CAFx: The Red and the Grey Matter - New Architecture in Africa

“We are the youngest continent, the fastest-urbanizing continent.” For Lesley Lokko, chief curator of the highly acclaimed 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, one thing is clear: “Africa is the laboratory of the future.”

More than 80 percent of all buildings in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to be built by 2050 – using concrete, steel, and aluminum, materials that already account for nearly a quarter of global emissions. Concrete has taken over everyday life in Africa: It is available, inexpensive, and promises social mobility, safety, modernity, and progress.
Yet self-assured architects, construction professionals, and visionaries from Africa are harnessing this momentum to drive contemporary construction in Africa: using climate-friendly building materials like clay and ideas for the future rooted in traditional, local knowledge. They are the heroes of our story. Spanning seven years marked by political upheaval, this co-production by DW and the Goethe-Institut traces how African architecture is powerfully emerging from centuries of obscurity to take center stage in the debate.

In the documentary we meet pioneer Francis Kéré, the first African architect to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize. He designed a building for Dakar on behalf of the Goethe-Institut: a modern earthen structure whose construction, from 2019 to 2025. We also meet Nzinga Mboup, who—together with her firm partner Nicolas Rondet and engineer Doudou Dème in Dakar—aims to prove that a different kind of climate-just and site-specific architecture is possible. And finally we meet Lesley Lokko, the influential visionary who is bringing an entire generation of young, often female “Afritects” to the stage of the 2023 Venice Biennale. In doing so, she fosters a new sense of unity: more than half of the participants in Venice come from Africa and the diaspora, including influential figures like Mariam Issoufou and David Adjaye.