 Hi, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Dean's lecture series today with our guest speaker, Miriam Kamara. Before we get started, I'd just like to give a land acknowledgement. Though we are dispersed virtually today, we gather in Lenapehoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors, and future generations, and acknowledging as a school that Columbia, like New York City and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples. GSEP is committed to addressing the deep history of erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment generally, and in the Western tradition of architectural education specifically. With this, GSEP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring Indigenous knowledge in its curriculum. I'd also like to further acknowledge that we're pleased that this lecture has been made possible by the John F. Forster 1964 fund. The fund was created in memory of John Forster, who received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Columbia in 1964. Mr. Forster went on to become a practicing architect working on a variety of architectural and interior design projects throughout New York City and in the greater New York metropolitan area. He was an active member of the AIA New York chapter. This fund honors his experience at GSEP, during which he benefited enormously from the opportunity to engage and interact with some of the greatest architects of his time. The fund hopes to inspire and continue these important interactions between generations of architects. Through the generation of the Forster family, we are pleased to have Miriam Kamara offer an insight, an insightful lecture this afternoon, and also to participate in the Core 3 Housing Studio tomorrow morning. So now, for our guest speaker. Miriam Kamara is an architect from Niger who studied architecture at the University of Washington. In 2013, she co-founded the architectural collective United for Design, alongside Yassi Esmali and Elizabeth Golden and Peter Strader. The collective worked on projects in the United States, Afghanistan and Niger. In 2000, designed by United for Design was awarded an American Institute of Architect Seattle Award and the Architects Magazine 2017 R&D Award for Innovation. Hikma Religious and Secular Complex, designed by Kamara and Yassi Esmali, won the 2017 Gold Lafarge Hulkem Award for Africa and the Middle East, and the 2018 Silver Global Lafarge Hulkem Award for sustainable architecture. In 2014, Kamara founded Atelier Masomi, an architecture and research practice with offices in Niger's capital of Miami. The firm tackles public, cultural, residential, commercial and urban design projects. Kamara believes that architects have an important role to play in creating spaces that have the power to elevate, dignify and provide people with a better quality of life. Other projects include the Dandanji Regional Market, which was shortlisted for the Dazeen Awards in 2019. Upcoming projects include an office building in Niami as well as the Niami Cultural Center, which Kamara designed under the mentorship of Sir David Ajay as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative. Also in 2019, Kamara was a laureate of the Prince Claus Award. She was a 2019 Royal Academy of Arts Dorfman Awards finalist as well. Last year, the New York Times named her as one of the 15 creative women of our time. She was the head of the jury for the Middle East Africa, for the Middle East Africa at the Lafarge Hulkem Awards and the Royal Institute of Canada named her as one of their 2020 honorary fellows. Please join me this afternoon in welcoming to GSAP, Maryam Kamara. Thank you so much, Mary. This was such an amazing introduction. It's such an honor to be here. I've been looking forward to this lecture for quite some time, actually, so it feels a long way coming. Last time I gave a lecture at Columbia, it was a bit shorter, so I've been looking for the opportunity to have a longer discussion. Thank you. I was really interested in talking about, you know, our work when it comes to memory and how both as a firm and for me as a practitioner, I really use architecture as a way of moving into memories, collected memories, individual ones and using memory as a blueprint for architecture, which I'm not sure if that's a very popular notion considering the fact that we've been largely taught to view architecture as some kind of tabular as a exercise, especially modernism where it was kind of assumed that we're supposed to kind of invent everything even though we never do, but that seems to be always the after it. But I just really wanted to talk about this issue of memory, particularly because it seems that what progress is really important, and I would say even vital obviously, I've always wondered if it means that we've kind of relegated over the 20th century memory to museums as something that people can really encounter in these museums that are receptacles now of the whole world's memory. And I'm not going to get into all of the issues surrounding museums and all of the collective memories of the world that are in there, but it's just been kind of nagging at me that the true power of memory as we've encountered it through our practice is really what it teaches us, the power that it has to teach us fundamental truth about ourselves, about our environment, but also how it provides us with crucial keys and clues for how to evolve and how to go forward and build a form of momentum really. This has been an essential, has been essentially the approach of the practice that we've developed in Niger as a firm over the years, whether it will work on projects in West Africa or elsewhere now. This image, for example, is of the market of Dandaji in Niger, as it was roughly five years ago, a project that we worked on. It was a weekly market that only operated on Fridays. And the idea was to create a new market that would eventually operate daily after a transition period in order to help the local market and market economy flourish in some sense. And one thing that caught our eye immediately was how it was organized around this tree that was a local fixture in the village. And many said that that tree had probably been there for over a century and it was just really this marker for all of the inhabitants of Dandaji. And as we were walking through, we just, you know, took notes of these styles that were very simple and straightforward with an architecture made of mud. The walls were very, you know, just linear with a flat patch roof. And those, and that, you know, those thin patch roofs, you know, had the advantage of offering immediate ventilation, but the roofs themselves were a challenge because they needed to be changed all the time. The patch doesn't really hold up to rainy seasons, you know, and strong winds. But nevertheless, the market had this model for quite a few decades, you know, at that point. And it was very much in keeping with traditional market architecture going back centuries in the region. So there was something very compelling about it. And so when it came to designing the project, it was evident to me that there was very little value really in overhauling the way things were already done. Rather, I was much more interested in how to incentive and make it more functional based on what we had observed in the daily tasks of the market goers and logistics behind actually what they needed to do and accomplish and how they brought their way, their layers, how they displayed everything, how they packed everything up, how they secured their goods. And so we, we devised these, you know, we used the same language, you know, with these kind of simple tear down walls, but it also devised, you know, these more durable shading systems that also foster ventilation, you know, again, taking our cue from the patch roofs. But it also helped cool down the temperature at ground level by using heating up the metal naturally to kind of help suck up hot air that would be right below. So in the end, the result was that we keep, we kept the memory of the original market using a similar architecture language with the earthquakes. And it was important for us that the people felt comfortable in the new market while still making it, you know, a modern proposition, you know, keeping traditional materials where it made sense and introducing new approaches were needed. So one thing that we noticed on Market Opening Day, which this image shows, was that the sellers found their marks immediately, which was very, you know, rewarding. But it was also really interesting to see how they started using this new infrastructure in even newer ways because they saw opportunities, you know, either because of shared instructors, or because of the way we partitioned the spaces and created, you know, places for them to park the motorcycles or, you know, store their goods. They started using it in new and inventive ways, actually, because we have provided additional spaces now for them to explore and do more with. But ultimately, the crucial aspect of the project was the fact that we provided an open air space market, instead of an enclosed shed, you know, with stalls, you know, inside of it, which is a lot of times what we tend to go towards when we're trying to do more contemporary markets in Africa. And this means that because it was open space, it could be, it could operate as a public space and even became a playground actually for the school next door. And these open spaces just like the stalls themselves were something that the population immediately co-opted. And there was kind of this fundamental understanding of how to use it and also how to transform it and co-opt it. And so the results, you know, at the end of the day was just this market that kept what is familiar, but pushed the expression forward. You know, and we've kind of explored this, you know, over and over again, while, you know, all the typologies of the projects that we've worked on, you know, during our explorations of the local context in Indonesia. And one thing that one cannot miss, you know, if anybody, you know, has ever been here or a country like this one is the amount of blank walls that one encounters, which is a direct response to the climate. So this picture was taken in the old town of Zender in Indonesia, which has traditional architecture in this traditional quarter that is intact and has been there for a few centuries. And we've learned a great deal from these strategies aimed at creating shade but also avoiding openings, you know, on the street side in order to avoid attracting heat and direct sunlight. And so these are principles that we've used for many projects including, you know, more commercial projects, you know, in this case for this office building project we have currently under construction in Indonesia where we were interested in embodying the climatic principles that we learned vertically by, you know, first breaking up the volume, trying to provide ways in which, you know, we can create zones of ventilation, how we can actually allow cross ventilation also about breaking it up a bit more, how we can be a bit more, you know, aware of obviously, you know, how the sun moves around the building, how we can start, you know, seeing what that means for a building such as this one and start to carve it to shield where we need shielding and to provide openings along the sides and the facade where we have openings and actually only placing openings where we know we already have shade present to help mitigate installation and decrease energy consumption. And obviously it was also about acknowledging, this is kind of one of the images of a few months ago of the project under construction, acknowledging that part of the memory, you know, of the place is also in its material, you know, in this case we're using Earth which will make this project one of the luxury projects in the region made out of raw earth, a hybrid system, you know, using concrete structure and the earth bricks as filling. It was uniquely appropriate in the sense that, you know, it has an economic advantage, you know, so for clients, this is very interesting because it brings down the construction costs by close to 20% rather than using cement, it introduces significant reduction in energy consumption, which is a big deal when you think about an office building that consumes a lot of energy that produces a lot of heat, while it's trying to also shield itself from the ambient heat. So the project will complete construction next year, but it has been an incredible testing ground that allowed us to start exploring how the architecture memories of a place can take fundamentally different forms to adapt to the new technologies of today, so to say. So similarly, we had the opportunity to develop a design for a mosque and library that constituted a community center in Dandaji, the same place we make the market. We didn't necessarily go and look to mosque typologies in the Middle East for precedence. In Islam, there is no prescribed typology for its places of worship, which we considered as a fantastic opportunity. So the first step was to look to pre-colonial cities like Kanol, which is shown here, or Zaria in Nigeria, which shared the same cultural makeup as the village of Dandaji where we were working and where the project was cited. These zones, these cities and this village were actually part of the same house and kingdom before Europe, the European arbitrarily, I mean, before Europe arbitrarily kind of partitioned Africa. So a typology through our research that immediately jumped out was definitely not what we normally see in the Middle East. There was often several volumes in the mosque that we noticed in these other pre-colonial house towns. There were these, you know, these entrance gates that kept repeating themselves and that's sort of as transition zones and as ablution stations for cleansing rituals before prayer. And this is something that we immediately jumped at and we reintroduced in the project as in a way kind of the perfect transition zone before proceeding to the mosque proper. But going back further, as we were investigating the history of the mosque prototype and the mosque program more specifically, we learned also of some of the earlier ways in which mosques were done, you know, as far back as the 9th century, where actually mosques were actually knowledge centers in places like Baghdad, where they often went hand in hand with libraries, with schools and research centers, teaming with scholars from all over the world actually who came and taught and learned in research. And because the project involves taking an existing traditional building, which you can see on the left hand side here, renovating it and adapting it into for a new use. And we use that model called Bayat al-Hikmah or House of Wisdom to turn the project into a community center that has both a mosque but also a library, classrooms, and workshop spaces for the community. And so, you know, I think from this project, tapping into the memory of the Islamic culture itself rather than just kind of taking the form of what we see as Islamic architecture, quote, unquote, today, allowed us to bring back a topology that is directly relevant to, you know, to our times in the context of growing tensions that we experienced at certainly in the share between sacred knowledge and religious practice. When one considers that geographically speaking, if one looks at a map, we're surrounded by, you know, Libya and Algeria to the north, to the east, northern Nigeria that has issues with Boko Haram to the south, and Mali that has issues with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda offshoots to the west. But ultimately, while developing this project, as we're grappling with all of these, you know, religious and social and, you know, political aspects, we were also developing a project that was about understanding the memory of a place, as it's being embedded in the people who kind of carry the knowledge within them and pass it down. And harnessing that knowledge has been one of the most important aspects of the project, but also of our practice, honestly. We approached traditional Masons to have them bring the Adobe building that I was pointing to earlier back to life, but also to learn from them, things that we can learn in Western focused schools, which certainly was a big challenge for me, having been in school in the US, it was very difficult for me to figure out how to develop a language for an architecture that is rooted in a completely different context. And you should know that actually Masons in most of West Africa were traditionally organized in really powerful guilt, and they were handed their knowledge from generation to generation, and their expertise is often a closely guarded secret. So for us, it was quite a treat to actually get to work with them and have them share their knowledge with us. And actually, I guess, up until recently, people thought that Masons had magic powers, I mean, mystical powers, because of the creativity and the aesthetic sense and technical skill that they, that they portrayed in these traditional domes, sorry, that are showing the interior of the old Dutch mosque that we changed into the library, are one of the reasons why not only did we want to save this building that was taken for demolition, but we, it was really important for us to find the original Masons who built this project, and to refer to them in, you know, in defer to their expertise in refurbishing the project by collaborating with kind of more contemporary Masons to help in improving the materials that will be used to improve the durability and to make sure that we create kind of a healthy and safe space for the students who were largely the target for the library in the village. So when he came to the mosque proper, which was the other part of this complex, we collaborated with, you know, these other kind of more contemporary traditional Masons, and local engineers from from me to produce in a way a new interpretation of the traditional domes that I showed you, I kind of simplified more pair down still using Earth, but then you know introducing concrete because we were interested in, you know, larger scales, you know, and much more dramatic heights for the, for the new mosque, and it allowed us to further anchor the project as part of a cultural and stylistic evolution, rather than importing a radically different structural structural solution or aesthetic expression. So, you know, this was kind of the result of that exercise. This is one of the ceilings of one of the volumes of the mosque. And it was really about elevating the local material and the techniques using processes that people are already familiar with what introducing sort of new techniques to share and working through that project actually another powerful memory we harness and continue to do so and we did for the market project as well is the skill of metalwork. Some blacksmiths are really skilled and respected group since roughly some say 1500 before coming era, they have been blacksmiths in the area, and they have, they have kind of developed this craftsmanship, you know, over the centuries, and similar to the mason guilds and builders. They were also considered one of those groups with mystical powers, you know, so great that their ingenuity, you know, because of the ingenuity and their skill. And literally, it was believed that they could help win wars or take over empires, you know, such was their importance to, to local to the kings and empires of the time. Tunisia is an Arab country with very few trees would Islam material we use in architecture. When we build there. Instead, we've been using vast amounts of recycled iron that metal workers, you know, all over the country but definitely in the capital of Miami, melt down from things like motorcycle and carp parts and turn them into everyday objects. In these square tubes that you see in this image that are used in construction for making light structures for making doors for making windows, you name it. And it was astonishing actually to see how we just a handful of tools, and these modern day blacksmiths, you know, as I like to think of them could make just about anything and it was just incredible how little was required to do that. So, we came quickly to understand that, you know, what we understood was that anything we could draw really and or imagine, they could make provided that we understood this fundamental principle of using sample materials and simple tools to make it happen. And so, in the end, the objective was to bring about a richer solution and kind of widen the toolbox of knowledge for us, you know, by tapping into those memories to produce something that is very much rooted in the local context in the local memory and actually further, you know, that memory act its own layer to these collective memories that we have of our identity of who we are as a people and how we move forward in the world. But that being said, along the way, I think one of the things that I realized was that memory can also be treacherous sometimes and can be fraught with traps, particularly because of the way we're often taught to practice and see architecture as a form to be analyzed, to be deconstructed and reconstructed, or sometimes even simply just past-teached as a series of motifs, you know, kind of completely removed from its initial context and purpose. And during colonization, the French in West Africa, in the French part of West Africa, created this style called Neo-Sultanese architecture, which consisted in taking buildings like the Jamiim Mosque, which you see on this image here, and making that the basis for all administrative and monumental buildings for all of their territories that they had taken over regardless of, you know, the culture of that place, regardless of, you know, the traditional architecture that exists there. You know, that was just that became kind of the architecture uniform, you know, for their empire. And so they made things like these, which is a maternity ward in Senegal that they had built and that looks, you know, just like the Jamiim Mosque, right? It was just essentially a copy of that, with just kind of, you know, some new kind of more modern-looking windows, you know, on the facade. Or this training station in Burkina Faso, which actually looks very close to both the Jamiim Mosque but also the Timbuktu Mosque, which I don't have a good image for to show you. Or even the Presidential Palace, this is the one in Niger, where, you know, that whenever I look at these buildings, you know, one of the things, you know, for us who know this typology, we quickly start realizing that all of these administrative buildings actually look like mosques, complete even with the minaret, you know, so it's just kind of really separating the use and the symbolism from the original buildings. And the danger here is that the form itself and its actual meaning, you know, is reduced down to a plastic rendition only, you know, and we use the structural logic that brought it into being. We use the spatial reasoning, you know, the symbolism, you know, behind the originals, all of which really contribute to having a less meaningful architecture, you know, ultimately. And so for me, these, these forms, you know, why they are blueprints, you know, to be analyzed, and for which, you know, I mean, there are blueprints to be analyzed, but more so as, you know, as a way of understanding fundamental and underlying forces and principles that brought them to life. So one challenge has been, you know, coming up with new kind of narratives, architectural narratives and continuity for architecture in Asia, when we consider that, you know, we either have the traditional buildings that we're lucky enough to still have. We have these completely western propositions and kind of nothing in between. And so, you know, to figure out how to forge a way forward. We've had to also tap a lot into communal or community memory, you know, in terms of the knowledge that they have, you know, the kind of interesting wisdom, you know, in the cultural behaviors in the community all point to how space is viewed psychologically, emotionally, and what the needs are, you know, for the spaces that we need to design moving forward. And it's not unlike, you know, some of the exercises that we've done, you know, through, I mean, by tapping into the skills and knowledge of the blacksmiths or of the masons, you know, your average daily person also was kind of a wealth of information of a minefield of, you know, memories to tap into and to harness. And to kind of take it even further, you know, I think I've talked about this a couple of times, there's been found also that there was just a wealth of memories embedded in obviously the climate and the geography of the place, you know, which is something that we talk about a lot these days, the climate change and how it's been impacting us. And it is embodied in, you know, traditional architectures all over the world that we have seen for our history. And so for Niger, again, you know, looking at such an extreme climate, you know, such a hot and arid condition, we spend a lot of time looking at similar conditions all over the world for cues again for additional wisdoms additional memories that we can layer, you know, and kind of learn from necessarily copying, you know, so whether it's in Asia or South America or anywhere else, you know, that where we can find parallels. The idea is that, you know, you can, you can fit a lot of those parallels, you know, when you need similar conditions, right. And so for example, in the desert climate, as I was saying, you know, harvesting rainwater is key. So, you know, when you look at when you look at all the different ways in which rainwater has been harvested through architecture, you know, in these incredible beautiful ways, there's really a lot, you know, to, to take from, you know, just like this image shows. When you look at when you think about the step wells, you know, in Rajasthan or in Rajasthan in India, or the wind catchers in Iran that core buildings and tears to lower energy consumption naturally. And so the first tall structures made out of earth in Yemen, for example, for a look at an alternative building technology, you know, an alternative way or different ways of actually dealing with density and dealing with also circulation and how you move through, you know, these vertical spaces and what they mean, and how they came about. And so sometimes we get to work on a project that allows to explore all of these things combined and more tapping into those memories embedded in culture, technical skills and geographic imperatives, you know, and tapping into those memories. And so this is kind of one of one project that started from the premise of, you know, the fact that culturally in Asia, we largely live outside, you know, even when you would see people in front of the homes, you know, just lounging all the time in front of office building in front of, you know, on the roof of the homes you name it. And so we started imagining these interconnected public zones that we could devise on the site for a future cultural project in Yemen, and how these zones would help to fragment the project and ensure kind of a freer access to its ground, looking for, you know, different areas where that could be natural gathering points, and also obviously being conscious of the temperatures that are really harsh for open spaces in Asia, especially when we start designing really large ones obviously. And that naturally sort of led us to creating shade through these dramatic cultural forms that also serve as a landmark and a beacon for the project throughout the city. And then organizing indoor program, you know, around all of all of that for people to enjoy and to effortlessly, you know, create an indoor outdoor relationship between program and open space, which is very typical of an engineering architecture actually when we go back in history, or how we go about developing, you know, or how they were kind of started to use these forms to develop natural pooling mechanisms by using these cultural towers. And obviously this being an Arab country and it only was three months out of the year it was also really important that we are very deliberate about collecting rainwater and not just letting it go into sewers, you know, going back into the river, but actually really using it as, you know, just this amazing resource that we have to help us then create gardens and irrigate them and create shady trees all over the project for people to be able to stroll and enjoy, you know, in a comfortable kind of ecosystem. And so the result was really the set of buildings that draw from the site, the memories and narratives of the place but also anticipate on future challenges by finding low cost and simple ways to mitigate them. It seemed at, you know, like looking at it, you know, it seems at once to be of another time, but it also is firmly anchored in the now and definitely looking, you know, to the tomorrow. And just like for the most projects, you know, the architecture really seems to use forms and structural solutions that are familiar to traditional builders, one of the things that was incredibly important for us was to make a project of the scale, but with local materials that live, you know, in nearby villages. To help stretch their skills, you know, to kind of the extreme by having to do these kinds of, these kinds of skills, but also help the technologies, you know, of these materials evolve and kind of aiding in any way that we can for that purpose. And so the buildings became a system, you know, and a system that kind of does multiple things at once, you know, a system of buildings that are traditional in their technique and in their materials but also contemporary in their scale, in their programming and in the seriousness of the approach to sustainability, you know, but it's a process and ability that we've learned from the past as much as possible in order to not have to rely always on, you know, mechanical solutions or, you know, technological solutions which have their place here, but they cannot be the only sort of approach that we use particularly in places like Asia that are economically incredibly vulnerable. For us, practicing here has been the end exercise in trying to figure out how to make a contemporary architecture in a way that doesn't break the bank, right, and that doesn't have, you know, that doesn't make that doesn't create this, this impossible choice of either you make yourself you put modernize yourself supposedly by making yourself look as Western as possible, which is incredibly expensive and unaffordable and unmaintainable long term, or you're kind of like stuck, you know, doing something from 200 years ago, neither one of which is desirable, neither one of which really works. So it's really been about tapping into those memories to try to find a way forward, but also trying to bring new ideas, you know, for, for the future and for the challenges that we are going to face, even as a planet. And I think I'm going to try to end on this project. More recently, we've been putting this approach to the test for projects outside of the continent. And one, this one is a proposal for the National Black Theater and for which we imagine the interior space within its new home, which is kind of this multi story you might have seen the announcement for this multi story misuse building, and that we imagined a an interior kind of treatment, you know, architecture for its new home. And here too, you know, obviously, the power of memory was something that was just kind of the first step, right? We all have, you know, history and that history made who we are, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly, you know, and because this project was about also a black narrative in America. We looked at both West Africa, you know, kind of the origins, but also because of how its spiritual power was kind of kept alive, you know, within the slaves that were brought here to the American shows, but also images like these that represent, you know, some of the cabins, you know, that the slaves built, for example. And that was because, you know, I couldn't help but see some of the motifs from the former homes in these cabins, you know, memories in a way of the lives they were taken from is seemed, you know, obviously there were a lot of elements that were brought had enormous amounts of skill, you know, that has widely documented and were experts, you know, and builders, you know, you name it and help to build some of the most significant monuments in America. And so really kind of tapping into, you know, this, this terrible history, but then you kind of, you know, finding trying to find ways to surmount that and to celebrate the challenge that it is to actually be black in America today. The project really delved into this, you know, and it became also about, you know, just like we would do in Niger or in Ghana, you know, or elsewhere, you know, about trying to find the local materials in which case we kind of zeroed in on wood which again you know goes back to the image of the cabin, you know, rather than earth, and then, you know, kind of take our cue from some of the spatial and structural logics, you know, common to both places, you know, West Africa and America. And then, ultimately, it started, you know, being embedded with, you know, notions of, you know, the smell of the wild wood, you know, for example, these cabins, you know, their form. And sometimes kind of exquisite care with which, you know, the skills and aesthetic memories of a homeland can, or a home, you know, kind of continent can accompany one into a new reality, no matter how kind of horrifying that reality. And so ultimately, I think for me, project like these, you know, and the practice that I've been privileged to be able to continue hasn't been so much about creating an architecture for the African context per se, but it's been ultimately about making an architecture that is true for a place, and that anchors us in identities that instills pride and dignity in its users. And I think that is one of the many valuable things, you know, that we have to offer as architects. And so I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you so much for that really, really inspiring lecture. And before I ask you about some of the specifics regarding the projects that you presented, I want to ask you, I think the students might also find this interesting. Can you maybe tell us when you were a student in Washington. Did you imagine then that you would return to me share to practice architecture or what motivated you to return home to practice. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Actually, actually, yes, that was my objective from the beginning. Because one of the things I guess that was a little bit different for me, you know, studying architecture was that it was my second career. So I was a software developer before becoming an architect, but I kind of wanted to be an architect since I was a teenager, but I didn't know anybody in my program was an architect. It seemed something that fit me, because I was very kind of science minded, but also, you know, I was very artistic, and I drew and I painted, you know, all of those things. And it just seemed to make sense. But kind of when push came to shove, I just could not pull that trigger. It just seemed, you know, coming from where I come from, and having the incredible luck to be able to be sent thousands of miles away to get this kind of work class education. And I just did not feel like I had the right to study something creative. It just seemed like it needed to be something, you know, more pragmatic, like being an engineer or doctor, you know, a lawyer, you know, which is the story of almost every African immigrant you know, in America, right? All of us are in this situation. Yeah, yeah, exactly, whether it's coming from us or from family pressures, you know, or whatever. But in my case, it was fully me, you know, I just I just decided that this just was not reasonable. But, you know, fast forward almost 10 years, you know, this kind of desire to be an architect never never left me. And I just always yearn for that. But I think the thing that gave me the push, which explains why I knew I wanted to work in Niger where I went to school was because I started seeing all the ways in which architecture, you know, actually fundamentally obviously shapes shapes our environment fully right But then all the ways in which it was used in the most horrific ways where I come from, you know, all the all the contradictions, all the kind of it was just so many illogical things, you know, that I saw. It just started becoming this whole, the social dimension, the political dimension, you know, the economic dimension of architecture started becoming something that was so important, you know, and so kind of alarming to me that that gave me the ultimate push and I just kind of stopped everything went back to school. But then I went back to school knowing what I wanted to turn this degree into, which was also, you know, obviously gives you an incredible kind of laser beam focus, right, like through through the education. And meant also that I saw, you know, certain professors, I saw certain, you know, kind of like trying to learn certain specific things, just to kind of make sure that I will be ready for something like this. And in the introduction I noted that you participated and the Rolex mentorship program with David, David, would you, and I promise I will move away from this topic and talk about the work. I was also wondering if you might be able to tell us a little bit about your experience working in yummy and, you know, having studied in Washington, the University of Washington, what it's like now to kind of be there on the ground. If you don't mind and also as a as a woman practicing architecture, you know, what have been the rewards and perhaps some of the challenges that you face. Yeah. So, I think the mentorship itself. In the beginning since it's not the kind of thing that you can apply for, they just kind of find you. So it was just, you know, this this this situation that all of a sudden, it was incredibly stressful in the sense that I had to figure out, you know, how to make the most of it, right, just like very like, if you have access to David for two years, like you have to make something out of that. And what was incredible about the mentorship was that, you know, from the beginning and I've talked about this many times but because I just found it so incredible, you know, his, his approach was, well, I'm not interested in just, you know, just kind of giving you, you know, or bringing you to my office and just kind of like, you know, first feeding you all of these things that I do, you know, I think it will be much more interesting for you to tell me what you want to do. And then I'll help you, you know, along that route, which was incredibly powerful, right, which also meant that the mentorship ended up being all about the context in which I'm working and the challenges that come with that, you know, both in terms of kind of developing this new way forward that I was talking about from an architecture point of view how to think through the context, you know, both in kind of practical ways, but also in fundamental philosophical ways, you know, in terms of colonization in terms of, you know, reclaiming one's identity in terms of kind of, you know, being true to one's culture. In general, you know, on a more fundamental level, as I said, it's not, this is not an African problem. It's actually a problem that 80% of the world has and 80% of the world, that's not the Western world, right. And we, in a way, all have this challenge to tackle through and the mentorship is kind of this very, very powerful conversation. You know, it felt that lasted two years, you know, that was all about exploring those things, you know, and David come into the picture and seeing the context and kind of, you know, maybe able to also see the context to his eyes was also incredibly powerful and incredibly clarifying also in terms of thinking in terms of figuring out how to parse things properly. But then, you know, that that put aside, I think, you know, when it comes to the notion of gender that you were that you were talking about, you know, I think one of maybe unfortunately in Niger, there are very few architects period. So the side effect of that is that you actually do not encounter as much gender related issues because there's so few of us to begin with, that at the end of the day is not as big of a problem. As it is actually in other countries, or as I might even encounter in the US, frankly, because also, you know, gender issues are fundamentally different here than they are in the US. They're not so much about, you know, people questioning your intelligence or your ability, they're more about people questioning maybe your role, you know, in the community, right. So when you come back, and this is something that that is both unfortunate, but in the end, you know, ended up working for me. I think when you come back also with a degree from the US. It helps to break those barriers because there's kind of this idea that oh okay so not only is your gender not being looked at as something that means that you're not as intelligent that's not an issue. But if you come back with this this really good education then automatically this kind of this authority, you know, kind of label, you know, that you get to enjoy. And that really helps mitigate not to say that there are no issues, you know, you can be on construction sites, or you can even meet clients and they will be talking to your architecture they're talking to you, or, you know, that kind of works out, you know, eventually rather quickly. So it's not easy, but it has many silver linings and it has many kind of, you know, ways to surmount, I guess, the any kind of gender barriers that might be there. One of the things I really appreciate about from your talk is the way that you spoke about memory as a blueprint. And in which you spoke about, let's say the memory is in the is in the mason's you talked about memory in terms of community, but also in terms of materiality in terms of the earthen materials that you use in the building and that struck me as you were talking about memory. And first, I think you talked about memory, you know, particularly in Europe or the US as being relegated to museums that that your work is also I guess challenging that typology of museum that typology that let's say is a collection of artifacts as a way of knowing knowledge or, or organizing knowledge and ultimately challenging I guess the kind of Euro American epistemology to memory and some other memory as another way of being so I'm wondering if you might just kind of talk to us a little bit more about about this other way of knowing or this other kind of memory or these other kind of memories. I think, I think we've unfortunately kind of falling into this, you know, I mean there are many reasons why museums are what they are and became what they are one of the reasons being actually that you know, kind of taking over other countries and you know, taking all of the resources actually created the need to take over from museums because then where do you put all of these things that you stole and that they continue, they continue being there so in a way that typology that is a typology that was born of, you know, all this looting and and all of this terrible, you know, all these terrible ills you know that were done and that continued to happen right and so in of itself that the purpose of the museum is about in a way showcasing all these, all these riches that you've amassed at other people's you know, like from other territories and so the problem that I end up having is when I think about the idea of memory and the idea of museums in a context such as ours where so we don't have that history, we don't have that baggage of having gone and taken someone else's thing that we then need to show a local population. And so what does a museum, what would be a museum for from that point of view, which is a question that you know I struggle with and that, you know, I've been exploring through a couple competitions, but at the end of the day, I think there's something fundamentally wrong, perhaps, if I may say, about taking a collection of things, freezing them into time, placing them in these glass boxes, and in a way it allows us to continue kind of these modernist ideas of before and after. It prevents continuities, it prevents, you know, it impoverishes, quite frankly, the tools that we have at our disposal, you know, in terms of what we can imagine and how we can see the future and how we can see ourselves in our case because these things have been removed from our territories altogether. So kind of imagining yourself and projecting yourself in the future becomes a problem, actually, because how do you do that when you don't know your own history or that when your history has been watched from here, right? Same thing, you know, you were mentioning at the beginning of the lecture, when it came, when it comes to indigenous, you know, spaces and architecture and knowledge that has been completely ignored, you know, and America being the ultimate, ultimate colonial project, right, where it just kind of made this empire in its own image in a place that is stolen from other people that had history, that had an architecture, that had, you know, incredible cultures, you know, museums are obviously complacent in that, but museums are something that I think even for architecture presents a really great problem, you know, in how we move forward in history. And I think that is a question that we are going to have to grapple with for some time if we're serious about kind of both decolonizing our knowledge systems, if we're serious about, you know, starting to actually really see, you know, the rest of the world as equal beings, you know, and really take advantage of all of these different knowledges that are available and that enrich us, you know, as a species. You know, this is something that we're going to have to grapple with, obviously I don't have an answer for, but that, you know, we just need to, we need to, yeah, that we need to look at seriously beyond just the notion of retribution, which we're talking about now in terms of returning artifacts, it goes way beyond that because once again, it froze time and it froze time for several centuries. What does that mean? And for me, that's what, you know, that's what we work on in the sense that it's always about unearthing, you know, all of the forgotten things, you know, everything, everything, all of the forgotten but also erased, you know, narratives. At the end of the day, that's why we don't have a choice but to then speak of and tap into living memories, you know, through the skills of people, through the daily habits and behaviors through because that's what gives us the cues, you know, to the essence of those memories, because they're the result of those memories, even though they're not conscious. Yeah, yeah, and it seems to me that that actually it throws the larger question about, it throws the idea of typology, if you will, into question because I think that, you know, one of the other things that I appreciated about about your talk was also just kind of, you know, exposing, if you will, for those of us who might not have been as familiar, you know, you showed the photograph of the great mosque at Jinné, which I've actually been to, but you showed that photograph and then showed how it was extracted and then reappropriated in terms of colonial architecture, right, colonial typologies, or the mosque at Timbuktu. So when we come to, you know, a project of yours like that, like the flea market or the mosque at Danjaji, I mean, I think what you're doing there is, you know, it's not so much about the typology, if you will, but it's about the hybrid conditions so the, you know, the flea market that you've reorganized around this tree, the mosque that is also a community center, you know, at the end of the day, it seems to me that perhaps the, you know, what it is as a typology goes away and it's much more about how it gets used in the everyday. No, absolutely, you know, and that's the thing, and that's why I tried to, as much as possible, remove myself from obsessing over form, right, because at the end of the day, you know, if it is just about the form, then there's no more meaning, right, you can just take, it's just an image, then we're just doing what we're doing, it's just sculpture, you know, like that's at the end of the day, that's about it, even though architecture is culture, but it's also a spatial art, so often I think, you know, by obsessing so much over the forms, we forget the space, and I think what has been really key for me has been really doubling down on this notion of space and how those memories can help inform how those spaces need to function, whether it's in terms of how they mitigate the climate or how they bring people together, you know, like for the market or how they can actually help combat in the in the case of the community center, extremist notions, but without having to get on your soapbox and say that extremist notions are bad, but by creating the kind of, you know, spatial relationships and situation where someone who might think that actually, you know, some secular knowledge that you will learn at school is kind of incompatible with religious knowledge, using an old mosque to turn into a library was quite difficult, it was a very difficult thing to do, right, but in the end of the day, it didn't work for many, many reasons that we don't have to get into it, it ended up working, but one of the things that we were trying to achieve by doing that was to also create this center where by the very simple fact that people would be in the library and because we pray five times a day, you know, have to walk over this landscape and go into the mosque and then walk back, that back and forth actually helps dissolve this notion of, you know, kind of incompatibility between these two things because that incompatibility is a completely made up notion by, you know, some extremists along our borders, you know, or something like that. So, for me, it's been, yeah, no, not so much about typology, but it's also been about looking at, you know, local challenges and looking at some of the really important issues people are grappling with and trying to figure out what is the place of design and what is the place of architecture, you know, among all of this, not to say that, you know, we get to, you know, fix everything and tackle everything, but we certainly can make, you know, some serious, can bring some serious value because if we can destroy things which we do all day long, right, we destroy communities through architecture, we destroy communities through urban design, we incarcerate people through architecture, we do all kinds of things through architecture. So then it means that the reverse is also true. We can also elevate through architecture, we can also dignify through architecture, and we can also build people up through architecture. I know we have a question in the Q&A, but I don't want to let that one go because what you just said go, because I was also taken by, you know, when you talked about, you know, looking at whether or not there are the stepwells in India or the wind catchers in Iran, or looking at South America for issues that might be similar, that there's a kind of horizontal relationships that you are, that you're forming, that you're looking at relative to your work, rather than what one might expect in terms of looking north to Europe, or looking to America, that you're actually, I should say, to the United States, that you're actually sort of looking horizontally, if you will, and that there's a kind of, maybe not collaborative, but there's a kind of acknowledgement, if you will, of perhaps similar conditions of extraction of colonialism that have happened in these places, and how other indigenous populations have constructed, have made place in light of that. And I don't know if you could maybe just kind of talk a little bit more about the importance of looking horizontally. No, absolutely. For me, that has been so fundamental, that has been really key, because once again, all of us, as you pointed out, are always looking up. As though somehow there was just like an anointed few that hold the key to the solution of every problem on the planet, which is incredibly absurd. So for me, again, even when I was studying architecture, it was about finding these relationships, these similar conditions. I spent a huge amount of time looking towards India, for example, both because of the common colonial condition, but also as a place that has actually already a couple of generations ago, went through this exercise with architects, like Bacchina Joshi, or with Charles Correa. And also, frankly, architects like Mikan, who tried to do an architecture that is more of a translation of the local conditions rather than a super imposition of a western style of architecture. And so I was just always interested in all of the architects who did that, right? You know, in South America, it would be Louis Barragan, for example. You know, and it was just, those were always kind of the conduit, you know, because at the end of the day, I was not, and I am not interested, you know, in duplicating a western model because it doesn't make sense in most places in the world. It developed the way it developed there because it made sense there. When we make a house that is a box where everything is self-contained, we have to do that in the West because it gets cold and you have to conserve heat. When you do that in Niger, and it's 110 degrees outside, you are making an oven. It's as simple as that. So for me, beyond even the identity and the cultural issues, there's just like simple logical problems with looking north. You know, it's just completely illogical at the end of the day. You know, so that's why I'm looking horizontally also and across geographies and across climates because those are the things, you know, for as long as we've been making architecture, those are the things that actually affect architecture and affect the decisions that we make in the forms that we produce historically. Well, thank you so much. Thanks again. So, I'm going to turn to the Q&A now and our first question is from Farouk Banin. Farouk says, hi, Miriam. Farouk here, Masters of Architecture, third year from Accra, Ghana. Thank you for the inspiring presentation. In reading books like Udo Koltriman's New Direction in Africa, he mentions that contemporary architecture in Africa is way too diverse, heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory to be readily defined as African architecture. What are your opinions on this and that African, and that African architecture should look, feel or be some type of way or have a certain aesthetic because I feel you are responding perfectly to your context in Yame and Niger. I don't agree more. I don't think, you know, we can talk about an African condition in terms of history, in terms of colonization, in terms of some of the socio-economic challenges. Actually, I shouldn't say social, I shouldn't say economic challenges, but the reality is we are incredibly diverse as a, because we're a continent no matter how, no matter, in spite of the fact that we always talked about as though we were just one place, right? So, I'm not sure there's such a thing that there should be such a thing as an African architecture. However, there can be a thing as an architecture born of Africa and a certain set of common challenges, right? Now, when it comes to when you're thinking about, you know, as you see region to region, not country to country, because again, you know, then you fall onto under this other problem of the fact that our countries are artificial and that 60 years ago, our countries did not exist, right? So they're not actually even a real thing. So the architecture that we do in Niger would be, you know, completely relevant to Northern Nigeria, for example, as well. But now the rest of Nigeria, it would be completely appropriate in, you know, Western Mali, and it would be completely appropriate for parts of Burkina Faso, because Guy, you know, has the same kind of climatic and geographic conditions and also historically speaking, you know, withdrawing from the precedence of those regions, right? Now, if we have to do a project in Ghana, that's a completely different bulking, because number one, the material is completely different. You know, it can be earth, but there's also a lot of wood. You know, the culture is shockingly different, you know, and that's we're still in West Africa. So if you actually take it to East Africa or to Central Africa, to Southern Africa, then, you know, our hair breaks loose. So I don't think we should be reductive and reduce ourselves down to a continental expression, but we do have to acknowledge that we share a set of common challenges. And with that comes maybe a certain subset of common responses that could work. But in the overarching main, you know, kind of moves, they cannot necessarily be the same. Okay. And we have one question here in the auditorium. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Hi, Maria. My name is Anoushe, and I'm an MR third year as well. So I was just really, I've followed your work for quite a while and I, I'm really impressed by everything you do. So thank you and thank you for your presentation and your comments. My question surrounds the idea of participatory design, because I'm very cognizant that you have a very Western education, right, and you're working in a very different context. So how do you incorporate, I guess, participation by design or for design from the community? Like how do you, what are some of the mechanisms that you may be employed to gather as much information as possible from who you work with? I mean, it really varies from project to project, right? But I think we also need to be incredibly careful when we talk about participatory design, because I think at some point it became kind of this fashionable thing, especially through, you know, certain ideas, you know, that, you know, kind of go in a kind of so-called underdeveloped parts of the world, you know, and try to do these exercises and it became kind of this message about the fact that in order to empower people, then we need to have them build their own architecture. However, I think that's slightly strange proposition in the sense that people have jobs and people have economic activities and they have, you know, other things, you know, that they need to get done in their life. So the idea that everybody should be building their own home and, you know, and should be, you know, kind of participating in building, you know, the environment, it's a little bit strange considering that that's not an idea that we would propose anywhere else in the world. As I said, I think what you're talking about in terms of participatory design specifically is more in terms of maybe community consultation and involvement in the design phases. And for that, like I said, depending on the project we're working on, we will approach it differently and the people we would approach will be different. So if we're working on a project like the community center in the nation, for example, then the whole village was our trade, right? And we would create different sessions with different people, you know, different kind of subsections of the village. So we might have sales with teenagers only, for example. Another one would only women, another one would everybody, another one would the male leaders, you know, another one, you know, because again, it's about at the end of the understanding the context in which you work and to understand the forces at work in that context, so that you can also avoid conflicts among the forces and that you can really harness as much information as you possibly can by designing sort of these strategies to get information and to get, you know, kind of information and desires and hopes and dreams, you know, out of people, which is a very inexact science, right? So I cannot tell you that, you know, you do X, Y, Z, you know, like one, two, three, four, five, those are the steps, you know, go ahead. This completely depends on on the context and it depends on what you have access to and who you have access to. But for me, it definitely has not been in the forms of, you know, sometimes what we see is maybe almost like a town hall, you know, type of situation where you bring everybody in and you do a shred or you, you know, explain the project and get input. It definitely has not been like that for me. For me, it's been kind of a lot more, like I said, smaller groups, different and very different, but also different forms of exercises to kind of run people through that allow you to, in a way, get to the bottom of what people are truly thinking and truly feeling, rather than, you know, if you ask them directly, a lot of times what I discovered is like people who tend to tell you what you, what they think you want to hear. That's been a fundamental, fundamental thing that I noticed actually when I was a student and I first started researching. And then so I had to just kind of like change tack from that point of view. And then in a way you have to become a psychologist almost where you have to start figuring out these ways of finding out the truth within, you know, and there is, there's no like magic bullet for it. So, Mary, again, I want to thank you so much for this, for this inspiring talk. And I look forward to your gathering with the Masters of architecture, second year students tomorrow in their, in their housing studio. And hopefully we will get to see you here at GSAP sometime in the in the near future for everyone who participated in our lecture today. I'd just like to call your attention to a number of events going on later this week. The Geographer academic and academic Rob kitchen examines the conceptual underpinnings and practices of urban science that's coming up I believe on Wednesday of our Seiza discusses his latest book in conversation with Professor Kenneth Frampton on Thursday and on Friday, the GSAP collective for recognizes a conversation around the recent publication of reconnecting Beirut. So thank you again everyone for for attending today's lecture and we'll see you again at the next Dean's lecture. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you madam.