 to properly welcome you to what is really the first research seminar of summer 2023, which is co-organized with Rick Woodstra, who you will hear from and hear about shortly. So you see that the series that we've organized for the summer is on architecture, which in some sense is a way to step out of our comfort zone a little bit and to think together about the porous boundaries between the arts and the landscapes and spaces that we inhabit. As you know, it's a series of talks and discussions which showcases new research and approaches to architecture and its histories. Really the hope is to create conversations that allow us to think expansively both about art and architecture. And we'll cover a range of different topics over the next five sessions and I encourage you to look at the program and come back to things and I think we'll build conversations from there as well. So the format for today is a little bit different from some of the formats that we followed in the past. We'll have 25 to 30 minutes from the speaker and then 10 minutes from a respondent. In this particular case, Rick Woodstra, who is also the co-organizer of the series, is a respondent but usually we'll have also an external respondent coming in, depending on the topic of the talk. I'll introduce Rick now and then I think just hand over to Rick to sort of take the evening on as well. Just one thing before I introduce Rick. Everyone is really welcome to join us for a drinks reception here after we finish and there will be time for questions from the audience physically present but also online audiences, so feel free to type your questions into the Q&A section of the chat and we'll sort of bring you in and on board. So Rick Woodstra is an assistant professor in architectural history at the University of Amsterdam where she co-directs the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History. She's a historian of modern architecture with a specific interest in architectural design and planning in the British Empire and the global circulation of architectural knowledge and building materials. Before she moved to Amsterdam, she was very close by, at Northeastern University in London and worked as a lever-hume-funded post-doctoral research associate at the University of Liverpool and she got her PhD from MIT in the US. Rick has a lot of publications, I'm not going to go through all of them quite yet, but just mention a co-authored monograph, the United Africa Company, Mercantile Architecture and the West African City, which is to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024 and I know that the topic also relates in some sense to some of the topics we're talking about over the series and today's talk. So over to Rick. Thank you. So thank you, Sria, for that introduction and also thank you for the invitation to co-organize this series here at the Paul Mellon Centre. Tonight, it is my pleasure to introduce Adidoy and Teriba. But first of all, it's a pleasure to see you here tonight, despite the fact that part of the architecture world has, of course, relocated to Venice this week, where the architecture biennial is opening, curated by Leslie Locco, the first curator of African descent and with very excitingly and long overdue an emphasis on architecture in Africa and its diaspora. And in that sense, our subject today on African architecture and performance, particularly in southwest Nigeria, is quite fitting. So I would like to introduce Adidoy and Teriba, an assistant professor of architectural history at Dartmouth University in the United States. Dr. Teriba specializes in the history of architecture and urbanism with a specific focus on West Africa and its diasporas. His teaching and scholarship explore a multitude of subjects, including architecture and placemaking and the ways in which folklore, orality, language, art, dance and music are used as tools, both in an historical sense and in the present to generate an architecture that creates a sense of place. Another subject of research is performance-based ways of designing in Africa and its diaspora, a very exciting and novel subject in architectural history that he will discuss with us tonight and one that fits perfectly in our architecture summer series, in which we aim to highlight new and innovative scholarship within the history of architecture. Our speaker tonight received his PhD in architectural history from Princeton University with a dissertation Afro-Brazilian architecture in southwest Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th century. He's the author of various fascinating articles including an article on orality and permanence, restoring a bongum palace through spoken architectural history in the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and also quite recently, a wonderful essay on a 19th century mosque in Lagos Colony in the book Race and Modern Architecture, a critical history from the Enlightenment to the present. Please join me in welcoming Adedoyin Tariqa. Well, good evening everybody. Riks, thank you for that very generous introduction. Shria, thank you and Riks as well for organizing this. And I see some familiar faces myself and so I'm gladdened and with that I will begin by saying that this is an excerpt of a book I'm working on, my second book project about performance. It was alluded to in my biography about performance and architecture as those two things have been very important in the continent of Africa for generations and also how they linger in its diaspora in the hands of some architects and builders. The book is also going to argue that despite that storied tradition, there's a way that it is marginal when thinking about how architecture is created and designed particularly today. And so this talk is a distillation just testing out some ideas to welcome your questions, criticisms and comments and so with that I will begin. I'm going to invite you to peer beneath a veil into a conversation occurring amongst African architects and professors of architecture that is equally pertinent to the larger discipline of architectural design and the historiography of architecture. Ideas such as identity and performance have been part of this discourse manifesting itself in print speech and in the design practice of some architects. In this talk I hope to show the ways in which design was and is part of a larger holistic enterprise integrating it with other fields such as dance and music. Thus it is my goal to provoke us to think of how architectural history can be harnessed as a living tradition that engages with old forms of interdisciplinary making of places and monuments even as it rethinks what contemporary architectural and urban design could be. I will begin with a survey of recent trends on the continent that explore the interplay between culture, design and architecture. In 2014 the Ghanaian architect Joseph Ose Ado tried to organize a conference that would deal with the challenges and opportunities of creating architecture and other design-related disciplines in Africa in the 21st century. Ado, president of Arche Africa, you see the logo on the upper right hand side and not-for-profit organization was committed to addressing that very issue. Several panels in the conference were to focus on the state of the various design disciplines in the continent. The main event was to be a discussion between Francis Kerry, the Bokinabi architect Sir David Ajay and Kule Adiemi, the Nigerian architect. The conference was to be called African Perspectives, the Lagos Dialogues because its venue was supposed to be in Lagos, Nigeria. In some ways it was a resuscitation of conversations about regionalism and architectural have gone on for a lot of the 20th century. The American architectural critic Lewis Monford is just one example in his description of a Bay region style in San Francisco, California to more recent decades where the contributions of Alexander Sones, Leon Lefevre and Kenneth Frampton were prominent. Unfortunately, the Lagos Dialogues Conference, a kindred spirit to these conversations of regionalism, did not take place for reasons that remain unknown. Nonetheless, the discourse about the relationship between contemporary African cultures and design on the continent continued apace, manifesting itself in different places and times. Ado himself was involved in some of these convening a multidisciplinary social event featuring architects, musicians and other designers within Ghana itself in 2014. The event was called Why Design Matters? In 2021, Arche Africa had a pavilion at the European Cultural Center's Time, Space, Existence exhibition in Venice that ran with the 17th Venice Biennale. In 2020, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Lagos in Nigeria organized multiple Zoom seminars focusing on the relevance of ornaments in the creation of contemporary architecture. One speaker asked whether re-enacting rituals were necessary to create new expressions of architectural ornaments in pluralistic societies where in past errors, artisans had to participate in rituals to be prepared to create architectural forms. Some citizens are atheists, agnostics, while others are devotees of monotheistic and even polytheistic religions. How the speaker queried would ornament on columns and other building elements if people wanted to see ornaments on buildings, be created in a region saturated with the religious and the irreligious alike. At the conference, I urged my colleagues to revisit how older traditions of building in the region were performative to initiate new discussions about the relevance of performance in contemporary architectural design. This paper today then is an elaboration on that point made in the University of Lagos conference focusing on how a type of architectural history not only performative but was used by one monarch to rebuild his palace and how in the hands of some contemporary architects memory, performance, and design intertwined in their design practices. The purpose of illuminating this episode, or these episodes rather, is to make the argument for placing the historiography of architecture and the design disciplines for a plethora of architectural history types including those that are performance-based. Put differently, this presentation will show how one monarch used architectural history as a design tool and how such performative approaches to design come to the fore in contemporary architectural practice. In the mid-1980s, an ailing monarch, Sulu Mon, Baba Yemi, who you see on your left-hand side of the Kingdom of Bongong in southwest Nigeria thought it best to present a paper at a conference in absentia instructing a British scholar, Karin Barber, to deliver the paper on his behalf. Professor Dame Karin Barber is an emeritus professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Birmingham. The paper in question that Karin Barber presented was about the occurrence of oral poems of palaces in southwest Nigerian kingdoms that were at the very least 300 years old and in the case of Baba Yemi's kingdom were used as a tool to reconstruct his own palace. In addition to being the ruler of his kingdom, Baba Yemi was a distinguished scholar. He took his PhD in Yoruba literature, Yoruba, the language in southwest Nigeria from the University of Birmingham in 1962, writing a dissertation on the fall and rise of the Oyo Empire in southwest Nigeria. He had also written about ruins of many kingdoms in the region and collected poems of particular palaces as well. He was part of his area of study. Those poems are known in Yoruba as oriki orile. I will devote the next few minutes to describe what such poems were in part because the word poem does not do justice to the multidisciplinary and multi-sensory nature. The first thing to note is that each southwest Nigerian kingdom and there are several to this day had an oriki orile that was uttered orally by a royal griot. The poem contained the origins of the kingdom, traced the succession of rulers, signified prominent historical episodes in the kingdom's history and without warning praised the builders of the palace. Some of them even described the building elements that the artisan was known for. Additionally, oriki orile were performed in a way that incorporated music and dance. Instruments such as the dundum drum, also known as the talking drum among the Yoruba, accompanied the utterance of the oriki orile. And so what I'm going to do for the next few minutes is actually play, try and reconstruct. As I said, they were performed, the accompaniment of music, different instruments and dance. And I am just starting this research about this living tradition that persists and I'm going to play just some instruments and actually recite some of the, an excerpt of a poem that speaks to a builder, what a builder did on a particular palace that is his palace. And so this will start, the first instrument I want to introduce, it will take a few moments, is the shekare, a rattling sort of instrument. And then I will introduce the dundum drum, just beginning this research, but at times this syncopation was overlaid with an orator who would utter the poetry and that I would do right now with an accompanying English translation. Ido'u agge girebe te foba, which when translated into English means Ido'u, one who creates beautiful carvings for the king, or by the Yoruba title for king. Ido'u refers to the builder, Ido'u is the name of the builder. But ingbe odo, which when translated means he was not only an expert in carving mortars, that is, basis for shungo ritual containers, shungobi, the deity of thunder in southwest Nigeria. Ningbe akbuti, which when translated means he also excelled on carving decorative containers. Ningbe uko, which means in sculpting monumental veranda posts, some of which you see in the middle of the screen. Ningbe ashe, fun uluayye, translated as and in bar reliefs on wooden doors for important persons in the community. I'll allow the music to just play out, but this is just to summarize the point that this is an excerpt from the poem of King Baba Yemi's own palace. And he actually used this in reconstructing his own palace that was destroyed several generations before as different ethnic groups were warring in southwest Nigeria. I'll just allow you to play out. So back to the script, each southwest Nigerian king learned the drumming and dancing that accompanied the utterance of the oriki orille. Rulers in other words participated in this performative history. Suleiman Baba Yemi knew that and took perhaps the unprecedented move of using the oriki orille of his kingdom to rebuild the palace in the 1980s in his own words, immersing himself in the performance-based activities that encompassed the evocation of the poem. Out of that activity came a new palace that you see on your right-hand side that differed from the old one in terms of the use of materials, ornaments and the layout of its plan. The older one was done in Adobe, Adobe building materials. This one relied on concrete blocks. Columns were different. And just to give you a sense in terms of the plan, an older palace was known for its open courtyards. It's a way, in a way, the number, the greater the number of open courtyards, it added to the prestige of the palace, added to the complexity. So it was this spatial way of adding grandeur to these palaces. But also, in addition to that, I'm going to just sort of circle in on a particular detail. You see that circle, that small circle there. That is a detail of a sculpted column, which was very, very popular. More about sculpted columns in the course of this presentation. But I wanted to just indicate where the location of this sculpted column within this older palace scheme. And just to buttress the point of how Baba Yamey's palace, this construction, of a palace with poetry differed. In terms of the picture on your right hand side, gone are the sculpted columns that you see, that you see an example of in the middle. And so there's a way in which his was an interpretation of what you see right here. In many ways, relying upon tradition, this performative history, but being quite liberal in how he created a new palace out of the old palace. And we can return to that that liberality later on. But one of the things I want to highlight is an artisan who I'll introduce next, who was somebody who sculpted the column in the middle that you see. And his name was Arie Ogun. A renowned woodcarver in the region, creating sculpted columns, one of which you see on your left-hand side, far left. The British Museum actually has a number of his works. He also created royal palace doors that you see right here, while belonging, and I'll show you another image of him right here, while belonging to three secret cults that performed rituals. One of my hypotheses is that his participation in rituals inspired the way he even carved a wooden sculpted column. And so one of the points of departure for me that I want to explore is whether the analogies between he had to participate in drumming himself and whether that tempo, whether tempo is generated in drumming, one can bring that into conversation with his tempo of carving the sculpted columns that you see on your right-hand side. And so a question I have for myself is just could the very non-literal and performance of the architectural poetry that Arie Ogun also immersed himself in in service to these palaces that had poems could that have influenced architectural design? I want to show just an isometric view of one of the palaces, and we owe this to the very important work of the Polish architect and historian Domołowski, who wrote an incredible three-volume set on Nigerian traditional architecture. But my purpose for showing this is to also show you a detail that just a detail, just the way that these sculpted columns just really loomed just in these architectural schemes of older palaces. And these were done by Arie Ogun himself. This is another image of a sculpted column that he worked on. Now, such performative art accompanied other palatial architectural forms in the region, whereas Adobe and Wood were the primary building materials in past eras. Afro-Brazilian immigrant artisans created a palatial room in the Palace of the King of Lagos made from brick and stucco. The details shown here show how the Afro-Brazilians appropriated architectural elements they saw in Portuguese-owned buildings in Brazil and inserted them into the Lagos Palace. And just this is, just show you a different, just a blow-up detail just another, just some other stylistic elements that also were part of a larger performative enterprise where song, poetry and all of that were also part of this. And so there's a way, even with the stylistic differences, that performative tradition lingered. And in some ways, just a little bit more about the Afro-Brazilians, these were ex-slaves who, over a 70-year period, migrated from north-eastern Brazil to southwestern Nigeria. This is one of the only pictures we have of an ex-slave master Mason, Lazaro Borges da Silva. This is the subject of my first book project. They created Islamic architecture. You see to your far left, lower left, Tombstone architecture, you see in the middle, but also civic architecture that you see on your right-hand side. Why this is also pertinent to a place like this, the Paul Mellon Centre, is that some of these ex-slaves, on starting to create architecture in southwest Nigeria, were then sent by the Lagos Colony to the Public Works Department to get training in architectural drafting and what have you. Almost an augmentation of the performance-based approaches to design that they were doing. But in addition to creating architecture, the built form in the atmosphere of ritual and performance, that didn't stop with the completion of the building. There's a way in which masquerades, like the Gelede masquerade that you see here, a picture from the 1970s, danced through around and around these buildings as well. So there was a performance-based activity even on the completion of the building. And the Gelede spectacle itself does merge history. It does merge all sorts of things into its performers. Just further, just showing the ways that the built form, so to say, and these performative activities were just augmented together. And so this is to say that hence King Baba Yamit, who'd go back to the monarch, was only the latest in a line, at least in southwest Nigeria, of monarchs who appropriated other construction technologies and architectural styles even while re-enacting the palace's oral architectural histories in performance. More recently, Sir David Ajaye used the top part of one of Ariao Goons' columns as the basis for the American Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. Additionally, for more than two decades, David and his brother, Peter, have created a non-linear architectural design process where David gives Peter conceptual sketches of designs and Peter, in turn, composes a soundtrack. Peter then gives the composition to David who completes his design. This is all to say that the tradition of using performance to inspire design continues in the brother's collaboration. In the year 2016, Peter released a vinyl record called Dialogues, Music for Architecture, that featured ten tracks, ten soundtracks that Peter composed for David's buildings and pavilions. I'm going to play one of those soundtracks and this being the 30th year anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London. Stephen Lawrence Day was April the 22nd. He was a young man who was an aspiring architect and David Peter and Chris O'Feeley collaborated on the building that you see on your right-hand side. What I'm going to play right now is the soundtrack called Reflections on a Golden Dream that Peter composed for the building and in the memory of Stephen Lawrence. It is not lost on me that these case studies were created either in Britain or in what used to be a former British colony where designing architecture through joints has a rich history. The performative ways of designing I have shown today at times complemented drawings in some cases. There is no doubt however that architectural design through joints has become the de facto way of architectural practice and there is a case to be made that the British Empire influenced the way that architectural drawings have become the, became the dominant way in its colonies even in its former colonies. The instance of the efforts of King Baba Yamut to preserve and embodied architectural history that relies on a plethora of artistic genres and to use that to create a new palace is an instance of history designing architecture in my estimation. The Ajayi brothers use of the traumatic event of Stephen Lawrence's murder is another instance. These episodes indicate the continued practices of performatively creating spaces in Africa and it's diaspora and urges to expand a notion of what architectural history is and to rethink how the history of architecture and the design disciplines can be taught. Perhaps such instances will allow us to cast a fresh set of eyes on the way that the built environment and space is an inherently performative symphony of different art forms and media moving to different rhythms and in the way that the British sociologist Patrick Gettys for instance saw as a particular drama. Thank you very much for your attention. First of all, thank you so much for this wonderfully rich and engaging talk. It's not an easy task as a respondent to or to act as a respondent to a talk that has so many ideas packed into it but I'll give it a try and what I would like to do tonight is to pick up on three particularly interesting threads within the talk connected to three separate questions although of course I have some more and I'm sure all of you do. Nearly 50 years ago in 1974 architectural historian Labelle Proussin author of several wonderful books on architecture in northern Ghana and a former staff member of KNUST in Kumasi, Ghana stated that and here I quote her until recently, until quite recently the Western world accorded no place in its architectural schema to Africa with the exception of Egypt. The subject of African architecture was and indeed still is among many not considered worthy of recognition and quote. Fortunately much has changed in 50 years. If this year's Venice Biennials shows as exciting examples of present-day architectural practice across the continent in glimpses of an African future then our talk tonight has demonstrated that the field of architectural history is indeed thriving. Perhaps one of the most fascinating ideas we've heard about tonight is the way in which architectural construction in southwest Nigeria was and indeed still is deeply embedded in a multi-sensory experience of sound, music and ritual. You've taken us along to Nigeria to show us the example of King Babayemi in the 1980s to Palace that was redesigned based on oral poems. And in doing so I couldn't help thinking about what your talk has also made abundantly clear is the way in which most scholarship on modern architecture has been devoid of the senses or rather I would argue has strongly stressed one of those senses our sight, our vision. Meanwhile, other senses sound, music, smell or even touch are mostly absent in our consideration of architectural form. Perhaps with some exceptions of course one could think of for example the appearance of phenomenology in the 1970s and the work of someone like Christian Norbeck-Schultz comes to mind here. But in other words, what you've sketched out for us tonight is not only the lack of consideration for multi-sensory experiences in architectural history, but also the ways in which our methods, our toolkits still primarily focused on visual and textual analysis isn't quite equipped to deal with issues such as sound and music. And the issue of methodology leads me to the first point I wanted to pick up on and that is the matter of evidence. One of the difficulties of doing this kind of work, I imagine, is the notion of evidence both in terms of locating evidence but also what serves as evidence. And here I would like to invoke a recent essay by Ita Hana Saeem Wase professor of architectural history at Brown University, also with a focus on Africa and its diaspora. She reiterated that in a field that still heavily relies on textual sources, and here I quote her again, evidence is long been considered one of the greatest challenges for historians of Sub-Saharan Africa. Though it is becoming increasingly clear that Africa had many long, rich and diverse traditions of writing from ancient times to the present that have been largely unacknowledged, most people in Sub-Saharan Africa did not adopt phonetic writing systems until the late 19th century, end quote. The presence of oral traditions, however, poses distinct challenges to a field that they still focused on textual evidence. This problem, she adds, is further exacerbated when studying the built environment. Many structures in Sub-Saharan Africa, as we know, have not survived because of the choice of materials like Adobe, which you mentioned, or if they have, have been altered in the process of maintenance. While tonight's talk has showed a convincing way to overcome some of these issues, using oral recordings to do research on the built environment, some of the same difficulties still remain. What then, I wonder, counts as evidence here, perhaps in this specific project, but also more broadly, thinking about your book project. How have you dealt with some of these problems related to evidence? The second point I would like to pick up on is what you compellingly described as history designing architecture, or the idea that history, in this instance, in the shape of an architectural poem, could shape architectural design. In a broader sense, this ties into an ongoing discussion in many architecture and design schools about the relevance of history and design education. Many of us who teach or have taught in architecture schools know that it's often difficult to anchor design education history, or to prove the relevance of history for the education of architects. And here, I'd like to turn briefly to a recent interview with Leslie Locco, architect, former head of the Johannesburg Graduate School of Architecture, and of course curator of this year's Venice Biennial. It's again present. In an interview with Locco, published in a recent and very evocative issue of Journal of Architectural Education on Critical Architectural Pedagogy, she discussed the importance, but also the difficulties associated with the importance of the oral tradition in Africa, and African architectural education. One example of this interview is that in architecture schools in Africa, on the continent, still to heavily rely on the written word, while not sufficiently incorporating oral traditions. One interesting solution she proposed at the Graduate School of Architecture in Johannesburg, which she also led for several years, was to give students the option of doing a performance instead of a written dissertation. My question then to you is how do you envision performance, or participatory and embodied ways of learning to play a role in design education in a more practical sense? Do you see this as a critical or perhaps even decolonial pedagogy? And I somewhat hesitate to use the word here because it's so frequently used these days. Yet thinking about performance, also the ephemeral nature of performance comes to mind, which perhaps also makes it challenging as a tool for education and learning. Thirdly, and finally, I would like us to briefly move from methodology to the architectural form itself, to the palace of Baba Emi. We heard about a process of interpretation and in a way also of translation from sound into architectural form and space. And what struck me was your description of Baba Emi's translation as a liberal interpretation of the architectural poem. And I think this prompts the question of the broader cultural significance of the redesign of the palace, in appropriating the poem and conflating the past with the present, what is perhaps the political dimension of his interpretation and the political dimension of these incredible ornaments you've showed us. And with these three points, first the notion of evidence in West African architectural history, the role of performance in architectural design education and finally the political dimensions of using performance for redesign. I would like to hand it back to you, Adid Oyan, and ask you to join me now in the front and perhaps give a response to maybe one or more of these points if you'd like before we turn it over to the audience, of course. Rick, thank you for your very generous and probing just summary but also just the questions you have asked. I'll attempt to do justice to some of these questions. I think if I were to talk about evidence, what counts as evidence and how I have dealt with that, it's a great question and because this project is ongoing, I'm just really at the beginning but there's a way in which your question about performance and the place of performance in architectural education is related to this question about evidence. Let me try and attempt to respond to the latter, how I have dealt with the notion of evidence. So part of what there's a way in which these... So the first, let me say this, the first time I heard of such a tradition was acquiring the report that King Baba Yami himself wrote, a list in different palaces, poems of palaces, poetry. And that point is significant because it was transcribed. I didn't hear these poems in their original contexts and part of what I propose, part of the way I propose to deal with this and this is where your discussion of ephemerality is also important. I am afraid that going to southwest Nigeria and going to some of these kingdoms, there may not be a lot of people who are still performing this poetry in its multi-disciplinary context. So the short answer is that because I first encountered this through a textual transcription, it remains to be seen what challenges I'm going to see. So it's a legitimate question that I can't answer. I realize the risk of that. But I think there's something there. I think what I would say, though, is how important the performative part of this tradition is that this tradition of oral poetry or just poetry of palaces was performed. I want to emphasize that and to really begin to try and engage with that tradition. One has to go there. So there's a sense that one has to go there. And so that is how I would respond to the question of how I have dealt with it in terms of evidence. It's also a very good question. Part of why I find Baba Yemmi very interesting is, again, to go back to a point about the liberal. It was almost as if part of the purpose of his performance of the poetry was to create a sonic and performative atmosphere where the new building could be built. And it was almost not as important what type of building was built. What was probably more important was just creating the atmosphere. So merely performing, not merely, but performing, you know, evoking the poetry within a ritualistic context created, and I don't want to use the word adequate, but created an ideal atmosphere where this was created. So the factual, where I'm going with this, is that the factual, you know, whether the poetry, in other words... So just give me a perfect example. The excerpt of that poetry that I read referred to an Edo who was the builder. And when he rebuilt the palace again, Edo was not involved. And so it's almost as if Edo became a model, an idea, right, that needed to be performed in order for his liberal interpretation of what that palace would be. So there's a way in which the question of what constitutes evidence, it's the sonic atmosphere. It's that as opposed to some faithful, right, you know, faithful interpretation of the poetry, you know, the use of the people, you know, the original people. So there's a lot of liberality here. And so that would be my response to a question of what is evidence. I think the most important thing is the ephemerality. The most important thing is the fact that it's performed. So that would be my response. I'm grappling with these, but this is what comes to mind. It's related to what you said about performance, the place of performance in architectural education. I would say that as wonderful as studios are, I think there can be alternative spaces where architecture can be generated in a way that allows for performance, allows for, you know, just a sense of community. You know, a lot of these activities are communal. And I'm also thinking about just radical things like the American Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio. And the way that, you know, students of that Rural Studio go into communities. They linger, they play on sports teams. They get to know the clients and they build these, they build buildings together. Why not adapt part of that, you know, a long-term strategy in thinking of a studio that has, you know, just, it's longer than the normal studio and creating avenues where, for instance, just taking a place like Southwest Nigeria, having students embed themselves in these communities where these are still performed and then just creating a studio around that, right, where they have proximity to these performances. That would be my response as I'm dealing with these questions and I realize I have to give these questions much more thought. But the political, if I may, the political question, it's an interesting one because I think one response to that would be that it brings up a question of style and fidelity to a particular style. And so with the column that I showed by Arie Ogun, there's a way in which the history, especially the 20th century, the history of architecture in Southwest Nigeria as opposed to, well, maybe not as opposed to others, but there's a way in which there is a liberal take on style. There isn't a sense of canonization as such, right, or fidelity to a particular style. So there is a liberality to how certain things are, certain styles are used and deployed and what have you, and that includes architectural form. And so there is a political dimension to that. That I have to think about, but I think you can't divorce that from this liberality to the question of style and how that is deployed. So I would just say that just right now, but I really thank you for these. I would grapple with them some more, but that would be my response to these three things right now. So thank you. Well, thank you for answering all three of them. That's really good. I think especially your first, I don't know if this is working, but I think especially what you said about the ephemerality of this tradition and the ways in which it changes as well is very interesting, but also challenging in scholarship that is, in a world of scholarship, that's so much focused on replicability and permanence. Right, yeah. But let's open it up to questions from the audience. Hi, thanks a lot for that. That was great. I had a question about the poem and the way in which the poem seems on the face of it to make carving into a performance. The poem isn't about carving. Carving, as such. It's about carving. And so I wonder if that can lead into speculative thoughts. And I think speculation here is actually more important in a sense than a kind of evidence-based way of interpreting. I think speculation really is what this makes us do. I actually think speculation is more important, actually. But speculating about the idea that the making is the performance, what happens then to the idea of performance around the finished column, a finished column, such as the one you showed, and the fact that that column is in a particular place beside an open courtyard, what happens then in moving from carving as an act to a carving? It's a good question. And this is something I have to give much thought to. I mean, the few times granted through documentaries, the few times I have witnessed carvers, chip away, so to say, and carve and engage with different types of work. There is definitely a rhythm. There's a performative dimension. And I have to think about this a little bit more. So there's the performance of that making, that carving as you stressed that. So there is that. To the latter part, what happens, to the latter part of your question of what happens, depending on the subject matter of the sculpted column itself, sometimes what is depicted is a king's horseman that has a storied history in southwest Nigeria. The playwright Waleishu Inka wrote, and the king's horseman really highlighting the importance of the king's horseman. The king's horseman occupies a very important place in southwest Nigeria. And so there's a way in which that is communicated, right, in that courtyard, just the ideal and the importance of that. And so it continues a function as a finished product. It's not even really finished in a sense, it's venerated and what have you. But also, especially women who have gone past the childbirth, so women of a certain age, for instance, are venerated. They are very powerful in South, historically have been very powerful in southwest Nigeria. They support the kings in a sense. And there are a lot of these sculpted columns that are depictions of those women as well. So these columns, even after the performative part of the carving has taken place, they are intentionally put around the courtyard precisely because of their status. So there's that dimension to... And in some cases, I mean, with wood sculptures in general, the sculptures of twins, twins loom very large in southwest Nigeria as well, those are fed, you know, twin Ibeji. They are known as Ibeji. They are closed, they are fed, right? So there's a way, in terms of performance, it's a great question. There's a way in which with some of these sculpted columns, the carving is just the end of one performance and there's another type of performance as well. Hi, thank you for your really interesting presentation. I mean, I'm just sort of thinking about the actual word, the word performance. I mean, within the English language, it has the word form in it. And, you know, the prefix per is for forming. So that might be something useful for you to sort of help frame your thinking as well. Obviously, you know, it's in the English language and other languages have different kind of words. But it would, you know, obviously you're forming something, you know, and the performance itself, the act, you know, as an act has a kind of a shape. It has a front. It has, you know, I mean, any dancer will say, no, dancing has, you know, I mean, the ballet always has a front. You know, there's a place where you're viewing it and it has a form. And perhaps the humans is a kind of an architectural thing as well within the performance. Yeah. I don't know. That's just my idea. Thank you. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Hello. Okay, thank you. Thank you for the wonderful lecture. So whilst listening to you, I was thinking about, so I trained originally as an architect in Ghana and I remember back in architecture school being very interested in poetry and architecture grappling with poems like Kofi Aouna's Rediscovery. And then listening to you, I'm thinking, where was this, you know, when I was back there, you know, I could have done with this because at the time I had to rely a lot on, you know, I remember Poetics of Architecture by Greek architect Antonia Antoniades. And so I guess the question is, how do you see this work in a sense going back to a place like Nigeria or to West Africa or to Ghana and sort of expanding the canon? Because again, back then there was a lot of reliance on the Western canon and if you were interested in some of these topics, you sort of had to come back to that. And yet I see there's a lot of rich history here that could enrich the canon, expand it. And the second question would be based on your research. What is your reading of, let's say, the contemporary West African architectural scene, especially as it relates to its own history and how that history is appropriated or ignored or, you know, used if at all? Okay, thank you very much. Two great questions. So the first question about just the curriculum and expanding the curriculum, so I will try to answer that by just citing an example, just a few examples in Nigeria. There was a sort of revolution in the curriculum of art practice where, you know, certain students, Nigerian students demanded that Nigerian art be taught, that they were only taught, you know, they were only taught just from the Western canon. So to say, that has been less successful. There was, you know, there was a moment, and Lukach here has talked about that a little bit. There was a moment, especially in this area, a school of architecture, where something, you know, where there was this demand for a broader, you know, a broader architectural history offering. It hasn't had, you know, just, even just decades after that, it didn't go anywhere. I studied architecture in Nigeria in the 90s, and there were no offerings whatsoever, and I can count the number of schools of architecture in Nigeria, where there were no offerings on Nigerian architecture at all. And so I don't think much has changed in that regard. So the things that were instilled into art history curricula in Nigeria, that didn't follow in architecture schools to what I know. It may very well be the case now. I doubt it, but it may very well be the case now. So that, so, and that is interesting. Why that has been the case is quite interesting. I would allude that to, at least it was the case when I was an undergraduate student, just this desire to quote unquote catch up with the West and just to be very fluent in modernist architectural forms in the West. That was what, you know, that was the goal of many, many students. So there's something there that's worth talking about. Your question about just contemporary, you know, West African architectural practice. In the conference, the University of Lagos conference that I cited, there was more a desire to appropriate semiotics and forms, you know, architectural forms of historical architectural Nigeria as opposed to the question of ritual and the place of ritual in all of that in generating and being a sort of atmosphere, performative atmosphere. My sense is that with, at least, I can only speak to Nigeria, I can't speak to Ghana as much, but there is this move, right? There is a growing critical mass of people who are interested in the question of, you know, semiotics and what have you. The performative part less so and it was what I was trying to provoke in the conference at the University of Lagos. In fact, there was somebody who taught theater and one of the people, the three pictures I showed including myself, the person in the middle was a professor of drama, so it was heartening to see him there, but I would say he was in the margins, so to say, and so there is this desire to use ornament, whatever one defines that, as a rallying point to create, you know, contemporary West African architecture, but it's at face value in my humble opinion and it does not involve just the context, the ritualistic, the performative context, so that's what I would say, and I don't know how it is in Ghana. Sorry, thanks so much for the talk. I wanted to ask you about, in your presentation, you present two main performative spaces, one of the David and Jay, one of the Palace, and I wanted to ask you about the different approximations that you take to one or the other, your own performative self in that, which is quite distinct. I had some speculations why that was, but I'd rather ask you before. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there is the... That's interesting. There is one of the ways, maybe I will attempt to do justice to this question this way. One of the ways that I connected these two case studies together was the Ajayi's use of Areogun, the artisan, you know, his knowledge, of the artisan's work, and as I said, it's generated, it became the impetus for the Smithsonian design, and so there's that direct, right, connection. Now, you are right to allude to the ways that they are, they are different ways of performing, but David's knowledge of, he's done a documentary on the urban built environment in Africa. His knowledge of different architectural traditions in Africa is vast, he's written books, he's written at least one book on that, and the idea of performance has been very, very important to him. In talking with his brother, they lived in Saudi Arabia and would wake up to the, just the wisdoms, you know, call to prayer, Islam and what have you, so there's a way in which, in the biography of somebody like, well, the two Ajayi brothers, you know, just performance and sound has been a huge part of just their, you know, their lives just growing up, and so I would say that the palace itself and that oral history of the palace and the performance, nature of that palace, as I tried to demonstrate, was a multidisciplinary atmosphere that I think is a little bit akin to the kind of atmosphere that the Ajayi brothers were creating, where in both these case studies, the built form was not the only thing, it was part of a larger complex, right, of different artistic genres, and so I guess my, my positionality, for lack of a better phrase, my position vis-a-vis these things is just appreciated how in these two cases, they are these examples of placemaking that are multi-disciplinary, a multi-sensory, you know, and with the Ajayi brothers and Chris Ophelia as well, who I also have to mention, the Stephen Lawrence Center is this amalgam, right, of music, you know, I didn't mention this, but Ophelia did the stained glass windows at the Lawrence Center. It's, in both cases, there are these, there are these holistic enterprises, holistic attempts at making a sense of place, right, and so that as, as a scholar looking at these, that's how I was able to just connect these two together, that's the common thread for me, you know, just running through these two. I think we have time for one last quick question. Thank you. That was great. I was really intrigued by this statement, which I believe came from the conference of the University of Lagos about this close relationship with an ornament and rituals, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that, because what is striking to me the most specific statement than the statement about the relationship between architecture and rituals, right, and my kind of follow-up question, or perhaps a counter-question, is to what extent the category of an ornament as opposed to something else, to what extent the category of an ornament is useful for the material that you are discussing? Let me attempt to the question of ornament and ritual. At least historically, as it was understood, there was a way in which, whether it's in building elements, it's actually more so with columns and what have you. There's a way in which those building elements were the culmination, but also a very concrete part of what was otherwise, in some cases, much more ephemeral, if that makes sense. That in other words, whether it's with evoking poetry, plain drums that had a temporal, that had just a sense of time. There was a way in which ornaments considered a certain way, and by that I'm referring to the wooden columns in particular. Of course, you know, ornaments abound in a variety of ways. That was something that manifested itself in a way that had a different kind of duration than say, you know, the authoring of poetry, the dancing, and the drumming. And so ritual, the way that ritual and the ornament, the Christian ornament was part of the ritual. So the way I would respond to that is that the ornament of wooden columns was almost a different physical manifestation of what was also a holistic process. But if one were to think of ritual in terms of the music and the poetry alone, there's a way in which the sculpted columns were part, they were, again, sounding like a broken record, but they were this, I don't want to say more concrete, but they were just a different kind of manifestation. That would be how I would respond to that. But what was the, forgive me, what was the second part of what you were saying? To what extent the category of ornament is a useful category of distinction? It's a good question, and I'm thinking through this, and I'm not sure that I can actually distinguish. Yeah, I mean, the question is making me think of how people have defined ornaments, and how people have defined ritual, how people have defined architecture. I mean, I think this question is forcing me to actually really interrogate these, because I think as you, I know it's a leading question, but I think as you are pushing me to think about these, there are ways that these, the boundaries, the false boundaries or whatever, could be, you know, just problematized and blurred even more. So I'll have to think about this more. I hadn't really thought about that. And the reality too is that there isn't a Yoruba equivalent of ornament as such, right? And I think I am projecting these terms right onto this, right? There isn't a Yoruba word for ritual as such, right? And even architecture as such, there isn't a term for that. You know, the closest, there are terms, there's a term for a palace, right? There's a term for that. There's a term for home, right? And usually, it encompasses the poetry, it encompasses, you know, just the features. So no, you are right to push me and to really make me again just look at these terms. How am I deploying these terms? Are there maybe something there that I need to just think through a little bit more? So thank you very much. Thank you. I actually think we have time for one more question. Yeah, we have a question from our online audiences. We have a couple of comments. So just to kind of, for those online, we'll pass these on to Ada Doyne to look at, maybe respond by email, just for him to know. There's a question that I think you've already answered in many ways, but I'll sort of ask it anyway. This is from Dayemi Akande, who asks in the Babayemi example, once he's a significant departure from the early style, how much of the old was he able to represent in the new palace, considering that he relied on history, archaeology and folklore as primary sources for his reproduction? I know you've talked about it in your response, Derrickst. And I was wondering also if you could tell us when the new palace was sort of inaugurated and built? Yes, it was in the 1980s. Okay. It was built in the 1980s. And my sense is that the Babayemi was very much a product of the 20th century, the latter half of the 20th century, and had no qualms about just employing, in a very liberal fashion, different elements of, you know, different stylistic elements of architecture. And it speaks to very much his place in history. So that's what I would say, that he had no qualms about that. And that the atmosphere of the performance was more important to him than a literal translation, a literal depiction of stylistic elements from the early part of the 20th century or the 19th century. Yeah. Thank you. I really just also want to say a big thank you to both you and Derrickst for the talk and the conversation tonight. And I know I have quite a few questions that I'm holding back on, and I know quite a few of you in the audience will as well, but this isn't really finished. We can sort of move to the next room and continue our conversations. And thanks to all those online as well for joining us. So, thank you.