated into traditional Lobi practices.

This allows us to reach a conclusion, which provides an insight into what this kind of architecture approach is and maybe simple looking objects as such, can be of great importance in terms of heritage and culture.

In today’s case of the tug of war between development and environment, how does going back to the roots and looking for a solution help address the development- culture- climate paradigm?

I think West Africa, or Africa itself, is still directly experiencing the exacerbating effects of its colonial legacy and I believe that there’s a collective unknowing of personal and collective history. Having lived in Nigeria myself for some time, I can’t speak the traditional language- “Yoruba”. Being of Nigerian descent, I have good knowledge of Europe and European culture but almost very little of my own culture.

By acknowledging the culture, now having researched rigorously for nine months, it has actually gotten better. It was the imposition of European colonial measures that had ruptured the very meaning of what it means to be West African and their traditional principles, and we all know that industrialization has been one of the driving factors which is comforting us today.

So in my mind, the real solution for African nations is to begin looking at their core principles of traditional practices.

One of the most prominent movements that pervade contemporary architectural practice is “sustainability” and yet we have concepts like “net zero”, “passive house”, “embodied carbon”, “new values” etc. I believe there’s a plethora of West African tribes that’s thriving while accommodating climatic conditions in the areas of tropical and coastal conditions utilizing natural resources that were available which didn't have a negative effect or ruining the environment in any significant way, and they are almost always good to nature much by employing techniques like adobe construction. There’s so much brilliant intellect and approach to the design, construction and in-habitation with respect to the environment and I think that just begins to inform ourselves and extrapolate.

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom”.

~ Socrates