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The story behind Kunlé Adeyemi's Makoko floating school collapse

2018-03-02T14:02:00-05:00

There is a persistent risk of doing harm, dashing hopes, and eroding trust with trial and error, no matter how virtuous the objectives. It is the duty of the powerful to minimize that risk as much as possible. “It was supposed to be innovation, but now we’re being told it was experimentation,” Papa Omotayo, a Lagos-based architect and friend of Adeyemi’s, said of the floating school a few days after the collapse. “The issue is, can you experiment in a community like [Makoko] [...] ?”

Kunlé Adeyemi's floating school was built in 2013 and collapsed in 2016. The structured was meant to served 100 elementary students in Makoko, a heavily populated slum on Lagos' waterfront. Classes were only held for about 4 months in the 3 years it stood.

Now two years later, Allyn Gaestel analyses the full story around the failed structure in her long-form piece titled "Things Fall Apart". The question is raised: is it ok to experiment with trial and error in marginalized communities?

Allyn Gaestel explains, "The project was a chimera composed of flawed and superficial ideas and curated by deflection, obfuscation, and overestimation." As the situation stands now money has been donated, however no decision has been reached on what to do next.

Water World: rapid urbanization and rising seas with Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ on One-to-One #36

2016-09-05T20:55:00-04:00

Kunlé Adeyemi founded NLÉ in Amsterdam and Lagos in 2010, after over eight years at OMA. Raised in Kaduna, Nigeria, with an architect father who was constantly redesigning his childhood home, Adeyemi studied architecture in Lagos before getting an MArch II at Princeton, studying with Peter Eisenman. His work at OMA included pivotal roles in projects such as Lagos’ master plan and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Throughout his work, he focuses on issues of rapid urbanization and climate change in the Global South.

I spoke with Kunlé this past August, for his keynote presentation at the AIA Tennessee Convention in Chattanooga. We cover his work in wide breadth: how he focuses on cities’ relationships to water and infrastructure, quickly iterating projects like the Makoko Floating School prototypes in Lagos and at the Venice Biennale, and why he left OMA to start his own firm in the first place. Due to a technical glitch in the live recording, the episode starts about ten minutes into our ...

Kunlé Adeyemi's Makoko floating school collapses

2016-06-10T13:24:00-04:00

The school collapsed on Tuesday after a heavy rainfall that took over most part of the Lagos including Makoko, a slum and highly populated part of the state [...] “So as far as that floating school is concerned, it was erected without the permission of the state government. “The simple answer to the floating school is that it is an illegal structure and it shouldn’t be there.”

Kunlé Adeyemi's floating school was built with the help of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2013, to serve 100 elementary school students living in the Makoko slum on Lagos' waterfront. About 300,000 people are estimated to be living in the slum, which before the floating school was built, was going to be demolished due to health concerns. The school had a influential role in convincing the government to instead adopt a "regeneration plan" for the slum.

From The Guardian:

The school became a symbol of bottom-up development, its designs even adopted by the state ministry of urban development for new house plans. The collapse throws this process into disarray.

Plans to rebuild are reportedly already underway.

Related on Archinect:

Inside Kunlé Adeyemi's Serpentine Pavilion Summer House

2016-06-09T13:11:00-04:00

“While observing the building, we realized that the internal void was really a great quality to reveal, and so our building is really an inversion of that,” [Kunlé Adeyemi] explained. “In a way, it’s a rotated from of the temple that highlights the interior space and also creates the fundamental purpose of what we think a summer house is: a place for shade and relaxation."

Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ's Summer House for the Serpentine Galleries is constructed in prefabricated sandstone blocks, similar to the stone used in Queen Caroline's Temple, the 18th century summer house that served as its inspiration.

While known for his modernist designs, Adeyemi focused on the form and proportions of the neoclassical Temple, developing his own design from the "voids," or negative spaces, of the original.

Archinect's U.K correspondent Robert Urquhart covered this year's Serpertine Pavilion in depth and had the chance to hear Adeyemi describe the pavilion in his own words.

"We’ve been able to use this opportunity to perhaps create a place [in line with what] we think is a tradition in London: a tradition of public space and some form of humour in architecture, somewhere that furniture design and material in context can all come together," Adeyemi states.

For more on this year's Serpentine Pavilion and Summer Houses, read Urquhart's feature here.

Serpentine unzips Bjarke Ingels' Pavilion and 4 Summer Houses

2016-02-24T13:21:00-05:00

Bjarke Ingels' unfurling wall-based pavilion joins four summer houses—designed by Asif Khan, Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, and Yona Friedman—to create this year's Serpentine Architecture Program. Each of the four summer houses riffs on the adjacent Queen Caroline's Temple designed in 1734, while BIG's Serpentine Pavilion appears to have been inspired by the desire to, according to an interview with Ingels in the Standard, "use rationality and rigour to create the extraordinary out of the ordinary.”

“We’ve played with one of the most basic elements [of a building] — the wall,” Ingels explains. “Typically, walls are made from stacked identical elements. When you see it you can sense how it fits into our general way of thinking. We are playing with the idea of bigamy — you don’t have to choose between box or blob.”

According to the Serpentine Pavilion's website, Asif Khan's summer house was designed in part to mimic the Queen Caroline Temple's orientation toward the Serpentine Lake, ...

BIG to design 2016 Serpentine Pavilion, alongside smaller "Summer Houses" by Kunlé Adeyemi, Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif Kahn

2016-02-10T15:29:00-05:00

The Serpentine Galleries in London announced earlier today the designer of the 2016 iteration of their annual Pavilion series: Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, the Copenhagen and New York-based global powerhouse.

This summer marks the 16th Pavilion of the acclaimed program, which began in 2000. Conceived initially by Julia Peyton-Jones, the outgoing co-director of the Galleries, the Serpentine’ Pavilion commission is awarded each year to noted architects who have never built in the UK.

As Peyton-Jones’ swan song, this summer’s program will be expanded to include four other 25 square meter structures, or “Summer Houses”, scattered on the lawns of Hyde Park in close proximity to the Galleries. These will be designed by Kunlé Adeyemi – NLÉ (Amsterdam/Lagos), Barkow Leibinger (Berlin/New York), Yona Friedman (Paris) and Asif Kahn (London).

Since its inception, the Serpentine Pavilion has drawn large crowds, garnering public attention for practitioners whose reputations had not necessarily exce...