 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 in 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. GSAP 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, GSAP 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 GSAP, 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 insightful lecture this afternoon and also to participate in the core three 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. The Yami 2000, designed by United for Design, was awarded an American Institute of Architects 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 Yami. 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 Yami as well as the Niami Cultural Center, which Kamara designed under the mentorship of Sir David Ajay as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protege 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 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, Maryam. 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 short, so I've been looking for the opportunity to have a longer discussion. Thank you for having me. I think I'm going to try to share my screen now so we can just get started. Just for a minute or five seconds. I'm trying to do all of this complicated sharing. Please let me know if you can see the screen well. So I'm not completely sure. Leila, does this look okay? I'll take that as a yes. Thank you again. Today, I just wanted to... I think though I'm supposed to give a lecture first and then have a discussion, I'm really much more looking forward to the discussion. So I'll try to kind of run through the lecture as quickly as possible. Obviously without shortchanging anyone. I was really interested in talking about 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 digging into memories, collected memories, individual ones, and usually really 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 tabularized exercise, especially for modernism where it was kind of assumed that we were supposed to kind of invent everything, even though we never do. But that seems to be always the effort. 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 read 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 around the 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 fundamental building. This has been essentially the approach of the practice that we've developed in Niger as a firm over the years, whether when we 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 took notes of these styles that were very simple and straightforward. They were an architecture made of mud. The walls were very just linear, with a flat patch roof. And those thin patch roofs had the advantage of offering immediate ventilation, but the roofs themselves were a challenge because they needed to be changed all the time. That patch doesn't really hold up to rainy seasons and strong winds. But nevertheless, the market had this model for quite a few decades at that point. And it was very much in keeping with traditional market architecture going back centuries in the region. So there was something compelling about it. And so when it came to designing the patch, it was evident to me that there was very little value 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 the logistics behind actually what they needed to do and accomplish and how they brought their wares, how they displayed everything, how they packed everything up, how they secured their goods. And so we devised these, we used the same language with these kind of simple pared down walls, but then also devised these more durable shading systems that also foster ventilation, again, in 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 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 a modern proposition. 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 centers found the marks immediately, which was very rewarding. But it was also really interesting to see how they started using this new infrastructure in even newer ways, because they saw opportunities either because of shading structures, or because of the way we partitioned the spaces and created places for them to park the motorcycles or 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 with stalls 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 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 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. So the results at the end of the day was just this market that kept what is familiar but pushed the expression forward. And we've kind of explored this over and over again while all the typologies of the projects that we've worked on during our explorations of the local context in Indonesia, one thing that one cannot miss if anybody 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 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 more commercial projects, 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 first breaking up the volume, trying to provide ways in which we can create zones of ventilation, how we can actually allow cross ventilation also by breaking it up a bit more, how we can be a bit more aware of obviously how the sun moves around the building, how we can start 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 insulation and decrease energy consumption. And obviously it was also about acknowledging this is kind of one of the images a few months ago of the project under construction acknowledging that part of the memory of the place is also in its material in this case we're using earth which will make this project one of the only multi-storey projects in the region made out of raw earth a hybrid system using concrete structure and the earth bricks as filling it was uniquely appropriate in the sense that it has an economic advantage so for clients this is very interesting because it brings down the construction cost by close to 20% rather than using cement but it also introduces a 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 and also shade 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 architectural 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 centre 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 settings like Kano which is shown here or Zaria in Nigeria 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 European, the European arbitrarily before Europe arbitrarily kind of partitioned Africa and 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 entrance gates that kept repeating themselves and that served as transition zones and as stations for cleansing rituals before prayer and this is something that we immediately jumped at and 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 as far back as the 9th century mosques were actually knowledge centers in places like Baghdad where they often went hand in hand with libraries with schools and research centers with scholars from all over the world actually who came and taught and learned and researched 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 foreign new use which is now 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 through 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 that is directly relevant to you know to our times in the context of growing tensions that we experience 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, Chad 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 and that pass it down and harnessing that knowledge has been one of the most important aspects of the project but also about practice honestly we approach traditional reasons 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 our western focused schools which certainly was a big challenge for me having been schooled 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 them that must have been trained into a library or one of the reasons why not only did we want to save this building that was taken for demolition but it was really important for us to find the original Masons who built this project and deferred to them in deferred to their expertise in refurbishing the project by collaborating with kind of more contemporary Masons to help in improving the materials that were being 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 and so when he came to the mosque proper which was the other part of this complex we collaborated with these other kind of more contemporary traditional Masons and local engineers from the MA to produce in a way a new interpretation of the traditional domes that I showed you I kind of simplified more pare down still using earth but then introducing concrete because we were interested in larger scales and much more dramatic heights 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 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 bargains of the mosque and it was really about elevating the local material and the techniques using processes that people are already familiar with introducing sort of new techniques to share 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 in West Africa blacksmiths are a really skilled and respected group since roughly some say 1500 before coming era there have been blacksmiths in the area and they have kind of developed this craftsmanship over the centuries and similar to the mason guilds and builders they were also considered one of those groups with mystical powers so great that their ingenuity because of the ingenuity and their skill and literally it was believed that they could help win wars or take over empires such was their importance of the time and because Niger is an Arab country with very few trees wood Islam material we use in architecture when we build there instead we've been using vast amounts of recycled iron that metal workers 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 the square tubes that you see in this image that are used in construction from making light structures for making doors for making windows you name it and it was astonishing actually to see how we're just a handful of tools and these modern day blacksmiths as I like to think of them could make just about anything and it was just incredible how little was required to do that and 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 simple 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 by tapping into those memories to produce something that is very much rooted in the local context, in the local memory and that could actually further that memory add 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 reconstructed and reconstructed or sometimes even simply just past-teached as a series of motifs that have completely removed from its initial context and purpose and during colonization the French part of West Africa created this style called Neon Sudanese architecture which consisted of taking buildings like the Jami 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 the culture of that place regardless of the traditional architecture that exists there that became kind of the architecture uniform for their empire and so they made things like these which is a maternity ward in Senegal that they had built and that looks just like the Jami Mosque it was essentially a copy of that more modern looking windows on the facade or this train station in Brigham Faso which actually looks very close to both the Jami 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 whenever I look at these buildings one of the things 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 so it's just kind of really separating the views and the symbolism from the original buildings and the danger here is that the form itself and its actual meaning is reduced down to a plastic rendition only and we use the structural logic that brought it into being, we use the spatial reasoning the symbolism behind the originals all of which really contribute to having a less meaningful architecture ultimately and so for me these forms why they are blueprints to be analyzed and for which there are blueprints to be analyzed but more so as a way of understanding fundamental and underlying forces and principles that brought them into life so one challenge has been coming up with new kind of narratives architectural narratives and continuity for architecture in Niger when we consider that we either have the traditional buildings that we're lucky enough to still have or we have these completely western propositions and kind of nothing in between and so to figure out how to move the way forward we've had to also tap a lot into communal or community memory in terms of the knowledge that they have the kind of interesting wisdom in the cultural behaviors that really all point to how space is viewed psychologically, emotionally these are for the spaces that we need to design moving forward and it's not unlike some of the exercises that we've done by tapping into the skills and knowledge of the blacksmiths or the masons your average daily person also is kind of a wealth of information and kind of a minefield of memories to tap into and to harness to kind of take it even further I think I've talked about this a couple of times we found also that there was just a wealth of memories embedded in obviously the climate and the geography of the place, which is something that we talk about a lot these days especially because of climate change and how it's been impacting us and it is embodied in traditional architectures all over the world that we have seen through our history and so for Niger again looking at how an 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 and kind of learn from that necessarily copying so whether it's in Asia or South America or anywhere else where we can find parallels the idea is that you can fit a lot of those parallels in the similar conditions and so for example in the desert climate as I was saying harvesting rainwater is key so when you look at all the different ways in which rainwater has been harvested through architecture in these incredible beautiful ways there's really a lot to take from just like this image shows when you think about the step wells in India or the wind catchers in Iran that co-buildings interiors to lower energy consumption naturally or the first tall structures made out of earth in Yemen for example for our look at an alternative building technology in an alternative way or different ways of actually dealing with density and dealing with also circulation and how you move through these vertical spaces and what they mean and how they came about and so sometimes we get to work on projects that allow us to explore all of these things combined and more tapping into those memories embedded in culture technical skills and geographic imperatives and tapping into those memories this was kind of one project that started from the premise of the fact that culturally in Asia there's a large and little outside even when you would see people in front of the homes just lounging all the time in front of office building or on the roof of their homes you name it and 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 could help to fragment the project and ensure kind of a freer access to its ground for 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 also organizing indoor programming around all of that for people to enjoy and to effortlessly create an indoor outdoor relationship between programming and open space which is very typical of international architecture actually when we go back in history or how we go about developing or how we're 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 or going back into the river but actually really using it as 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 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 fighting low cost and simple ways to mitigate them it seemed like looking at it it seems at once to be of another time but it also is firmly anchored in the now and definitely looking to the tomorrow and just like for the most project 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 in nearby villages to help stretch their skills to kind of the extreme by having to deal with these kinds of scales but also help the technologies of these materials evolve and kind of aid in any way that we can for that purpose so the buildings became a system and a system that does multiple things at once 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 but it's approach to sustainability that we've learned from the past as much as possible in order to not have to rely always on mechanical solutions or technological solutions which have their place here but they cannot be the only sort of approach that we use particularly in places like Indonesia that are economically incredibly vulnerable for us practicing here has been really an exercise in trying to figure out how to make a contemporary architecture in a way that doesn't break the bank and that doesn't have that doesn't create this this impossible choice of either you make yourself 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 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 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 the one this one is a proposal for the National Black Theater and for which we imagine an interior space within its new home which is kind of this multi-story you might have seen the announced for it this multi-story mix use building and that we imagined an interior kind of treatment or kind of architecture for its new home and here too obviously the power of memory was something that was just kind of the first step we all have a history and that history made who we are the good, the bad, the ugly and because this project was about also a black narrative in America we looked at both West Africa kind of the origins but also because of how its spiritual power was kind of kept alive within the slaves that were brought here to the American shows but also images like these that represent some of the cabins that the slaves built for example that was because I couldn't help but see some of the motifs from our homes in these cabins memories in a way of the lives they were taken from obviously there were a lot of some of the sites that were brought had enormous amounts of skill that has widely documented and were experts and builders and helped build some of the most significant monuments in America and so really kind of tapping into this terrible history but then kind of finding ways to surmount that and to celebrate the triumph that it is to actually be black in America today the project really delved into this and it became also about just like we would do in Niger or in Ghana or elsewhere about trying to find the local materials in which case we kind of zeroed in on wood which again goes back to that image of the cabin rather than earth and then kind of take our cue from some of the spatial and structural logics common to both places West Africa and America and then ultimately it started being embedded with notions of the smell of the wild wood for example of these cabins their form exquisite care with which the skills and aesthetic memories of a homeland or of a home you know continent can accompany one into a new reality no matter how kind of horrifying that reality and so ultimately I think for me a project like these 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 a bit of quick shuffling here on site Miriam and get Mario to you Loris I went a bit fast because like I said I was really hoping for it I'm really looking forward to the discussion a lot more can you hear me it's quite faint Miriam you are muted can you hear me now I still can't hear you can you hear me can you hear me better now Miriam can you hear me I can but it's really faint it's your voice as you know the volume is low Miriam could you try to speak again I'm sorry the volume is a bit low coming from Mario I could barely hear him okay I'll try it again is that any better no I mean I think I can hear you but it's definitely Mario's microphone might not be on guys testing is that any better um I'm sorry a little bit how about this better okay okay great and Miriam can you still hear me yes fantastic thank you so much for that 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 at Washington did you imagine then that you would return to share to practice architecture or what motivated you to return home to practice oh yeah absolutely actually yes that was my objective from the beginning because one of the things I guess that was a little bit different from me 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 grandmother 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 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 or lawyer you know which is the story of almost every African immigrant you will meet 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 the Raman's architecture school was because I started seeing all the ways in which architecture you know actually fundamentally obviously shapes shapes our environment fully right but in 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 the education and meant also that I saw you know certain professors I saw certain you know kind of trying to learn certain specific things just to kind of make sure that I would be ready for something like this and in the introduction I noted that you have participated in the Rolex partnership program with David would you and I promise I will sort of move away from this topic and talk about the work but I'm just also wondering if you might be able to tell us a little bit about your experience working in and you know having studied in Washington the University of Washington what it's like now to kind of be there on the ground 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 from 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 situation that all of a sudden it was incredibly stressful because I had to figure out how to make the most of it if you have access to David for two years you have to make something out of that and what was incredible about the mentorship was that from the beginning and I've talked about this many times because I just found it so incredible his approach was I'm not interested in just kind of giving you or bringing you to my office teaching 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 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 of both in kind of practical ways but also in fundamental philosophical ways you know in terms of colonization in terms of reclaiming one's identity in terms of being true to one's culture in general on a more fundamental level as I said this is not an African problem it's actually a problem that 80% of the world has 80% of the world that's not the western world right they all have this challenge down to tackle through and the mentorship was 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 coming to Indonesia and seeing the context and kind of you know me being able to also see the context through 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 put aside I think you know when it comes to the notion of gender 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 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 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 as something that means that you're not as intelligent that's not an issue but if you come back to education then automatically this kind of authority kind of label 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 architects or they'll be talking to you or you know but that kind of works out eventually rather quickly so it's not easy but it has many silver linings and it has many kind of ways to surmount I guess 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 you talked about memory in terms of community materiality in terms of the earthen materials that you use in the building and it struck me as you were talking about memory and first I think you talked about memory particularly in Europe or the US is being relegated to museums 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 organizing knowledge and ultimately challenging I guess the kind of Euro-American epistemology 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 this other way of knowing or this other kind of memory or these other kind of memories I think unfortunately we're 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 their resources actually created the need for museums because then where do you put all of these things that you stole and that they continue being there so in a way that typology is a typology that was born of all this looting and all of this terrible you know all these terrible ills that were done and that continued to happen right and so in of itself of the museum is about in a way showcasing all these riches that you have 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 through those things 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 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 all together 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 you same thing you know you were mentioning at the beginning of the lecture when it comes to indigenous spaces and architecture and knowledge that has been completely ignored 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 a history that had an architecture that had you know incredible cultures you know museums are obviously complicit 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 starting to actually really see the rest of the world as equal beings to us and really take advantage of all of these different knowledges that are available and that enrich us as a species this is something that we're going to have to grapple with that obviously I don't have an answer for but that you know we just need to 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 we work on in the sense that it's always about birthing you know all of the forgotten things everything out of the forgotten but also erased 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 through the skills of people through the daily habits and behaviors because that's what gives us the cues to the essence of those memories because they're the result of those memories even though they're not conscious 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 one of the other things that I appreciated about about your talk was also just kind of exposing if you will for those of us who might not have been as familiar you showed the photograph of the great mosque at Jinnay 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 in terms of colonial typologies or the mosque at Timbuktu and so when we come to a project of yours like the flea market or the mosque at Dunjaji I think what you're doing there is it's not so much about the typology if you will but it's about the hybrid condition so the flea market that you've reorganized around this tree the mosque that is also a community center at the end of the day it seems to me that perhaps the what it is as a typology goes away and it's much more about how it gets used in the everyday no absolutely and that's the thing and that's why I try to as much as possible remove myself from obsessing over form because at the end of the day if it is just about the form then there's no more meaning it's just an image and what we're doing is just sculpture you know at the end of the day that's about it even though architecture is sculpture but it's also a spatial art so often I think 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 for the market or how they can actually help combat 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 situations 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 we don't have to get into it but one of the things that we were trying to achieve by doing that was to 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 incompatibility between these two things because that incompatibility is a completely made up notion of borders you know or something like that so for me it's been yeah no not so much about topology 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 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 to architecture we destroy communities through urban design we incarcerate people through architecture we do all kinds of things to 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 to 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 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 forming or 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 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 I don't know if you could maybe just kind of talk a little bit more about what ends up 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 you know as though somehow there was just like an anointed few that hold the key to the solution of every problem you know on the planet which is incredibly absurd so for me you know again even when I was studying architecture it was about finding you know these relationships you know these similar conditions you know I spent a huge amount of time looking towards India for example you know 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 you know architects like Bokrishnan Joshi or with Charles Korea but and also frankly architects like Rui Khan who tried to do an architecture that is more of a translation of the local conditions rather than a super imposition of you know a western style of architecture and so I was just always interested in all of the architects who did that in South America it would be Rui Varga, Miss Varga for example you know and it was just if those were always kind of the background to it 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 that 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 Wane and 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 Koltraman'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 couldn'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 should just 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 is such a thing but there should be such a thing as an African architecture however they can be a thing as an architecture born of Africa and as a certain set of common challenges now when it comes to when you're thinking about region to region not country to country because again then you fall under this other problem of the fact that our countries are artificial and that 60 years ago our countries did not exist not actually even a real thing so the architecture that we do in Niger would be completely irrelevant 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 Dai you know has the same kind of climatic and geographic conditions and also historically speaking you know we're drawing from the precedents 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 or her 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. I hope I've answered your question for you. 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 maybe employ to gather as much information as possible from who you work with? I mean it really varies from project to project 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 studios you know that you know kind of go in kind of so called underdeveloped parts of the world you know and try to do these exercises and it's it became kind of this 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 like a 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 in the world that being 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 will approach also will be different so if we're working on a project like the community center in Dundas for example then the whole village was our terrain right you know and we would have discussions 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 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 XYZ three four five those are the steps you know go ahead it's completely depends 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 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 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 varied groups 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 that's been a fundamental fundamental thing that I noticed actually when I was a student 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 that is there's no like magic bullet for it unfortunately. So Mariam I want to thank you so much for this inspiring talk and I look forward to your gathering with the Masters of Architecture second year students tomorrow in their housing studio and hopefully we will get to see you here at GSAP sometime in the near future. For everyone who participated and watched our lecture today we have a lot of students going on later this week Geographer and Academic Rob Kitchen examines the conceptual underpinnings and practices of urban science that's coming up I believe on Wednesday Alvaro Cesar discusses his latest book in conversation with Professor Kenneth Frampton on Thursday and on Friday the GSAP collective for Beirut organizes a conversation around the recent publication of reconnecting Beirut. Thank you for attending today's lecture and we'll see you again at the next Dean's lecture. Thank you.