Black Rhino Academy Primary and Secondary Boarding School

By Caterina Testa - 27 April 2018

Accelerated urbanization is one of the dominant features of our century. The approach adopted by many of the world’s megacities to the similar problems arising as a result, whatever their latitude, are often very similar too. However, cities in developing countries where scant resources demand optimized use, have frequently come up with solutions that could be applied on a wider scale. With offices in Amsterdam and Lagos, Nlé is not so much an architecture practice as a multidisciplinary research and experimentation center looking across the board at how to provide architectural consistency to the cities and communities of the developing world, adopting a modus operandi transferable to other contexts. “Nlé” means “at home” in Yoruba, the language of the first African population to become urbanized in the 11th Century and subsequently develop a network of cities linked by trade and with a highly sophisticated system of government. For the Yoruba people, the term “home” implies much more than a mere house. It indicates everything that makes up a community and everyday collective life, its public spaces and all those numerous phenomena and relations that make the rapidly developing regions of the world so intensely complex. While rapid urbanization and globalization have swept away centuries-old social relations and systems, the inhabitants of these new megacities have developed innovative and economically viable ways of occupying spaces, appropriating materials and infrastructure with extraordinary efficiency and ingenuity despite their meager means. The architects, designers, urbanists and researchers at Nlé have taken their cue from these ingenious solutions to explore projects blending global ideas and local construction techniques, innovative technology and local resources and skills. A combination of traditional settlement systems, local building techniques and contemporary technologies and...