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| Asante Traditional Buildings, Ashanti Region, Ghana. The buildings combine earth construction, timber, bamboo, plaster, courtyards and symbolic relief work. Their architectural significance cannot be reduced to their material construction alone. |
This article examines the politics of the term vernacular through African architectural history, with particular attention to Ghana. It considers Asante architecture, northern Ghanaian Islamic architecture, the coastal architecture of the Gold Coast, tropical modernism, postcolonial architectural education and contemporary debates surrounding decolonisation. Drawing upon the work of scholars including Nnamdi Elleh, Ola Uduku, Viviana d’Auria, Iain Jackson, Mark Crinson, Łukasz Stanek and Michelle Apotsos, the article argues that the problem is not the word vernacular itself, but the epistemic hierarchy within which it has frequently been deployed. A decolonised architectural history must therefore move beyond recovering “lost” African traditions and instead recognise African actors as producers, interpreters and transformers of architectural modernity.
Introduction: A Word Hiding in Plain Sight
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| Decorative relief and earthen construction at an Asante traditional building. The architecture communicates through material, spatial organisation and symbolic imagery |
European buildings are rarely introduced merely as “European traditional architecture.” They are more likely to be identified as Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Modernist or Postmodernist. Their formal characteristics are connected to intellectual movements, political transformations, technologies, patrons and named architects.
African buildings, by contrast, are frequently gathered beneath a much broader term:
vernacular.
The word appears everywhere.
Vernacular houses.
Vernacular settlements.
Vernacular construction.
Vernacular architecture.
At first glance, there is little objection to this terminology. In its conventional architectural sense, vernacular refers to buildings that emerge from local conditions and knowledge rather than from formally codified architectural practice. Such architecture is not unique to Africa. European farmhouses, Japanese rural buildings, Scandinavian timber structures and Mediterranean settlements may all be understood through vernacular frameworks.
The difficulty begins when vernacular becomes the principal historical category through which African architecture is encountered.
The question, therefore, is not:
“Is African architecture vernacular?”
Much of it certainly is.
The more important question is:
Why has “vernacular” become such a powerful category for describing African architecture, and what does its dominance tell us about the production of architectural knowledge?
This is fundamentally a historiographical problem.
It concerns not only buildings, but the institutions that decide what counts as architecture; the schools that teach architectural history; the museums that preserve buildings; the scholars who classify them; the colonial administrations that documented them; and the professional systems that determine whose knowledge becomes authoritative.
The argument advanced here is deliberately not that the term vernacular should be abandoned. Such a position would replace one simplification with another.
Rather, this article proposes that vernacular should be understood as a mode of architectural production, not as a position at the bottom of an implicit hierarchy.
That distinction becomes particularly important in Africa, where the history of architecture has too often been narrated through a sequence in which indigenous traditions occupy the “traditional” past, colonialism introduces modernity, and formally trained African architects subsequently inherit an already established modern architectural language.
The historical reality is considerably more complicated.
1. Before “Vernacular”: Architecture as Knowledge
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| Decorative relief and earthen construction at an Asante traditional building. The architecture communicates through material, spatial organisation and symbolic imagery |
The first problem with the category is that it can obscure what buildings actually contain.
A building is never merely a physical object.
It embodies knowledge.
Knowledge of materials.
Knowledge of climate.
Knowledge of labour.
Knowledge of social organisation.
Knowledge of ritual.
Knowledge of construction.
Knowledge of maintenance.
Knowledge of landscape.
Knowledge of symbolism.
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| Traditional building knowledge is often transmitted through practice, apprenticeship and collective memory rather than through the signed drawings associated with professional architectural authorship. |
There may be no signed drawing.
No professional specification.
No architectural competition.
No surviving correspondence between architect and client.
No published manifesto.
Yet there is still design.
There is still technical decision-making.
There is still experimentation.
There is still transmission.
The absence of the professional architect, therefore, should not be confused with the absence of architectural intelligence.
This distinction is particularly important for African architecture because formal architectural education in sub-Saharan Africa developed relatively recently and largely through institutional models shaped by colonial and international systems. Mark R. O. Olweny's research demonstrates that formal architectural education in sub-Saharan Africa emerged through institutions established initially in South Africa in the 1920s and later elsewhere, with the first postcolonial schools in Ghana and Sudan appearing in the 1950s.[1] (Taylor & Francis Online)
The professional architect is therefore not an eternal or universal category.
It is historically situated.
2. The Asante Building Is Not Simply a “Mud House”
Near Kumasi, the surviving Asante shrine buildings constitute some of the last material evidence of the architectural culture of the Asante Kingdom at its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century height. UNESCO identifies ten surviving shrines within the World Heritage property. Their construction incorporates timber, bamboo, earth and mud plaster, while courtyards organise the spatial relationships between buildings. Their bas-reliefs incorporate animal, plant and geometric motifs associated with Asante symbolic systems, including Adinkra. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre)
To describe these structures simply as vernacular architecture is technically defensible.
But it is analytically insufficient.
The buildings are not merely examples of an indigenous construction technique.
They are architectural manifestations of a political, religious and philosophical system.
The courtyard is spatial.
The shrine is religious.
The ornament is symbolic.
The construction is technical.
The material is environmental.
The building is social.
These dimensions cannot easily be separated.
UNESCO itself describes the surviving buildings as material testimony to the Asante civilisation and emphasises the relationship between their architectural form, decorative symbolism and religious practices. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre)
The designation “vernacular” therefore tells us something about how the buildings were produced, but comparatively little about what they meant.
That distinction matters.
3. When Heritage Freezes Living Architecture
There is another paradox.
The moment indigenous architecture becomes “heritage,” it can begin to be treated as something that belongs to the past.
This creates a peculiar temporal condition.
The building is declared valuable precisely because it represents an earlier culture, yet conservation can inadvertently freeze that culture at the moment selected for preservation.
The Asante Traditional Buildings demonstrate this tension.
UNESCO notes that many of the surviving buildings have undergone reconstruction and alteration. In twelve of thirteen documented buildings, the original steeply pitched palm-frond roofs have been replaced by corrugated-iron roofs, while traditional rammed-earth floors have also been replaced with more durable paving. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre)
The question then becomes:
Which version is authentic?
The eighteenth-century building?
The nineteenth-century building?
The twentieth-century adaptation?
The building maintained by contemporary custodians?
The answer is not necessarily obvious.
Architecture is normally allowed to change when it is considered “modern.”
Why should indigenous architecture lose its legitimacy when it changes?
This is one of the central contradictions of architectural heritage.
We often celebrate traditional architecture because it represents continuity, yet continuity itself frequently requires adaptation.
Tradition is not necessarily the opposite of change.
Tradition can be the mechanism through which change is absorbed.
4. Who Gets to Be Modern?
The category of modernity is perhaps even more revealing than that of vernacular.Architectural history frequently presents modernity as a movement originating in Europe and subsequently travelling outward.
Modernism is then exported, adapted and regionalised.
Africa becomes a place where modern architecture is received.
But this narrative underestimates African agency.
The history of twentieth-century Ghana demonstrates that architectural modernity was not simply imported intact.
It was negotiated.
It was modified.
It was resisted.
It was appropriated.
It was sometimes strategically embraced.
Viviana d'Auria's research into Ghana's late-colonial and decolonising architectural environment demonstrates precisely this complexity. Her work, alongside that of Iain Jackson, Ola Uduku, Mark Crinson and others, has shown how materials, construction systems, housing forms and architectural ideas were negotiated in West Africa rather than simply transferred unchanged from Europe. (Cambridge University Press)
This matters because the familiar distinction between “traditional African architecture” and “modern African architecture” can conceal a much more complicated process.
There was no clean moment when one ended and the other began.
5. Tropical Modernism: Modernism in Africa, or Modernism for Africa?
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| Tropical Modernism in Ghana. Climatic adaptation became an important component of modern architectural practice in West Africa, but the history of this adaptation also raises questions about who was recognised as the producer of architectural knowledge |
Architects such as Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew became associated with the adaptation of modernist principles to tropical environments.
Climate mattered.
Ventilation mattered.
Solar protection mattered.
Shading mattered.
Building orientation mattered.
Yet this was not simply a neutral architectural response to climate.
Recent scholarship on Ghana's construction history shows that Fry and Drew's adaptation involved a complicated combination of climatic concerns, local materials and technologies, and assumptions about the needs and aspirations of users. Their commitment to local materials, however, often remained aspirational, given the continued reliance on imported materials. (Cambridge University Press)
This exposes an important contradiction.
The colonial architect could study the climate of West Africa and produce an architecture responsive to it.
But the local builder had already been responding to that climate for generations.
The difference was not necessarily knowledge of climate.
It was whose knowledge was granted professional authority.
This is one of the key issues in the decolonisation of architectural history.
6. Ghana and the Colonial Construction of Expertise
It reorganised expertise.
European engineering, surveying, planning, architecture and construction became institutionalised within colonial government.
Certain forms of knowledge acquired official status.
Others became informal.
This distinction survived colonialism in ways that are not always immediately visible.
A professionally trained architect produces a drawing.
A master mason produces a wall.
The first is documented.
The second may disappear from the archive.
One is described as professional expertise.
The other becomes craft.
One is architectural knowledge.
The other becomes tradition.
The hierarchy is not natural.
It is institutional.
The important word here is classification.
Colonial power operated partly through the ability to classify.
To classify people.
To classify land.
To classify cities.
To classify buildings.
And classification is never entirely neutral.
7. The African Patron Disappears
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| Brazil House, Jamestown, Accra. An example of Afro-Brazilian architectural heritage associated with the Tabom community and the layered cultural exchanges that shaped coastal Ghana |
Who commissioned the building?
Who paid for it?
Who wanted it?
Who decided that it represented modernity?
Who determined what materials should be used?
These questions become particularly important along Ghana's coast.
The historic mansions of coastal Ghana are frequently interpreted through European colonial architectural influence. Yet recent scholarship has challenged the tendency to see these buildings primarily as products of European agency.
This changes the historical narrative.
The house is no longer simply:
European influence in Africa.
It becomes:
African actors negotiating a world of architectural influences.
That is a profoundly different historiography.
The difference between the two is not semantic.
It is political.
8. Larabanga and the Problem of the “Traditional” Mosque
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| Larabanga Mosque, Savannah Region, Ghana. The mosque demonstrates the intersection of Islamic practice, local construction traditions, regional architectural language and evolving ideas of heritage. |
The mosque at Larabanga is often encountered in heritage discourse as an example of “traditional” Sudanic architecture.
Yet Michelle Apotsos's study of Larabanga demonstrates why such categorisation is inadequate.
Her research situates the mosque within the intersections of architecture, Islam, identity and modernisation, showing how built form participates in continuously changing understandings of history and community. (Routledge)
This is crucial.
A building can have a long history without being historically static.
The meanings attached to it can change.
The community can change.
The building can change.
The techniques used to maintain it can change.
The political significance of the building can change.
To describe it simply as “vernacular” risks compressing all of this temporal complexity into one word.
9. The Problem Is Not “Vernacular”
There is nothing inherently problematic about the term vernacular.
Architectural scholars have developed sophisticated uses of the concept.
The problem occurs when vernacular becomes synonymous with:
indigenous,
traditional,
premodern,
informal,
rural,
non-professional,
poor,
or technologically inferior.
Those categories are not equivalent.
A building can be locally produced and technologically sophisticated.
It can be traditional and continually adaptive.
It can be collectively designed and highly intentional.
It can be informal and spatially complex.
It can use earth and be contemporary.
It can be African and modern.
The problem, therefore, is not terminology alone.
It is the hierarchy attached to terminology.
10. Architectural Education and the Coloniality of Knowledge
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| KNUST Architecture students design sustainable housing to address Ghana’s urban housing crisis |
If architectural education teaches students that “real architecture” is principally the product of named architects, published theories, canonical movements and European historical periods, then the student receives more than technical knowledge.
They receive an epistemology.
They learn what counts as knowledge.
They learn who counts as an architect.
They learn which buildings deserve analysis.
They learn which histories deserve studio investigation.
Research into architectural education in sub-Saharan Africa has increasingly highlighted these embedded knowledge hierarchies. Olweny argues that the history of architectural education in the region remains deeply connected to institutional structures inherited from colonial contexts and that contemporary decolonisation requires attention to alternative knowledge systems and pedagogical frameworks. (Taylor & Francis Online)
The Ghanaian context is particularly significant.
A 2025 study by Nicholas Anastasopoulos explicitly examines coloniality and architectural pedagogy at KNUST, arguing that architecture schools in the Global South continue to negotiate dominant paradigms, Eurocentrism and the marginalisation of alternative epistemologies. (Taylor & Francis Online)
This does not mean that KNUST—or African architecture schools generally—simply reproduce colonial education.
That would itself be an oversimplification.
Rather, the issue is that architecture schools operate within historical systems whose assumptions can persist even after political independence.
The question becomes:
Can architectural education be postcolonial if its definition of architectural knowledge remains colonial?
11. Kwame Nkrumah and the Architecture of Independence
Kwame Nkrumah understood that political independence was not merely about replacing one government with another.
It was also about creating a new national consciousness.
Architecture became part of that project.
New buildings.
New institutions.
New monuments.
New roads.
New schools.
New civic spaces.
The architecture of independence attempted to materialise a new Ghana.
Yet the visual language of independence itself was not necessarily indigenous.
Nnamdi Elleh has noted the tension embedded in Nkrumah's monumental architecture, including the Independence Arch and its invocation of “Freedom and Justice” through a visual language that could appear recognisably European or neoclassical. (Cambridge University Press)
This raises a fascinating paradox.
Can a newly independent nation use inherited architectural languages to express liberation?
The answer is yes.
But the contradiction is worth acknowledging.
Decolonisation does not necessarily produce immediate architectural decolonisation.
Political independence can occur while cultural and epistemological dependencies remain.
12. The “International” Is Not Always Neutral
The word international sounds universal.
But architectural history teaches us to be suspicious of universality.
The so-called International Style emerged from particular European and North American intellectual, technological and economic contexts.
When its principles travelled to Africa, they did not arrive in an empty landscape.
They encountered existing societies.
Existing construction systems.
Existing climates.
Existing urban forms.
Existing architectural knowledge.
The result was never simply “International Style in Africa.”
It was a negotiation.
This is precisely why Mark Crinson's work on modern architecture and empire remains important. Modern architecture cannot be separated neatly from the imperial networks through which architects, technologies, materials and ideas circulated.[3]
Architecture travelled through empire.
So did architectural education.
So did standards.
So did building regulations.
So did professional identities.
Modernism was therefore never simply an aesthetic.
It was also a network.
13. From Colonialism to Neocolonialism
The end of formal colonial rule did not necessarily mean the end of external influence.
The same could be said of architecture.
A building could be commissioned by an independent African government, constructed in an African capital and occupied by African citizens while still depending heavily on foreign consultants, imported materials, external financing and international technical expertise.
Recent scholarship on Ghana's construction industry makes precisely this point: foreign technological influence persisted after independence, sometimes through economic and political leverage rather than direct colonial administration. (Cambridge University Press)
The question therefore shifts.
Instead of asking:
“Is this architecture colonial?”
we might ask:
“What systems of dependency make this architecture possible?”
That is a more useful question.
14. “Indigenous” Is Not the Opposite of “Modern”
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| Contemporary African architecture increasingly occupies the space between inherited knowledge and new technologies, challenging the assumption that indigenous and modern architecture are opposing categories. |
They are not.
A building can be indigenous and contemporary.
A material can be traditional and technologically advanced.
A spatial practice can be inherited and radically reinterpreted.
A construction technique can have centuries of history and still provide solutions to twenty-first-century problems.
This is particularly relevant to contemporary interest in earth construction.
The resurgence of interest in earth, compressed earth blocks, rammed earth and other low-carbon materials is sometimes presented as an architectural rediscovery.
But for many African communities, earth never disappeared.
The innovation may therefore not be the material itself.
The innovation is the professional revaluation of the material.
That distinction is crucial.
15. When the Architect “Discovers” What the Builder Already Knew
This produces an uncomfortable contemporary paradox.
An architect designs with earth.
The project is published internationally.
It is described as sustainable.
Experimental.
Contextual.
Innovative.
Yet a local builder may have been working with earth for generations.
The contemporary architect has not necessarily invented the knowledge.
They have reframed it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
Architecture advances partly through translation.
But the history of credit matters.
Who is named?
Who is photographed?
Who is invited to lecture?
Who writes the book?
Who owns the intellectual property?
Who is described as innovative?
These questions should form part of any genuinely decolonial architectural practice.
Otherwise, decolonisation risks becoming another aesthetic trend.
16. The Risk of Romanticising the Vernacular
Once architects become aware of colonial bias, they can swing too far in the opposite direction.
Suddenly everything indigenous becomes authentic.
Everything traditional becomes sustainable.
Everything local becomes good.
That is equally problematic.
Traditional buildings can have serious shortcomings.
They can be difficult to maintain.
Some materials may be vulnerable to changing environmental conditions.
Some spatial arrangements may reflect social inequalities.
Some building systems may not satisfy contemporary accessibility, sanitation or safety requirements.
A serious decolonial architecture cannot simply romanticise the past.
Decolonisation is not nostalgia.
It is the redistribution of authority over how knowledge is interpreted.
The objective is not to declare indigenous architecture superior to European architecture.
It is to make the comparison possible without assuming that one is the universal standard.
17. Toward a Plural Architectural Canon
The real challenge, therefore, is the canon.
Who belongs in architectural history?
What constitutes an architectural movement?
What counts as a theory?
What counts as innovation?
If architecture is understood only through buildings accompanied by drawings, manifestos, publications and named architects, then enormous portions of global architectural history disappear.
A more inclusive architectural history would recognise:
collective authorship
alongside individual authorship.
oral transmission
alongside written theory.
craft knowledge
alongside professional expertise.
maintenance
alongside design.
adaptation
alongside invention.
occupation
alongside construction.
This would radically expand architectural history.
And Africa would not simply be “added” to the existing canon.
The canon itself would have to change.
18. Ghana as a Laboratory of Architectural Modernity
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| The contemporary return to earth construction raises a provocative question: when a material already embedded in African building traditions is reintroduced through professional architectural practice, is it being invented—or rediscovered? |
The country contains:
Asante earth-and-timber architecture;
northern Islamic building traditions;
coastal Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic architecture;
colonial administrative architecture;
tropical modernism;
post-independence modernism;
Soviet-influenced projects;
indigenous construction systems;
informal urbanism;
contemporary high-rise development;
experimental earth architecture;
digitally produced architecture;
and hybrid buildings combining multiple traditions.
These are not separate architectural worlds.
They overlap.
They contradict one another.
They influence one another.
They reveal different versions of Ghanaian modernity.
Research on Ghana's twentieth-century architecture has increasingly moved away from treating the colonial period as the endpoint of the story. Scholarship by Hannah Le Roux, Ola Uduku, Iain Jackson, Viviana d'Auria, Łukasz Stanek and others has helped reveal the complexity of postcolonial modernism, development, housing, infrastructure and technological exchange in Ghana. (Cambridge University Press)
This is important because postcolonial architecture is not simply what came after colonialism.
It is the architecture of negotiating what colonialism left behind.
19. From “Vernacular” to “Architectural Knowledge”
Perhaps the most productive conceptual shift is therefore not from vernacular to another label.
It is from vernacular architecture to architectural knowledge.
Instead of asking:
What style does this building belong to?
we can ask:
What knowledge does this building contain?
What does it know about rain?
What does it know about heat?
What does it know about community?
What does it know about privacy?
What does it know about ritual?
What does it know about labour?
What does it know about material scarcity?
What does it know about maintenance?
What does it know about identity?
Those questions are more generous because they do not assume that architectural knowledge begins with professional architectural education.
They also create opportunities for contemporary architects to learn without simply copying.
20. The Future of Decolonised Architecture
This distinction is essential.
Decolonisation is not a style.
There is no universally decolonial roof form.
No decolonial façade.
No decolonial material palette.
No catalogue of African motifs that automatically makes a building decolonial.
A building covered in Adinkra symbols can still reproduce exploitative labour systems.
A building made entirely from imported materials can still be culturally meaningful.
A technologically advanced building can be deeply rooted in local knowledge.
A modest building can be profoundly colonial in its assumptions.
The question is therefore not simply:
What does the building look like?
It is:
Who produced the knowledge behind it?
Who participated in its making?
Whose knowledge was considered legitimate?
Who benefits from it?
What histories does it acknowledge?
What histories does it erase?
That is a much more demanding definition of decolonisation.
Conclusion: Architecture Beyond the Vernacular
The problem with calling African architecture “vernacular” is not that the word is inaccurate.
It is that the word can become insufficient.
It can compress radically different architectural cultures into a single category.
It can transform living traditions into heritage objects.
It can separate indigenous architecture from modernity.
It can hide collective authorship.
It can make African architecture appear as though it exists outside the professional history of architecture.
And, when used carelessly, it can reproduce an old hierarchy:
Europe produces architecture.
Africa produces vernacular.
That hierarchy is historically indefensible.
Africa has never simply been a recipient of architecture.
It has been a producer of architectural knowledge, a participant in global exchanges, an innovator in materials and construction, a negotiator of modernity, and a site where architectural ideas have been continuously transformed.
The Asante shrine is not merely a mud building.
The Larabanga mosque is not merely a traditional monument.
The coastal mansion is not merely evidence of European influence.
The tropical modernist building is not merely a European idea transplanted into Africa.
And the contemporary African architect is not simply an inheritor of someone else's modernism.
These are parts of a much more complicated history.
The task of decolonising architectural history is therefore not to replace European architectural history with an idealised African alternative.
It is to create a history in which multiple architectural worlds can exist as producers of knowledge rather than as variations from a single centre.
Perhaps then the question should no longer be:
Why is African architecture called vernacular?
Perhaps the more important question is:
What kind of architectural history requires Africa to be called vernacular in the first place?
That question takes us beyond terminology.
It takes us to the architecture of knowledge itself.
And that is where the real decolonial project begins.
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