Figure 1 Vic Adegbite (chief architect), Jacek Chyrosz (design architect), Stanisław Rymaszewski (design architect), International Trade Fair, Accra,
1967 (photo by Jacek Chyrosz, 1967; Jacek Chyrosz Archive, Warsaw; courtesy of Jacek Chyrosz).
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Architects from Socialist Countries
in Ghana (1957– 67):
Modern Architecture and Mondialisation
łukasz stanek
University of Manchester
W
hen seen from Labadi Road, the buildings of
Accra’s International Trade Fair (ITF) appear
among abandoned billboards, scarce trees that
offer shade to resting taxi drivers, and tables where coconuts,
bottled water, sweets, and telephone cards are sold next to the
road.1 The buildings neighbor the La settlement, where streets
meander between houses, shops, bars, schools, and shrines,
while on the other side of Labadi Road, at the seashore, a luxurious housing estate is under construction next to upscale hotels
that overlook Labadi Beach. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s leader
after the country achieved independence (1957), initiated the
fair as a prestige project, but it was opened on 1 February 1967
by Joseph Arthur Ankrah, the chairman of the National
Liberation Council, who led the putsch that toppled Nkrumah
in 1966 (Figure 1).2 Once conveying a sense of radical modernity, the buildings have suffered from underinvestment and
insufficient maintenance, but most of them are still in use,
rented for exhibitions that take place every few months, for
political rallies, and for religious services (Figure 2).3
From 1962 to 1967, the Ghana National Construction
Corporation (GNCC), the state office charged with design,
construction, and maintenance of governmental buildings
and infrastructure in Nkrumah’s Ghana, designed and constructed the ITF. The designers of the fair were two young
architects from socialist Poland, Jacek Chyrosz and Stanisław
Rymaszewski, who worked with the Ghanaian Victor (Vic)
Adegbite, the chief architect. Chyrosz and Rymaszewski
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 4 (December 2015),
416–442. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2015 by the Society
of ­Architectural Histo­rians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce ­article content through the University of
­California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/
journals.php?p=reprints, or via email: [email protected]. DOI: 10.1525/
jsah.2015.74.4.416. were employed by the GNCC on a contract with Polservice,
the so-called central agency of foreign trade, which mediated
the export of labor from socialist Poland.4 At the GNCC,
they worked together with Ghanaian architects and foreign
professionals, many from socialist countries.
This collaboration reflected the alliance of Nkrumah’s
government with socialist countries, which was demonstrated at the fair by the exhibitions of Czechoslovakia, the
German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, and Poland
(Figure 3). At the same time, the Ankrah administration used
the fair to facilitate Ghana’s reopening toward the West.
Hence, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China
(PRC), two major allies of Nkrumah, were absent.5 By contrast, the two pavilions not to be overlooked were those of
Great Britain, Ghana’s former colonial ruler and its main
trade partner, and the United States, which granted Ghana
loans for its many infrastructural projects in the 1960s, in
particular the Akosombo Dam, financed jointly with the
United Kingdom and the World Bank. India was represented
as a member of the Commonwealth rather than as a member
of the Non-Aligned Movement, since Nkrumah’s attempt to
position Ghana among Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia as one
of the leading nations of the movement was abandoned after
the change of the regime. Collaboration among African
countries was particularly favored, not as a way of carrying
on Nkrumah’s vision of pan-African union but with a more
modest aim, that of the stimulation of trade among African
countries. Displays representing African countries were
gathered in the round Africa Pavilion at the end of the ramp
through which visitors entered the fair, before they moved
on to Pavilion A (the “Made in Ghana” pavilion) and the
pavilions rented to other countries and Ghanaian state firms.
Launched by Nkrumah’s regime and “adjusted” by the
National Liberation Council to the new geopolitical
417
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constellation of Ghana, the design, construction, operation,
and composition of the fair reflected the broad international
relations of Ghana in the 1960s and the variety of global
networks in which the nation was enmeshed: U.S.-based
Bretton Woods institutions, development aid from the British Commonwealth, technical assistance programs of socialist countries, collaboration within the Non-Aligned
Movement, and support programs operated by the United
Nations.6 The fair was but one among several hundred buildings designed and constructed by the GNCC that combined
resources circulating in these worldwide networks with those
made available by means of local and regional ones.
In this sense, the architectural production of the GNCC
may be seen as a part of the process through which modern
architecture was becoming the worldwide technocultural
dispositif of planetary urbanization after World War II.7
Architectural historians have identified several conduits of
exchanges that contributed to the postwar mobilities of modern architecture—conduits not always easily distinguished
from one another: colonial and postcolonial links, networks
set up by the United States and Western European countries
in response to the perceived Soviet threat, international institutions such as the United Nations and its agencies, and economic globalization.8 This article complements that work by
addressing networks among socialist countries, a topic that
until recently has been almost completely absent from the
historiography of modern architecture outside Europe.9 My
discussion of these networks is based on materials housed in
the archives of Ghanaian institutions in Accra, as well as in
public and private archives in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary,
and Poland, complemented by collections in the United
Kingdom and the United States. Particularly important
sources in this research have been the Ghanaian daily journals published between 1957 and 1967, which I have reviewed
day by day in order to contextualize the ITF within the overall building activities that took place under Nkrumah.
In this article I describe the architecture constructed and,
often, designed by the GNCC by making use of resources
from the competing networks of worldwide cooperation and
solidarity that intersected in Nkrumah’s Ghana. In order to
stress the multiplicity of these networks and the antagonisms
between them, I prefer to speak about the mondialisation of
architecture rather than about its “globalization.” This distinction has been developed by several authors, including
Henri Lefebvre and, more recently, Jean-Luc Nancy.10 For
these authors, the worldwide (le mondial) is less an accomplished process and more a horizon of practice, an experience, a project. As Lefebvre argued, the emergence of the
world as a dimension of practice, which he called mondialisation, was facilitated by the growing strength of various forces:
the world market, worldwide transportation and communication technology, transnational political associations, global
Figure 2 Vic Adegbite (chief architect), Jacek Chyrosz (design
architect), Stanisław Rymaszewski (design architect), Pavilion A
(“Made in Ghana” pavilion), International Trade Fair, Accra, 1967
(author’s photo, 2012).
mass movements, ecological threats on a planetary scale, the
tendency toward complete urbanization, and the “urban
problematic” as the stake, site, and discourse of political projects. These forces contribute to the “worldwide experience”
by conveying often competing ways of becoming worldly,
alternative visions of the world as a whole, its plural imaginations, and alternative ways of “practicing” the world, the
world as an abstraction becoming “true in practice.” 11
Mondialisation is hence not so much opposed to globalization;
rather, the U.S.-backed, global spread of economic and political phenomena known to English-language readers since
the 1970s as “globalization” is to be seen as just one among
many possibilities of mondialisation. Socialist internationalism
and the Non-Aligned Movement, with their anti-imperialist
and antiracist discourse, were other such possibilities.
In what follows I will offer a glimpse into the articulation
of these mondialisation dynamics in the GNCC architectural
production. This requires addressing networks of architectural expertise beyond the metropolitan model of dissemination, which is still dominant in the historiography of postwar
modern architecture outside Europe and the United States.
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Figure 3 International Trade Fair project, aerial-view drawing, 1965 (Jacek Chyrosz Archive, Warsaw; courtesy of Jacek Chyrosz).
Much of this research has focused on so-called tropical architecture, the self-assigned name of a network of architects and
urban planners operating within the British late colonial and
Commonwealth context, who exerted a particularly important influence in the West African colonies: Gold Coast (later
Ghana), Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Gambia.12 Like similar
programs carried out by French, Belgian, and Portuguese
colonial governments after World War II, British tropical
architecture aimed at adapting the principles of modern
architecture according to local specificities outside Europe.13
On one hand, as a technological phenomenon, tropical
architecture has been analyzed by historians as a transfer of
norms, standards, and technical details from the colonial
capital to the peripheries. Influenced by science and technology studies (STS), this research has focused on the labor of
stabilization and reproduction of networks in which those
“immutable mobiles” or “global forms” circulated between
the metropolis and the colonies and, later, countries of the
British Commonwealth.14 On the other hand, as a cultural
phenomenon, tropical architecture has been understood as a
mode of dissemination of modern architecture aimed at normalizing the relationship between the colonies and the
metropolis. In these accounts, tropical architecture has been
theorized as a variation of metropolitan modernism, modified according to local climatic, technological, and social
conditions and reproduced in the postindependence period.15
Neither side of this metropolitan model of architectural
dissemination helps us to understand the building production by the GNCC. While architects from Bulgaria, Hungary,
Poland, and Yugoslavia considered their designs at the GNCC
as a continuation of their previous projects back home, the
architecture of the GNCC cannot be reduced to a sum of
European “modernisms.” Headed by Ghanaians with international education and experience, responding to the technopolitical road map of modernization taken by the
authorities, and accompanied by a self-aware discourse in the
popular and professional press, this production needs to be
seen as an assemblage and allocation of resources from competing networks intersecting in Ghana. These resources
included labor (intellectual and manual), building materials,
construction technologies, technical details, images and discourses, building norms and standards, and principles of
design. The admission of these resources to Ghana and their
transfers between particular networks were regulated by specific entrance protocols and gatekeeping procedures, such as
precredited contracts, technical assistance programs, and
free market agreements, but also by cultural hierarchies and
competing scenarios of modernization supported by various
international experts advising the Ghanaian authorities.16 By
addressing the protocols that granted or blocked the entrance
of particular resources to particular networks, this article
captures both sides of the mondialisation dynamics of the
architectural production of the GNCC: the mobilization and
appropriation of resources from the global networks operating in Ghana and the antagonisms between those networks.
I will begin with an overview of the intersecting networks,
the resources that circulated within them, and their entrance
conditions to Ghana. In the second part of this article I will
show how these resources were deployed in the GNCC’s
architectural production and instrumentalized within the
modernization processes pursued by the regime. I will argue
that this instrumentality took the form of the redistribution
of everyday places and times according to categories conveying the postcolonial modernization project, such as the
“modern” division of labor and new socioeconomic hierarchies. Yet, while in the Ghanaian press the GNCC architectural production appears as seamlessly combining resources
from competing networks within the idiom of modern architecture, the focus on one particular resource—architectural
labor—reveals the antagonisms between these networks.
In the third part of this article I will show how these antagonisms were articulated in the architectural production
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in Ghana.17 The GNCC designers from socialist countries,
including the architects of the ITF, aspired to international
architectural culture, but in the face of the accelerating economic competition with British architects and Ghanaians
educated in the West, their claim to this shared culture was
challenged. This challenge was formulated in the Cold War
discourse about the West’s cultural superiority over the
“East.” In the article’s final section, I will show how, in
response, architects from socialist countries legitimated their
work in West Africa by pointing at their experience of both
state-led postwar modernization in Eastern Europe and
Eastern European architectural culture since the late nineteenth century, with its contributions to nation-building
processes and its ambiguous experience of “colonization.”
Networks of Architectural Resources
in Nkrumah’s Ghana
The Ghana National Construction Company, the predecessor of the Ghana National Construction Corporation, was
created in 1958 as a joint venture between the governmentowned Industrial Development Corporation (60 percent)
and the Israel Construction Company–Solel Boneh (40 percent). Established one year after Gold Coast declared independence from the United Kingdom under the ancient name
of Ghana, the company was responsible for the construction
of buildings and infrastructure within governmental programs of economic and social modernization.18 In 1962 it
was nationalized and merged with the former colonial Public
Works Department (PWD) to create the GNCC.19 This
genealogy resulted in continuity between the activities of the
GNCC and the colonial PWD. The transfer of expertise was
conveyed by specifications, technical papers, and handbooks
published since the early twentieth century by PWD
branches in West Africa; guidelines published by various
Ghanaian ministries; and such manuals as Village Housing in
the Tropics (1947) by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry.20 They
provided recommendations about architectural typologies
and urban layouts, some information about vernacular housing types in British West Africa, pragmatic solutions for
issues of hygiene and transportation, suggestions for ways of
handling local and imported materials in the climatic and
social conditions in question, and typical details. These publications were available to and used by architects working in
the postindependence PWD and GNCC in Accra.21
The continuity between the colonial and the postindependence planning institutions in Ghana was also a personal one,
and it was targeted by the policy of Africanization launched by
the government.22 Following independence, supervising positions were increasingly assumed by Ghanaians, including
Kojo Gyinaye Kyei, A. K. Amartey, O. T. Agyeman, and Vic
Adegbite. Adegbite’s biography itself reveals the
internationalization of Ghanaian architecture. A graduate of
the architectural school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Adegbite received a UN fellowship to specialize in
housing design at the Inter-American Housing Center in
Bogotá, Colombia, and traveled to study housing programs
in Jamaica and Puerto Rico. He returned to Ghana in 1956,
and, as the head of the Ghana Housing Corporation, he was
responsible for such prominent designs as the Ghana Farmers’ Office (1960) and the headquarters of the Convention
People’s Party (CPP, 1960), the party headed by Nkrumah.23
While most Ghanaian architects taking up leadership positions in the early 1960s were educated in the United Kingdom and the United States, by the mid-1960s they were
joined by Ghanaians trained in the Soviet Union, such as
A. W. Charaway and E. G. A. Don Arthur.24
This process was a gradual one, however, and in the first
years after independence the PWD and the GNCC depended
heavily on a foreign workforce. Until the early 1960s, smaller
buildings were designed and constructed by the PWD/
GNCC, while more prestigious and singular buildings were
designed by British architects based in Accra or abroad and
executed by the PWD/GNCC. Several of these architects
subscribed to the principles of tropical architecture, represented in West Africa by buildings by Maxwell Fry and Jane
Drew, the Architects Co-Partnership, James Cubitt, John
Godwin and Gillian Hopwood, and Kenneth Scott. Launched
by colonial administrations in the 1940s, tropical architecture
came to be presented by its protagonists in the next two
decades as an international community of professionals who
offered their services to the new independent states. Along
these lines, many of the Accra-based proponents of tropical
architecture were active in Ghana after independence, including Kenneth Scott, who designed the Kumasi Stadium (1958),
the Korle Bu Hospital and its numerous extensions in the
1960s, and the Volta River Authority building in Tema
(1964).25 The National Archives Building in Accra, designed
in 1959 by Nickson, Borys & Partners (Figure 4), was added
to the National Museum designed by Fry, Drew, Drake &
Lasdun (1957).26 Drew and Fry continued to participate in
discussions on the future of Ghanaian cities during the 1960s
and designed a number of housing projects, as did the Architects Co-Partnership and Miles Danby. Many of these structures were built in Kumasi, where the campus of the Kwame
Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST)
became a major building site for British architects.27 Gerlach
& Gillies-Reynburn, as well as Barnes, Hubbard & Arundel,
worked on numerous buildings for educational institutions,
while A. Gilmour designed several carefully detailed private
bungalows whose wooden frames offered an alternative to the
concrete structures of Scott’s Accra villas.28
British contractors continued to play an important role
in Ghanaian architecture after independence. In the 1960s
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Figure 4 Nickson, Borys & Partners, National Archives Building, Accra, designed in 1959 (author’s photo, 2012).
Taylor Woodrow continued commissioning British architectural and engineering firms, including Ove Arup and Partners, which opened offices in West and South Africa during
the 1950s, and George Paton, the designer of the landmark
Ambassador Hotel in Accra and its subsequent extensions.29
In the course of the early 1960s, the GNCC increasingly
kept design commissions for itself, and the International
Trade Fair was a case in point. British professionals still
played an important role in the design of the fair, however;
they included R. H. C. Hammond, a Commonwealth expert
in exhibition design, who was commissioned to draft the
functional program of the fair. Also, most of the construction
materials for the fair—from louver windows and the aluminum sheets for the round roof of the Africa Pavilion to the
fountain at the ITF grounds and fittings for particular pavilions—were shipped from Britain.
From the beginning of the 1960s, construction activities
in Ghana were supported by a number of bilateral agreements between Ghana and the countries of the British Commonwealth, in particular Canada, which provided materials,
design, equipment, and training staff for Accra’s Technical
Training College.30 Architects from Italy and France were
also increasingly present in Ghana based on credit agreements with these countries.31 For example, the new terminal
for Accra Airport was underwritten by the French government and constructed in the mid-1960s by French companies according to a design by Pierre Dufau.32 Dutch engineers
were working at the Korle Bu estate projects as well as at the
ITF, and shortly after the end of Nkrumah’s regime, the
West German Trade Union Organization was contracted to
build houses for workers in Accra.33 At that time, Ghana
received a significant group of African American professionals, including the architect Max Bond, who was employed at
the GNCC, where he designed the celebrated Bolgatanga
Library (1965) and delivered several other designs for Accra,
such as the Studio and Practice Hall for the National Orchestra (1964).34 Following the first contract (1961) between the
Greek firm Doxiadis Associates and the Ghanaian Ministry
of Works and Housing, the largest external commission of
the period, the design of the master plan of the new town of
Tema, went to Doxiadis, which was also commissioned to
design the large commercial area in Central Accra, a project
never realized.35
It was only after the experience of international isolation
during the Congo crisis (1960) and after Western funding for
the Akosombo Dam was secured (1961) that Nkrumah
decided to formalize the opening of Ghana toward socialist
countries. This coincided with Soviet leader Nikita
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Khrushchev’s policy of supporting newly independent states
in opposition to the United States and its allies. Together
with Guinea and Mali, Ghana became a testing ground for
the Soviet policy in West Africa, which took the form of
economic rivalry and the dissemination of propaganda.36
The circulation of Soviet printed materials was followed
by the establishment of field bureaus for the chief Soviet
information agencies and newspapers, and by the granting of
fellowships for Africans to study in the Soviet Union.37
Under Nkrumah, architectural examples from socialist
countries were often more visible to the general public in
Ghana than those from the West, since the press presented
images of newly constructed public buildings and housing
neighborhoods in Beijing, Shanghai, Moscow, Leningrad,
Rostov-on-Don, Budapest, Warsaw, Constanta, and East
Berlin, as well as “socialist” new towns Dunaújváros in
Hungary and Nowa Huta in Poland, which Nkrumah visited
in 1961.38 In the course of the 1960s, the Ghanaian authorities were increasingly susceptible to the influence of socialist,
and sometimes specifically Soviet, models of development in
key sectors, in particular agriculture, industry, and social services.39 Besides the attractiveness of the model of fast-track,
state-led urbanization by industrialization, members of the
government in Accra stressed that “modern scientific socialism” was suitable for Ghana because it would allow the preservation of the principles and ideals of the traditional
communalistic society.40
The opening of the Soviet embassy in Accra (1959) and
the Ghanaian embassy in Moscow (1960) preceded Ghana’s
establishment of relations with socialist countries in Eastern
Europe and the PRC, and it was in Accra that the Chinese
prime minister Zhou Enlai announced in 1964 the “Eight
Principles” that were to define PRC aid to Africa in the
decades to come.41 Soon to follow were treaties of economic
aid and technical assistance, all registered by the U.S.
embassy in Accra with growing unease.42 Most contracts
signed between Ghana and socialist countries concerned the
construction of precredited industrial facilities, including
cement factories and steel rolling mills that furnished the
basis for the Ghanaian construction industry.43 The GNCC
realized health, transport, and industrial facilities according
to designs delivered by Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary,
and Poland, and these countries sent specialists to supervise
the construction of the buildings.44 Contracts for architectural and planning projects were signed as well, and in June
1961 Ghana and the Soviet Union agreed that nine Soviet
architects and engineers would be sent to Ghana to design
residential areas for Accra (for 25,000 people) and Tema (for
15,000 people). The project for the housing district in Accra
adapted the Soviet typology of the mikrorayon, or microdistrict, to the tropical climate, with a layout that took advantage of the wind from the ocean.45 The residential area in
Accra was designed as part of the Korle Lagoon Development Project, which also included a cultural and amusement
center, a sports center, public beaches, and the spectacular
African Unity Tower.46
Critical of the “uneven quality” of the Eastern bloc technical assistance to Guinea, Ghanaian officials raised doubts
about the actual gains of such projects for the recipient
countries.47 Delivered by teams working abroad, at best
on the basis of short visits to Accra, the plans for such
projects as the Korle Lagoon scheme were created without
sufficient knowledge of local technical, financial, and organizational constraints. That is why this project was shelved;
the same was the case with the seashore development in Central Accra, delivered by the Bulgarian state firm
Technoexportstroy.48
The real impact on the development of Accra was made
by those architects from socialist countries who were
employed by the PWD, and later by the GNCC. Among
them was Charles Polónyi, the Hungarian member of Team
10, who worked at the GNCC in 1963–64 on a contract
with TESCO, the International Organization for TechnicalScientific Cooperation, which managed the export of intellectual labor from socialist Hungary.49 Polónyi designed the
Flagstaff House housing project (1964) (Figure 5) and other
housing projects in Accra, industrial facilities in Accra
and Tema, and numerous proposals for the Osu Castle, or
Christiansborg, the seat of the government.50 In 1964 he left
to join the architectural faculty of KNUST in Kumasi, an
international group of teachers that included the Czech
architect Jan Skokánek as well as the Yugoslav (Croatian)
architects Miro Marasovi , Berislav Kalogjera, and Nebojsa
Weiner and the engineer Zvonimir Žagar. They made significant contributions to modern architecture in Ghana,
both through their teaching and through the projects they
designed as employees of the Development Office (later the
Architect’s Office) of KNUST (Figure 6).51 Another teacher
at Kumasi was the Croatian architect and sculptor Niksa
Ciko, who came to Accra in 1960 and was employed by the
PWD until 1962, contributing to the design of Police Headquarters in Accra (1962), among other projects.52 During the
1960s, the PWD/GNCC employed also at least four Bulgarian architects on contracts with Technoexportstroy. They
were responsible for governmental buildings in Accra and
other cities; among them was Ivan Naidenovitch, superintendent architect for schools.53
Yet the largest group of foreign architects at the GNCC
during the 1960s, at least twenty-six architects, came from
socialist Poland.54 Engineers and technicians in a separate
group were responsible for construction drawings and the
supervision of construction sites—seven Polish engineers
worked on the ITF project alone, and Polish foremen were
employed to train Ghanaian workers.55 On top of this, at
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Figure 5 Vic Adegbite (chief
architect), Charles Polónyi
(design architect), Flagstaff
House housing project, Accra,
1964 (author’s photo, 2012).
Figure 6 Students
participating in the course
“Structures and Structural
Design” taught by Zvonimir
Žagar, School of Architecture,
Town Planning and Building,
Kwame Nkrumah University of
Science and Technology,
Kumasi, Ghana, 1965 (photo
by Zvonimir Žagar; Zvonimir
Žagar Archive, Zagreb;
courtesy of Zvonimir Žagar).
least five Polish architects and planners were working at the
Town and Country Planning Department (TCPD).56 Besides
Chyrosz and Rymaszewski, the group of Polish architects at
the PWD/GNCC included Witold Wojczy ski and Jan
Dru y ski, the designers of the Job 600, which consisted of
the Banqueting Hall and the Conference Hall (1965) and the
renovation of the State House with a hotel slab serving as its
background (1965) (Figures 7 and 8).57 The complex was one
of the most visible projects carried out under Nkrumah—and
the most notorious, constructed for the 1965 Organization
of African Unity (OAU) summit at a time when Nkrumah’s
economic policies were bringing about food shortages in the
country.58 Jan Laube designed numerous educational facilities in Accra, Jarosław Nowosadski was responsible for a
number of health care facilities (Figure 9), Jakub Kotli ski
was the superintendent architect responsible for hospitals,
and Kazimierz Sierakowski was the superintendent architect
for police stations.59
Among the thirty-one Polish architects and planners
working for the PWD, GNCC, and TCPD in the 1960s,
eight were women; this reflected the high status of female
architects in Poland since the interwar period and the career
opportunities open to expatriate professional women in
1960s Ghana.60 The Polish sculptor Alina lesi ska was
invited to Ghana, and her design for the monument for
Kwame Nkrumah was realized on the grounds of the Ideological Institute in Winneba.61 Hannah Schreckenbach, an
émigré from the GDR who studied in Karlsruhe and
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Figure 7 Vic Adegbite (chief
architect), Jan Dru y ski (design
architect), State House Complex
(Job 600), Accra, 1965
(photographer unknown; Witold
Wojczy ski Archive, Warsaw;
courtesy of Witold Wojczy ski).
Figure 8 Vic Adegbite (chief
architect), Witold Wojczy ski
(design architect), Banqueting Hall
and Hotel at the State House
Complex (Job 600), Accra, 1965
(photographer unknown; Witold
Wojczy ski Archive, Warsaw;
courtesy of Witold Wojczy ski).
London, became superintendent architect at the GNCC and
was responsible for a large number of prominent projects,
including the extensions of the Parliament House in the
1970s.62
With architects from Ghana, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland,
and Yugoslavia at the GNCC (joined by professionals from
West Germany, the United States, the Philippines, and
India),63 the corporation contributed to the cosmopolitan
milieu of architects in Nkrumah’s Ghana. There were a limited number of places where these architects could meet,
including KNUST, which became a site of exchanges
between Ghanaian, American, British, and West German
architects and their fellow professionals from Hungary,
Poland, and Yugoslavia. The geodesic KNUST pavilion at
the ITF, built by Ghanaian students of Buckminster Fuller
when he was a visiting professor at the university, resulted
from such contacts. Several architects crossed Cold War
divisions, including Charles Polónyi, invited to join KNUST
by the dean John Lloyd (1964), who was aware of Polónyi’s
activities as a member of Team 10.64 To both worlds belonged
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Figure 9 Jarosław Nowosadski, Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Legon, Ghana, 1969 (SARP Archive, Warsaw, dossier 623; courtesy of SARP Archive, Warsaw).
also those émigrés from Poland who settled down in the
United Kingdom during or after World War II, came to
Gold Coast as colonial officials, and stayed in Accra after
1957; they included Eligiusz Daszkiewicz, a graduate of the
Polish School of Architecture opened in Liverpool during
the war, and Olgierd Wojciechowski, who worked at the
PWD and later the GNCC as chief architect under the nickname Ludlam.65 A small number of expatriate architects at
the GNCC cooperated with private firms in Accra; this was
the case with Hannah Schreckenbach.66
The GNCC and the Modernization of Ghana
The preceding overview shows the variety of the worldwide
networks that were conveying resources for space production
in Ghana, resources that the GNCC combined with others,
provided through local and regional networks, before assembling and allocating them. This agency of the GNCC was at
the heart of Ghana’s modernization processes, which
included industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and
the creation of programs of welfare provision (health, education, housing) and programs of support for national culture
and heritage.67 I suggest conceptualizing this agency of the
GNCC as an attempt to unify the times and places of the
Ghanaian society divided according to colonial, “tribal,” and
ethnic categories and to redistribute them according to the
postindependence socioeconomic order and the “modern”
social and technical division of labor.
In what follows I will show how this redistribution of
times and places was conveyed, manifested, stabilized, and
reproduced in the GNCC’s architectural production. A particularly useful source for this task is the Ghanaian daily
press, including such publications as the Evening News
(founded by Nkrumah in 1948 as Accra Evening News), the
official newspaper of the CPP and always at the forefront of
the ideological battle; the Daily Graphic (established in 1950);
and the Ghanaian Times (founded in 1958). Almost every day,
these newspapers presented photographs of buildings by the
GNCC, and the accompanying texts suggested to readers
how to speak about these new structures, how to look at
them, how to use them, and how to be at home in them.
In this sense the press participated in the processes of spatiotemporal redistribution of the new Ghanaian society rather
than simply informing about those processes.68
The architectural production of the GNCC was far from
homogeneous, as was captured in the headline on a 1961
article in the Daily Graphic: “Modern Buildings Are Simple
in Form—but Old Designs Are Still in Use.”69 The “old
designs” were typically constructed by local communities by
means of self-help and voluntary contributions, often with
some financial support from the government. Many of them
were designed according to colonial typologies and built with
local materials in resettlement villages at the time of the construction of the Akosombo Dam.70 In schools constructed by
the GNCC, pitched roofs and verandas were sometimes
combined with expressive elements in reinforced concrete,
as in the staircases in the Accra Academy extension; such
elements undermined the sharp opposition between “old
designs” and “modern buildings.”71 Until the early 1960s,
the latter were generally designed by private architectural
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Figure 10 Kenneth Scott, Korle Bu Hospital, Accra, 1964 (“Better
Figure 11 “The great architect of Ghana Comrade Kwame Nkrumah
Health Services,” in the series “This is the New Ghana Kwame
seen admiring the new National Headquarters of the Convention
Nkrumah is Building,” Evening News, 22 Dec. 1964, 5).
People’s Party” (Evening News, 7 Mar. 1960, 1).
practices in Accra and Kumasi and constructed by the
GNCC; later, they were designed directly by the GNCC. As
an index of the “changing face of Ghana,” they straddled
various visual idioms, from tropical architecture through
expressive compositions such as the Tamale Cathedral to
sophisticated appropriation of vernacular forms, as in the
Regal Cinema in Accra (1970).72 Some of these buildings
were also explicitly called “modern” or “modernistic” by
Ghanaian commentators who described the specific experience of these structures.73
“Modern buildings” did not constitute a discrete category, delineated by sharp borders, but rather a broad field,
defined by a number of points of radiation. Among them
were new high-rises marking the skyline of Accra, such as
the Job 600, the Korle Bu Hospital, and the new Police
Headquarters, a “modernistic” composition of large surfaces
of shutters placed in an overarching structural frame
(Figure 10).74 This building was featured in the press when
it was opened by Kwame Nkrumah, and the portraits of the
leader on the patterned backgrounds of such structures as
the CPP headquarters and the Trade Union Congress
(TUC; Arthur Lindsay and Associates, 1961) were powerful
examples of such points of radiation (Figure 11).75 Several
buildings in Kumasi were presented by the press as examples
of “Nkrumaistic architecture and planning.”76 Most of them
were added to the university campus, including the Unity
Hall and the Faculty of Architecture (Miro Marasovi , 1968)
(Figure 12), followed by the Faculty of Pharmacy (Nebojsa
Weiner, opened after 1970).77 The association of modern
architecture with Nkrumah’s rule came most dramatically
to the fore in a list of buildings singled out as targets for bomb
attacks by, presumably, conspirators planning to overthrow
Nkrumah in 1961; the list, made public by the police, included
the headquarters of the CPP and TUC, as well as the extension of the Osu Castle and the Black Star Square.78 This association continued after the end of the regime, and accusations
that Nkrumah had squandered state resources and appropriated them illegally typically included mention of the Job 600
and the Peduase Lodge, the presidential holiday resort and
retreat near Aburi designed by Vic Adegbite (1959).79
This figure-ground effect, by means of which a building
provides background for the leader who, at the same time,
presents the building as a “revolutionary display of architectural maturity in Nkrumaist Ghana,” was a specific case of a
more general syntax that was conveyed by hundreds of blackand-white photographs of buildings published in the
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Figure 12 Miro Marasovi , Hall 5
(Independence Hall), Kwame
Nkrumah University of Science
and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana,
mid-1960s (photo by Nebojsa
Weiner after completion; Archive
of Nebojsa Weiner, Zagreb;
courtesy of Nebojsa Weiner).
Figure 13 “. . . And I See Springing Up Cities in Africa” (“Scenes
around Ghana [3],” in the series “This is the New Ghana Kwame
Nkrumah is Building,” Evening News, 21 May 1963, 6).
Ghanaian press during the 1960s.80 At its most abstract level,
this syntax was that of line and surface: a balcony railing on
the background of a wall; delicate profiles framing glass and
openwork screens; a slab of ceiling visually detached from the
wall by a sharp shadow; a structural frame capturing the
whole volume of the building; a patterned surface of cement
bricks; new roads and pedestrian crossings whose geometry
is revealed by aerial photographs (Figure 13).81 This fascination with straight lines and smooth surfaces was shared by
numerous authors, who described suave movements of the
eye or of cars. One among them was particularly impressed
by the new road from Adomi to Tema, which, “like a Roman
Road . . . goes on for miles in a straight line” and allows for
the car to move “so smoothly over its very good surface that
one could relax and enjoy the very pleasant scenery of the
surrounding countryside.”82
According to these accounts, improvements in infrastructure allowed people to see the country with new eyes, and
those coming back to Ghana after a stay abroad would see
that it “has progressed in all fields . . . particularly in the field
of architecture.”83 The architecture of the GNCC had provided new landmarks for Accra; this becomes apparent when
one compares two maps of the city—the “Kingsway” plan of
1958 and the tourist map of 1965 (Figure 14).84 Whereas the
older plan presents the landmarks of Accra as an accumulation of heterogeneous buildings in colonial historicism, art
deco, and tropical architecture, the newer map shows the city
as fundamentally modern, defined by radio masts and other
buildings produced by the PWD/GNCC, such as the parabolic Presidential Tribune (1961) at the Black Star Square
(Independence Square), the Flagstaff House, the Police
Headquarters at the Ring Road, the State House Complex,
the fountain at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, and new pavilions of the Korle Bu Hospital.
This map reveals not only that the architecture produced
by the GNCC conveyed a variety of programs but also that
it allowed urbanites to differentiate between these programs
within an urban system, linked by newly constructed roads,
designed by TCPD. 85 A differentiation of modern
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Figure 14 “Accra. Compiled, drawn, and photo-lithographed by the Survey of Ghana,” 1965 (Geography and Map Reading Room, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.).
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Figure 15 The Presidential Tribune at the Black Star Square
(Independence Square), Accra, 1961 (“How Ghana Spent the Great
Day,” Evening News, 7 Mar. 1964, 1).
architecture was pointed out by the press, which described
new “stately” buildings of ministries (such as the Ministry of
Communications in Accra, 1963), praised “massive commercial buildings such as the new banks and new shops” (this
included the emblematic Bank of Ghana, 1958, and the
rhythmic boxes similar to oversized shopwindows of the
People’s Shop in Central Accra, 1962), and admired “modern
bungalows” such as those designed by Polónyi for the Roman
Ridge in Accra (1964).86
The addressee of this architecture was a new collective
body unified against inherited, ethnic divisions, in line with
Nkrumah’s condemnation of “tribalism,” and redivided
according to the principles of a new societal organization.
Particular importance was placed on housing projects for
low-income groups, such as three blocks of eighteen flats
each designed by Stanisław Rymaszewski at the GNCC and
built at the Switchback Road between 1964 and 1967.87 Lowincome housing estates were also constructed in Accra’s
Kaneshie and Lartebiokorshie neighborhoods. In the latter,
finished in 1962, each of the buildings consisted of six selfcontained flats, each with a chamber, hall, kitchen, bathroom, and toilet, to be rented at moderate price.88 The
repetition of the buildings on the allotments was by no means
seen as monotonous; rather, it was a sign of plenty. This
visual effect was also conveyed by the repetition of the same
photographs, which returned over and over again in the
press, and not always with the same captions.
At the same time, the differentiation of housing served to
educate readers on social distinctions emerging within the
Ghanaian society after independence. For example, an article
on housing policies in Ghana showed images of housing for
lower-, middle-, and higher-income groups, with subtle differences in architectural expression.89 This differentiation
continued in articles on hotels and motels made available to
inhabitants and visitors according to their income: from economic motels in Accra, consisting of modest bungalows, to
the expressive composition of volumes and large-scale surfaces of openwork screens and wide windows in the spectacular first-class hotel for foreign businessmen in Takoradi.90
Readers learned to recognize the luxury in modernist designs
conveyed by variations in volumes, materials, details, and
patterns—and the journalists never failed to mention the
costs of each construction. This included, in particular, the
Ambassador Hotel, synonymous with luxury in Ghana, and
the “elegant” VIP flats near the Korle Bu Hospital.91 Such
luxury was condemned as ostentatious when privately owned
by a minister or a chief justice (a condemnation often preceding a purge) but praised when it was seen as a benefit for all,
such as the “luxury” Tema Community Centre.92
The capacity of modern architecture to provide backdrops on which elements are both united and distinguished
conveys the logics of modernization in “the new Ghana
Kwame Nkrumah [was] building.”93 Construction workers,
schoolchildren, athletes, party officials, women, students,
and engineers proudly presented the buildings they had built
or that were offered to them by the government—and at the
same time, on the backgrounds of these buildings they
appeared as members of specific social and professional
groups, distinguished by attributes such as school uniforms
or nurses’ aprons (Figure 15).94 In these buildings everybody
had their proper places, like the schoolgirls framed by the
grid of the extension of the Aburi Girls Secondary School.95
These structures stabilized the new spatiotemporal order; for
example, the People’s Shop in Accra was open late at night
and hence “prevented many workers from running away
from their jobs to shop during business hours.”96 The modernizing objective of such architecture is evident: the girls of
the Aburi school, an extension to a college designed by Fry
and Drew in 1955, were prepared to “challenge men for top
jobs,” and the cold storage in Tema reduced the hours of
commuting for many women.97 The experience of a modern
everyday was also at the center of the International Trade
Fair when it opened with displays of commodities from
all around the world, numerous restaurants and snack bars,
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a cinema, an exhibition gallery, and a drive-in banking window (the first in Ghana) (Figure 16).98
It was by contributing to the modernization of both the
visual and the social fields, rather than simply by signifying
modernization, that the newly erected buildings in Accra
helped Ghanaians to “eradicate the colonial mentality” that
was “induced” by their “contact with Europe”—as the foreign minister Kojo Botsio put it during the opening of the
Workers’ College in Accra.99 To receive this message it was
sometimes enough to look at the newly constructed buildings—as Joe Joseph argued in the Daily Graphic. He
exhorted his fellow citizens to prepare for the 1965 OAU
summit, urging taxi drivers to be polite and creditable to
visitors coming to Accra and bus conductors, managers of
hotels, and shop assistants to be helpful as well as neat in
appearance; he further asked the general public not to use
the gutters and sidewalks as dumping grounds. This long
list of urbane virtues was triggered by the view of the “affectionate ‘Job 600’ towering high” on the horizon, and its
photograph was reproduced next to Joseph’s article so that
his readers could participate in the didactic effect of this
building.100
Built around the colonial State House, the Job 600 demonstrated the ambition of GNCC architects to manage the
past and to integrate it into the modernization project.
In 1961 the press drew the attention of the recently created
National Museum and Monuments Board to the colonial
architecture as a matter of public concern, including European military ensembles around Cape Coast and British
bungalows in Kumasi.101 Appropriating the colonial past
into the new visual coherence of the Ghanaian state could
mean a careful placing of volumes in a historical context.
This was the case with the extension of the Osu Castle by
the GNCC.102 While Wojczy ski’s project of the cabinet
wing adjusted the volumes and open galleries to the proportions of the historical structures (Figure 17), Polónyi’s
extension of the chapel wing of the castle included a vertical
white cube furnished with bay windows of reinforced concrete and gargoyles that evoked historical military
architecture.103
Yet the true challenge was to turn precolonial heritage
into a resource for the postindependence society. “We have
a culture which we are proud of and determined to preserve,”
claimed one author, and a reader wrote a letter to the editor
of the Daily Graphic in which he urged the preservation
of Ashanti temples as a part of the “world history of architecture.”104 “Blending Ghanaian, traditional life with modern
ways of living” was presented as a pressing task for architects
and urban planners, who were called upon to design buildings according to “traditional and cultural patterns.”105 An
example favorably discussed was the Junior Staff Housing at
Osu Castle (1961), designed by the British architect Derek
Figure 16 International Trade Fair, Accra, night view, 1967 (photo by
Jacek Chyrosz, 1967; Jacek Chyrosz Archive, Warsaw; courtesy of
Jacek Chyrosz).
Barratt at the PWD. One enthusiastic reviewer asserted that
this ensemble “express[ed] the fusion of African and European cultures needed in Ghana today,” in contrast to the
“foreign types dumped down here regardless, as is unfortunately so often the case.”106 The negotiation between traditional and modern forms was at the center of the project of
a chief’s residence in Bolgatanga by Vic Adegbite and Jacek
Chyrosz (1962): an orthogonal house under a flying roof,
surrounded by a set of semicircular screens that evoked the
spaces between traditional round buildings of the Bolgatanga
region and at the same time regulated sun exposure and airflow.107 This building was planned to be constructed of sandcrete and stabilized earth bricks, in line with the calls of some
Ghanaians to abandon imported materials in order to end
Ghana’s economic dependence on industrialized countries
and to “project African personality in our buildings.”108 The
expectation to convey the cultural specificity of Ghana was
also addressed in the design of the ITF. However, rather than
quoting specific building traditions of particular ethnic
groups, when designing the Africa Pavilion of the ITF
Chyrosz and Rymaszewski chose the form of an umbrella,
the symbol of power and prestige in West Africa, which they
saw as a more general cultural reference.109
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Figure 17 E. Y. S. Engmann
(engineer in chief), O. J. Ludlam
(chief architect), Witold Wojczy ski
(project architect), Osu Castle,
Accra, extension to the offices of
the prime minister, 1960s
(postcard from the author’s
collection).
Tropical Architecture as Cold War Discourse
In the private archives of the European architects hired by
the GNCC, their designs for Ghana appear as points in their
personal creative trajectories, carrying on the discussions in
architectural culture in Budapest, Sofia, Warsaw, and Zagreb.
By contrast, in the Ghanaian press these architects’ names
were almost never mentioned, and the architecture of the
GNCC appeared to be the result of collective work that
seamlessly combined resources, including the labor of architects, foremen, and workers, regardless of the networks that
brought them to Ghana.
From this perspective not much changed after the coup
where the architects from Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and
Yugoslavia were concerned. Unlike the Soviet, PRC, and
GDR advisers, who were expelled from Ghana, professionals
from other socialist countries were invited to stay and to contribute to the development of the country together with specialists from the West.110
The site of the International Trade Fair was a case in
point: photographs from the construction site published in
the Ghanaian press showed the Polish designers working for
the GNCC in friendly conversations with British advisers
and U.S. experts.111 The architecture of the fair, with its
elementary volumes, levitating roofs, and rhythmic patterning, appeared as a part of such international professional
culture as well. The fair had nothing to do with the historicist, socialist realist style that the educated Ghanaian public
could have associated with buildings in socialist countries,
since photographs of many such structures from the late
1940s and early 1950s were widely circulated under
Nkrumah.112 Rather, the design of the fair, together with
many other designs of the GNCC reviewed in the previous
section, subscribed to the register of tropical architecture
represented by a number of prominent buildings in Accra
since the late colonial period and appeared to develop the
principles of modern architecture beyond political divisions.
Yet a closer look at the fair challenges this assumption, and
in the final part of this article I will discuss how Cold War
antagonisms were articulated in the architectural production
in Accra in spite of the shared design culture of the architects
involved.
The focus on tropical architecture offers an entrance
point to this discussion. The design of the ITF followed the
principles spelled out by Fry and Drew in their Tropical
Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956) and other publications,
with climate, local materials and technologies, and people’s
needs and aspirations identified as “main considerations
influencing architectural design in the tropics.”113 Climate
was the first concern for the architects of the fair, and both
its layout and particular buildings were designed with natural ventilation, open to breezes from the ocean, with pronounced eaves providing shade and protection from rain,
open brickwork of the walls offering shade and ventilation,
and roofs raised above the buildings and volumes raised
above the ground to secure airflow. Climate was abstracted
into an operative model by means of a section that isolated
particular factors (daylight, glare, rain, ventilation) and reassembled them into one single drawing. This was consistent
not only with the approach advocated in Tropical Architecture
but also, more generally, with the privileging of the section
in the representation and management of the climatic conditions in postwar architecture, as presented, for example,
in Techniques et Architecture in 1952 by means of diagrams
that could be directly translated into specific designs and
were widely circulated in Francophone Africa in the 1950s
and 1960s.114 The section was also the main design tool for
all buildings of the ITF. The designers of the Africa Pavilion
conceived it by rotating the section around its central symmetry axis, and in Pavilion A the section was projected on
the façade, which, in this way, was turned into a pedagogical
diagram demonstrating the principles of rainwater disposal,
ventilation of the building, control of glare, and access of
sunlight (Figure 18). 115 It was this very same approach,
of designing a building by means of a section, that won one
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Figure 18 Diagram explaining the
principle of Pavilion A,
International Trade Fair, Accra,
1967 (Jacek Chyrosz and
Stanisław Rymaszewski,
“Mi dzynarodowe Targi w Akrze,
1.2.1967–19.2.1967, “ Architektura
4 [1969], 146).
of the second prizes for the Polish team (to which Chyrosz
belonged) in the competition for the cultural center in
Leopoldville, today Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of
Congo (1959)—the singular event that opened the doors to
West Africa for Polish architects.116
Fry and Drew’s second postulate, that of using local materials and technologies, was a challenge they and other “tropical” architects working in West Africa struggled with in their
practices. As was the case with such prominent buildings in
Accra as the National Museum and the National Archives,
the main materials of the fair were reinforced concrete and
cement blocks, steel construction for roofs, and aluminum
covering. These materials, including louver windows,
another emblematic detail of tropical architecture, were all
imported in 1960s Ghana, since the Ghanaian building
industry was only slowly taking off. However, several temporary buildings at the fair were constructed by the GNCC
from local materials, including the Cocoa Industry Pavilion,
designed by Jan Laube, and the Timber Industry Pavilion by
Chyrosz and Rymaszewski, in their words a “truly African
architecture” (Figure 19).117 The Timber Industry Pavilion
was a hanging structure of shades made of plywood supported by mahogany pillars. The plywood was produced in
Ghana from local hardwood and tested for resilience to West
African climate and insects.118
Finally, Fry and Drew’s third recommendation, that of
accounting for “people’s needs and aspirations,” when
applied to the ITF, displayed the challenge addressed by
Tropical Architecture: the imperative to respond to the needs
of a rapidly modernizing population from within the processes of modernization, which included the modernization
of those very needs.119 In other words, the ITF subscribed to
the principles of tropical architecture to no lesser extent than
its most visible examples in Accra and encountered the same
challenges that “tropical” architects faced in their own work.
Furthermore, these architects shared with the designers of
the ITF the suppliers of materials as well as the contractors.120 They included state firms such as the GNCC and the
State Construction Corporation and private ones, both international firms with representatives in Accra and local contractors, operated by expatriates or Ghanaians.121 The affiliation
with tropical architecture was further strengthened by photographs taken by Jacek Chyrosz shortly before the opening
of the fair, showing the rhythmic patterning of the varying
surfaces, slender pillars on contrasting backgrounds, and deep
shadows emphasizing the volumes. In another photo taken by
Chyrosz, a low viewpoint makes a railing appear as a colonnade, almost as monumental as the schools by Fry and Drew
shown in black-and-white photographs in a 1955 theme issue
of Architectural Design (Figure 20).122
This aspiration of Polish architects to participate in an
international community that adapted the principles of modern architecture to tropical conditions was supported by
publications that started to appear in Poland in the early
1960s in response to the increasing number of export contracts for Polish architects.123 An example is the 1965 paper
“Budownictwo w warunkach klimatu tropikalnego” (Construction in the condition of tropical climate), which gathered basic information about the climatic factors a designer
needed to take into account and their influence on detailing
and materials.124 These texts, as well as Soviet publications
on architecture in hot climates, generally available in socialist
Eastern Europe, typically included British, French, and U.S.
references in their bibliographies, and many featured photographs reproduced from Fry and Drew’s Tropical Architecture.125 In spite of the Cold War context of the engagement
of socialist countries in technical assistance and export of
labor, the social and political conditions of working outside
Europe were rarely mentioned in professional publications.
The ideological part of the training was left to a few hours of
instruction included in a course organized by the Centre for
African Studies of Warsaw University; professionals about to
leave Poland on Polservice contracts were supposed to attend
this course.126
Yet, in spite of a shared body of principles, materials, contractors, modes of representation, and architectural
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Figure 19 Vic Adegbite (chief architect), Jacek Chyrosz (design architect), Stanisław Rymaszewski (design architect), Timber Industry Pavilion,
International Trade Fair, Accra, 1967 (photo by Nebojsa Weiner, 1967; Archive of Nebojsa Weiner, Zagreb; courtesy of Nebojsa Weiner).
Figure 20 International Trade Fair, Accra, 1967 (photo by Jacek Chyrosz, 1967; Jacek Chyrosz Archive, Warsaw; courtesy of Jacek Chyrosz).
precedence, the ITF was never included in publications
about tropical architecture. Particularly striking was the
absence of any presentation of the fair’s architecture in the
journal West African Builder and Architect, which featured the
most relevant buildings associated with tropical architecture
from Ghana and Nigeria during the 1960s and became a
major vehicle for the promotion of their designers. This
absence cannot be explained by a lack of awareness about the
ITF on the part of the editors of the journal, given that
images of the fair’s Africa Pavilion appeared in an
advertisement for Naco louver window systems that ran in
two issues.127 Neither is it likely that the editors deemed the
fair not significant enough to feature on the pages of the
journal, since the ITF was one of the most visible projects of
the decade in West Africa, appearing on the covers of magazines in Ghana and elsewhere.128
The main reason for this omission was that West African
Builder and Architect was invested in prolonging the existence
of British colonial networks in the Commonwealth. The
architects featured in the journal were members of the Royal
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Institute of British Architects (RIBA)—that is, the very group
whose economic interests were undermined by the GNCC,
which was increasingly taking over control of the whole
building process, from design to construction. With the
withdrawal of the GNCC from commissioning architectural
designs to RIBA architects, these architects had to rely on
private investors, themselves under threat by Nkrumah’s
nationalization policy. Design authorship seems to have been
the criterion for publication in West African Builder and Architect, since the journal presented buildings designed by RIBA
architects even if they were constructed by the GNCC.129
The competition between the GNCC and other architects
in Accra sometimes took direct forms: for example, Nkrumah
invited both Kenneth Scott and Witold Wojczy ski of the
GNCC to submit designs for his private theater; the commission, not realized, went to Wojczy ski, as he recalls.130 On
an institutional level, the competition between these two
groups was reflected in the existence of two professional
organizations of architects in the first half of the 1960s: the
Gold Coast Society of Architects (GCSA), founded during
the colonial period (1954), and the Ghana Institute of Architects (GIA), founded in 1962. Most architects from socialist
countries working for the GNCC were members of the GIA,
including Chyrosz and Rymaszewski.131
Yet on the pages of West African Builder and Architect this
economic rivalry was translated into what Carl Pletsch has
called the “Cold War division of intellectual labor” in Western discourse. In this discourse, the Cold War appeared as a
mode of production of knowledge in which cultural works
were assumed to be produced only by the “First,” “democratic,” “free” world; by contrast, the “Second,” socialist
world could, at best, produce industrial and engineering
works.132 Within Western Cold War discourse, labor under
socialism appeared as “non-free,” forced labor; hence, it
could not produce cultural objects, which, in this discourse,
require the work of free, creative, and spontaneous subjects.
In other words, architects from socialist countries perceived themselves as members of one world of international
architectural culture, together with professionals from the
Commonwealth, or Western, networks. But in fact the
“worlds” they belonged to were not exactly the same, and the
transfers between these worlds were subject to gatekeeping
procedures. In the reports on socialist countries in the Ghanaian press, their technical prowess was presented hand in
hand with their cultural achievements. By contrast, the condition of visibility of a cultural object from a socialist country
within Western discourse—and its condition of entry to the
market of intellectual labor controlled by Western institutions—was its translation into a technical object, deprived of
cultural capital. This devalorization procedure was conveyed
by Fry and Drew, who, in Tropical Architecture, compared the
massive change under way in the “tropical zone” to changes
in Soviet Russia but noted that the latter were operating
under “coercion” and for that reason were of lesser value.133
That such Cold War division of intellectual labor permeated
West African Builder and Architect can be confirmed by a second look at the journal, which, in fact, did mention the
ITF—not, however, in the section presenting architectural
designs, but in brief reports titled “Developments in Ghana,”
where the fair was discussed as an infrastructural and engineering project. The text implied that the GNCC was the
contractor rather than the planning office, the designers of
the buildings were not mentioned, and neither drawings nor
photographs were published.134
Socialist Labor and Eastern European
Experience
The discourse on the “Cold War division of intellectual
labor” pointed at the conditions of labor rather than at ideology, aesthetics, or technology as a critical line of division
between architects from socialist countries and those from
the West. Indeed, the conditions of labor at the GNCC were
distinct from those at private practices in Accra. The differences included remuneration and taxation (for example,
besides paying taxes in Ghana, Polish architects were paying
substantial fees to Polservice) and the organization of labor
(with less apparent hierarchies among architects, where one
could be the design architect for one project while answering
to somebody else on another project).135
These differences did not suggest, however, that the work
of GNCC architects was “non-free” in any meaningful sense.
While most architects from socialist countries in Ghana were
dissatisfied with the bureaucratic constraints imposed on
their work under socialism, they perceived their employment
at the GNCC as an alternative to conditions back home, not
as their extension. They held this view in spite of the fact that
some constraints continued in the GNCC, and their employment was differentiated according to citizenship (for example, the Polservice contracts were limited to three years, after
which the architects had to return to Poland, while architects
who were citizens of Yugoslavia were not subjected to such
strict time limits).136 Although Polservice took political views
into account in the recruitment for contracts abroad, professional experience and knowledge of English were more
important criteria and could trump political disloyalties
toward the regime—in particular since Ghanaians participated in the last round of interviews in Warsaw. Few architects from Poland and Hungary working in Ghana were
card-carrying members of the Communist Party in their
respective countries; neither Chyrosz nor Rymaszewski was
a party member. The fact that Charles Polónyi was not a
member deprived him of state commissions in Hungary
and motivated him to leave for Ghana.137 Those among the
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Polish group who were suspected to be informants for the
secret police were socially isolated by others.138 Even functionaries of the regime presented themselves as pragmatic in
West Africa: Rymaszewski recalled that the Polish trade
counselor “told us upon our arrival to Accra that they don’t
need people for slogans but people who can get things
done.”139
This ambiguous relationship with the regimes in their
countries resulted in a balancing act between the necessary
maintenance of links with state institutions back home and
their strategic loosening. While institutions in Poland and
Hungary responsible for the export of labor to Ghana, such
as Polservice or TESCO, encouraged the contracted architects to facilitate new commissions for companies back home,
these architects were reluctant to follow such instructions.
More often than not, they were skeptical about their professional prospects upon their return home and, rather, invested
in networking in Ghana. For Rymaszewski, this strategy paid
off: after returning to Poland in 1967, he went back to Ghana
two years later, against the recommendation of Polservice
but at the explicit wish of the Ghanaian authorities.140 This
fine-tuned distance from official institutions of their countries of origin was reflected in the everyday lives of Eastern
European architects, who, in contrast to Soviet technicians,
preferred to socialize with their Ghanaian colleagues rather
than at official ceremonies in their embassies: “My Ghanaian
boss, Vic Adegbite, taught me how to dance the twist,”
recalled Rymaszewski.141
In other words, if architects from socialist countries
needed to legitimate their work in West Africa, it was not
because of its presumably “non-free” character. Rather, the
challenge was to prove their professional and cultural credentials. As Polónyi recalled about a press conference during
his stay in Nigeria (1969–76): “The first question put to me
was the following: ‘You are Hungarians. You never had colonies. You don’t have any tropical experience. Do you consider
yourselves competent to prepare a master plan for a city in
West Africa?’ ”142 In response, Polónyi pointed to his tenure
at KNUST but also to his previous experience in the resettlement projects in 1940s Hungary. Other Eastern European
architects also stressed their involvement in state-led planning, industrialization, and urbanization after World War II.
For example, Gra yna Jonkajtys-Luba and Jerzy Luba linked
their Labadi Slum Clearance scheme, developed at TCPD
in Accra (1965), to their previous work on the postwar reconstruction of Warsaw, and in particular to their projects for
the neighborhood of Powi le, one of the poorest and most
underdeveloped parts of Warsaw.143
Polónyi also stressed a longer cultural tradition that, in
his view, aligned Eastern Europeans and West Africans.
He argued that both had experienced “colonization” by
external powers, and this shared experience allowed him to
“understand” the Africans.144 Ghanaians reporting on Eastern European countries in the 1960s drew parallels between
the colonization of Ghana and the long history of domination over the territories between Prussia and Austria to the
west and Russia and the Ottoman Empire to the east. For
example, a Ghanaian journalist argued that because Bulgarians were “five hundred years . . . under the Turkish rule,”
they “understand the African and are very sympathetic with
her struggle for the liberation of [the] continent from foreign
domination.”145 (This, however, contrasted uncomfortably
with a number of racist incidents against Africans in Sofia at
that time.)146 Similarly, Josip Broz Tito pointed out the parallels between the history of Yugoslavia and that of West
Africa, and Nkrumah himself used the term “Balkanization”
to refer to the dangers faced by a divided Africa.147
The Eastern European architectural culture invested,
since the late nineteenth century, in the integration of territories characterized by multiple cultures and emerging
from cultural dependence on external powers was a reference
point for a number of architects from the region working in
postindependence West Africa. This experience informed
the work in Nigeria by Zbigniew Dmochowski, an architect
and scholar at the Institute of Polish Architecture at the Warsaw Polytechnic during the 1930s and a teacher at the Polish
School of Architecture in Liverpool during the war. Unwilling to return to Soviet-dominated Poland after the war, he
stayed in the United Kingdom, and in 1958 he was appointed
to the Department of Antiquities in Lagos, where he initiated a program of mapping Nigerian vernacular architecture.
This program, which he continued after Nigeria’s independence (1960), employed techniques that he had developed
while making his prewar measured drawings of wooden
architecture in what was then eastern Poland. Dmochowski
dedicated his study to the “architectural youth of Nigeria,”
who should accept “tradition as the starting point of their
creative, independent thinking” and “evolve . . . a modern
school of Nigerian Architecture.”148 A different experience
of the Eastern European architects—one of rupture rather
than of evolution—that reverberated with cultural politics
in postindependence West Africa was interwar functionalism in such contested territories as Moravia and Silesia. The
radiant modernity of new governmental buildings in Brno
and Katowice manifested a break with the past associated
with German historicism and hence the support of new
states reemerging after World War I, Czechoslovakia and
Poland.
The attitude toward colonization was ambiguous in Eastern European architectural culture, however. This included
Polónyi, who bemoaned the “colonization” of Hungary by
the Soviet Union but admitted the gains of the Austrian
“colonization” of the Danube basin after Turkish rule.149 In
Poland, colonial fantasies were developed during the
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interwar period by the Maritime and Colonial League, which
demanded colonies for Poland.150 Much more real was the
program of “internal colonization” of the eastern territories
of interwar Poland, underdeveloped and inhabited by
national minorities, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and
Jewish. In these “borderlands,” the typology of the Polish
gentry country house was applied not only to housing but
also to numerous railway stations and post offices, schools,
and military barracks. The journalist Ryszard Kapu ci ski
grew up in such a “colonized territory” in the 1930s and later
discovered similar territories in Africa when reporting on the
emergence of postcolonial countries, including Nkrumah’s
Ghana.151 Kapu ci ski and the left-wing part of the Polish
intelligentsia did not cherish any sentiment for colonialism,
and this attitude was only strengthened by German-Nazi
biopolitics, which most Polish architects working in Ghana
had experienced firsthand.
Because of this historical experience of both the colonized
and the colonizers, which was very well understood by the
Ghanaian elites, the arrival of Eastern European architects
complicated the logics of subalternity in Ghana, and in particular the clear-cut cultural hierarchies between Africans
and Europeans inherited from the colonial period. The
changed conditions of labor were the very site of this complexity; in the words of one architect in Accra, “I remember
very well these Eastern European architects, because it was
the first and the last time that a white man had an African
boss in Ghana. It never happened before and it never happened after.”152
Conclusions: Not Another Modernism
In recent years, scholars have demonstrated that the global
mobility of modern architecture after World War II did not
mean its homogenization. Against reductive critiques of globalization as leading to a regime of sameness where everything resembles everything else, scholars have pointed out
the differentiation and specificity of postwar modern architecture around the world, sometimes captured in concepts of
“African,” “Eastern,” and “Third World” modernisms and,
more generally, “other” modernisms.153 This study contributes to such efforts. By putting aside the metropolitan model
of architectural transmissions, I have argued that the process
in the course of which modern architecture was becoming
the technocultural dispositif of urbanization outside Europe
and North America cannot be reduced to the exports from
one or more “centers.” Yet this renouncement of the metropolitan model requires a theorizing of difference in the
worldwide mobility of architecture that is not based on the
polarity between “center” and “periphery,” “core” and “margins,” “the same” and “the other.” This is why I have not
approached the architecture of the GNCC as “Ghanaian
modernism,” let alone as a sum of Eastern European “other
modernisms.” Rather, I have theorized the difference of the
GNCC architecture as compared with architectural production elsewhere by focusing on the antagonisms between
competing “projects” of the world, according to the concept
of mondialisation. From this perspective, I have studied the
architecture in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah as produced
from within antagonistic visions of global cooperation and
solidarity that mobilized the circulation of resources and
regulated the gatekeeping procedures between these networks at a variety of scales.
Ghana lost its visibility as a beacon of decolonization
after the fall of Nkrumah, but the mondialisation of modern
architecture described in this article was about to be generalized in the years to come. Over the course of the 1960s,
this process was facilitated by the increase in the number of
architects from European socialist countries working
abroad. For example, while in 1965 Ghana received most of
the Polish specialists in Africa (102 people), in the following
years that number quickly declined, and in 1971 Nigeria was
on the top of the list (94), just a little ahead of Algeria (91).154
These architects were welcomed in countries that were
nominally socialist or ruled by socialist parties but whose
governments negotiated their positions across Cold War
rivalries rather than siding with one or the other hegemonic
bloc: Syria since the 1960s; Iraq after Abdel Karim Kassem’s
coup d’état in 1958 and later under Saddam Hussein;
Afghanistan between 1953 and 1973, when the Afghan government accepted assistance from both sides of the Iron
Curtain; Algeria under the Boumédienne regime (1965–78);
Libya under Muammar Gaddafi (after 1969); and, after the
1960s, Nigeria, Kuwait, and others.155 Employed by state
offices and private firms, architects from socialist and NonAligned countries worked in competition and, sometimes,
in cooperation with architects from the West, as well as
architects from regional networks and local professionals
and administrators. In this sense, far from being an exceptional case, the architectural production in Nkrumah’s
Ghana manifested the mondialisation dynamics that were to
shape the urbanization processes in the coming decades of
the Cold War.
Notes
1. I am grateful for the funding and support granted to me by a number
of institutions. This article results from a research project supported in
2010 by the Institute of History and Theory of Architecture (GTA), Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH); the Museum of Modern
Art in Warsaw; Casco–Office for Art, Design and Theory; and Adam
Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw. The research project was initiated at
the Institute GTA; continued at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where
I was the 2011–13 A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow; and completed
at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC), University
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of Manchester. Parts of this article were also presented at the Bartlett
School of Architecture, University College London; Columbia University;
Harvard University Graduate School of Design; the University of Lisbon;
the University of Liverpool; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I am grateful for the feedback I received after these presentations. I would
also like to thank the chairs and participants of COST Action IS0904,
European Architecture beyond Europe, in particular Johan Lagae, Rachel
Lee, Ola Uduku, and Mercedes Volait, who commented on this work. Special
thanks go to the architects and engineers working in Ghana in the 1960s, and
their families, for granting me interviews and access to their private archives:
Encho Balukchev, Attila Em dy, Jacek Chyrosz, Zdenka Ciko, Gra yna
Jonkajtys-Luba, Anikó Polónyi, Evlogi Raychev, Stanisław Rymaszewski,
Hannah Schreckenbach, Nebojsa Weiner, Witold Wojczy ski, and
Zvonimir Žagar. I am particularly grateful to those who helped me with
the research in Accra: Foster Asae-Akonnor, Małgorzata Asare, Kofi
Asare, Alexander Eduful, Nat Nuno-Amarteifio, and Henry Nii-Adziri
Wellington. I would also like to thank Elena Balabanska, Piotr Bujas, Alicja
Gzowska, Aleksandra K dziorek, and Balint Tolmar for their invaluable
assistance during my archival research in Europe.
York: Routledge, 2003); Donald McNeill, The Global Architect: Firms, Fame
and Urban Form (New York: Routledge, 2009); Kim De Raedt, “Between
‘True Believers’ and Operational Experts: UNESCO Architects and
School Building in Post-colonial Africa,” Journal of Architecture 19, no. 1
(2014), 19–42.
2. For a description of the programming of the ITF, see Stanisław
Rymaszewski, “Handing Over Notes: Ghana International Trade Fair,”
Accra, 27 May 1967, Stanisław Rymaszewski Archive, Warsaw.
11. Lefebvre, “The Worldwide Experience”; Stuart Elden, “Mondialisation
before Globalization: Lefebvre and Axelos,” in Space, Difference, Everyday
Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid (New York: Routledge, 2008),
80–93; Łukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and
the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
12. Hannah Le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture,” Journal of
Architecture 8, no. 3 (Sept. 2003), 337–54.
13. On the programs carried out by the French, Belgian, and Portuguese
colonial governments, see, for example, Maurice Culot and Thiveaud de
Jean-Marie, eds., Architectures françaises outre-mer (Liège: Mardaga, 1992);
Jean-Luc Vellut, ed., Villes d’Afrique: Explorations en histoire urbaine (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2007); Johan Lagae, Claude Laurens: Architecture—Projets et
réalisations de 1934 à 1971 (Ghent: Vakgroep Architectuur en Stedenbouw,
Universiteit Gent, 2001); Madalena Cunha Matos, “Colonial Architecture
and Amnesia: Mapping the Work of Portuguese Architects in Angola and
Mozambique,” OASE, no. 82 (2010), 25–34.
3. Nana Kwame Ofori-Amanfo, interview by author, June 2012, Accra.
4. See Łukasz Stanek, “Second World’s Architecture and Planning in the
Third World,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012), 299–307; Łukasz
Stanek, “Miastoprojekt Goes Abroad: The Transfer of Architectural
Labour from Socialist Poland to Iraq (1958–1989),” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012), 361–86; Łukasz Stanek, Postmodernism Is Almost
All Right: Polish Architecture after Socialist Globalization (Warsaw: Fundacja
B c-Zmiana, 2012); Łukasz Stanek, “Mobilities of Architecture in the
Global Cold War: From Socialist Poland to Kuwait and Back,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 4, no. 2 (2015), 365–98.
5. By contrast, a pavilion for Taiwan was built. See “19 Will Man Hungarian Pavilion,” Daily Graphic, 18 Jan. 1967, 1; “Ghana, Hungary to Sign
Trade Agreement,” Daily Graphic, 30 Jan. 1967, 19; “Deku: Need for Africa
Market Now Great,” Daily Graphic, 16 Feb. 1967, 10; Mike Adjei, “Trade
Fair Opens Today,” Daily Graphic, 1 Feb. 1967, 2.
6. Regarding such UN programs, see, for example, Charles Abrams,
Vladimir Bodiansky, and Otto H. G. Koenigsberger, Report on Housing in
the Gold Coast (New York: United Nations Technical Assistance Administration, 1956).
7. On the concept of planetary urbanization, see Neil Brenner and
Christian Schmid, “Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 19, nos. 2/3 (2015), 151–82.
8. See Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi, eds., Modernism and the Middle
East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2008); Patsy Healey and Robert Upton, eds., Crossing
Borders: International Exchange and Planning Practices (London: Routledge,
2010); Annabel Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels
and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Joe
Nasr and Mercedes Volait, eds., Urbanism: Imported or Exported? (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2003); Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion von Osten, eds., Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the
Future (London: Black Dog, 2010); Tom Avermaete and Johan Lagae, eds.,
“L’Afrique c’est chic: Architecture and Planning in Africa 1950–1970,”
OASE, no. 82 (2010); Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development, and Identity (London: Routledge, 2011); Jack Masey and
Conway Lloyd Morgan, Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and Their
Role in the Cultural Cold War (Baden: Lars Müller, 2008); Anthony King,
The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge,
1984); Jeffrey W. Cody, Exporting American Architecture, 1870–2000 (New
9. See the theme issues of two journals: Łukasz Stanek, ed., “Socialist
Networks and the Internationalization of Building Culture after 1945,”
ABE Journal 6 (2014), http://dev.abejournal.eu (accessed 29 June 2015);
Łukasz Stanek and Tom Avermaete, eds., “Cold War Transfer: Architecture and Planning from Socialist Countries in the ‘Third World,’ ”
Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012). For bibliographic overviews, see
Stanek, “Second World’s Architecture and Planning”; and my introduction to Stanek, “Socialist Networks and the Internationalization of Building Culture.”
10. Henri Lefebvre, “The Worldwide Experience” (1978), in State, Space,
World: Selected Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, trans. Gerald
Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 274–89; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, or
Globalization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
14. Jiat-Hwee Chang, “Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network:
Tropical Architecture, Building Science and the Politics of Decolonization,” in Lu, Third World Modernism, 211–35. See also Stephen J. Collier
and Aihwa Ong, “Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems,” in
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Stephen J. Collier and Aihwa Ong (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
2005), 3–21.
15. See Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003); Le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical
Architecture.”
16. Robert L. Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). On the competing notions of (African) modernity during the Cold War, see Odd Arne
Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of
Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peter Geschiere, Birgit Meyer, and Peter Pels, eds., Readings in Modernity in Africa
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
17. For an account in architectural history of labor as resource, see Paul
B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi
Monumental Building Economy (London: Routledge, 2000).
18. “G.N.C.C.’s 3 Years of Notable Achievements,” Daily Graphic, 19 May
1961, 18; “Ghana to Form Joint Company with Israel,” Daily Graphic,
25 Mar. 1958, 1; “G.N.C.C. Trains Its Own Men for Key Posts,” Daily
Graphic, 19 May 1961, 19; “Ministry Building,” Daily Graphic, 20 Apr.
1963, 1; “Prison Offices,” Daily Graphic, 24 Apr. 1963, 8; “90 Rooms
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Added to Govt House,” Daily Graphic, 14 Feb. 1963, 1; “Atlantic Hotel,”
Daily Graphic, 21 July 1964, 1. See also “GNCC Springs Hope in Ghana’s
Reconstruction Programme” (advertisement), Evening News, 30 Sept.
1961, 8; “Workers Greet the Leader,” Evening News, 24 Dec. 1964, 8;
“G.N.C.C. Can Make More Profit,” Evening News, 18 Jan. 1965, 3. On
Israeli-Ghanaian relations, see Zach Levey, “The Rise and Decline of a
Special Relationship: Israel and Ghana, 1957–1966,” African Studies Review
46, no. 1 (Apr. 2003), 155–77; Haim Yacobi, Israel and Africa: A Genealogy of
Moral Geography (London: Routledge, 2015). See also “Solel Boneh (Overseas Contracting and Harbor Works Branch) Activities in West Africa,”
Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files, Ghana 1960–January
1963, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and “Annual Report of the
Ghana National Construction Corporation (Formerly Division of Public
Construction) for the Period 1959–60” (Accra: Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting on behalf of the Ghana National Construction Corp.,
1963), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
19. After independence, the PWD was shortly subsumed under the
Ministry of Works and Housing. After the fall of Nkrumah, the PWD
was again separated from the GNCC; see “P.W.D. May Come into Its
Own . . . ,” Evening News, 11 June 1966, 1. On the role of the PWD in the
British Empire, see Peter Scriver, “Empire-Building and Thinking in the
Public Works Department of British India,” in Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, ed. Peter Scriver
and Vikramaditya Prakash (London: Routledge, 2007), 69–92.
20. See, for example, Nigeria Public Works Department Specifications (Lagos:
PWD, 1938); A Handbook on Semi-permanent Housing, prepared and compiled by Desmond Agg, issued by W. C. Fitz-Henry (Lusaka: Government
Printer, 1947); Information Book: Hospitals and Dispensaries (Lagos: PWD,
1939); the series of technical papers published by various PWD branches;
A Building Guide for Self Help Projects (Accra: Ministry of Social Welfare,
1961); Jane B. Drew and E. Maxwell Fry, in collaboration with Henry L.
Ford, Village Housing in the Tropics (London: Lund Humphries, 1947).
21. Jacek Chyrosz, interview by author, June 2011, Warsaw; Gra yna
Jonkajtys-Luba, interview by author, June 2011, Warsaw.
22. See “Staff List of Administrative, Professional, Senior Executive and
Senior Technical Appointments” for the fiscal (financial) years 1956–57,
1957–58, 1959–60, 1960–61, 1961–62, National Archives, Accra. For
discussion of architecture in postindependence Ghana, see Crinson, Modern Architecture, in particular the chapter “Dialectics of Internationalism:
Architecture in Ghana 1945–66,” 127–56; Ikem Stanley Okoye, “Architecture, History, and the Debate on Identity in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and
South Africa,” JSAH 61, no. 3 (Sept. 2002), 381–96; Janet B. Hess, “Imagining Architecture: The Structure of Nationalism in Accra, Ghana,” Africa
Today 47, no. 2 (2000), 35–58; Janet B. Hess, “Imagining Architecture II:
‘Treasure Storehouses’ and Constructions of Asante Regional Hegemony,”
Africa Today 50, no. 1 (2003), 27–48. See also Keith Jopp, Ghana: Ten Great
Years, 1951–1960 (Accra: Ghana Information Services, 1960); Ghana Ministry of External Affairs, This Is Ghana (London: Welbecson Press, n.d.).
23. “Adegbite the Great Architect,” Evening News, 2 Apr. 1960, 13. Here
and in what follows, unless stated otherwise, the date refers to the year
of completion of the building in question. In references to the AESL
Archives, the dates pertain to the drawings.
24. A. W. Charaway, interview by author, June 2012, Accra; E. G. A. Don
Arthur, interview by author, June 2012, Accra.
25. “Kumasi Stadium May Be Ready Next Year,” Daily Graphic, 8 Aug.
1958, 14; “3 Million Pounds Extension to Korle Bu Hospital,” Evening
News, 9 Dec. 1960, 9; Udo Kultermann, ed., Central and Southern Africa,
vol. 6 of World Architecture 1900–2000: A Critical Mosaic, general ed.
Kenneth Frampton (New York: Springer, 2000), 66–67; “Volta River
Authority—Offices,” West African Builder and Architect 4, no. 4 (1964),
66–69; “£600,000 Offices for V.R.P.,” Evening News, 8 July 1964, 5.
26. Nickson, Borys & Partners, National Archives Building in Accra,
drawings, 1959, AESL Archives, Accra. Other projects by Nickson,
Borys & Partners in the AESL Archives include Kumasi Technical Institute (1958), Accra Technical Institute (1959), Memorial Library in Accra
(1960), Magistrates Courts in Accra (1960), Central Library Extension in
Accra (1961), School for Librarians in Accra (1961), and Survey Headquarters (1961).
27. Maxwell Fry, “Accra Gradually Becoming a Handsome City,” Daily
Graphic, 11 May 1960, 9; Jane Drew, “The Progress Achieved Has Been
Enormous,” Daily Graphic, 11 May 1960, 13; Maxwell Fry, “Accra Was
a Sleepy Town,” Daily Graphic, 29 Feb. 1960, 7; A. Graham Tipple, The
Development of Housing Policy in Kumasi, Ghana, 1901 to 1981: With an
Analysis of the Current Housing Stock (Newcastle: Centre for Architectural
Research and Development Overseas, 1987), 23–25; Miles Danby, Grammar of Architectural Design: With Special Reference to the Tropics (London:
Oxford University Press, 1963); Crinson, “Dialectics of Internationalism.”
28. The designs by Gerlach & Gillies-Reynburn included the Great Hall
at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi
(ca. 1964; see Crinson, “Dialectics of Internationalism,” 146) and the
Achimota Primary School (1961), AESL Archives, Accra. See also Barnes,
Hubbard & Arundel Architects and Town Planning Consultants, Wiawso
Teachers Training College, drawings, 1961, AESL Archives, Accra; A.
Gilmour, designs of private bungalows, 1960–62, AESL Archives, Accra.
29. John Carmichael, Together We Build: Fifty Years of Taylor Woodrow in
Ghana, 1947–1997 (London: Taylor Woodrow Construction Limited,
1997). See also the supplement on Taylor Woodrow, Ghanaian Times, 10
Mar. 1961; Peter Jones, Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 141, 155; “Ambassador
Hotel,” Daily Graphic, 4 Oct. 1962, 9; “The Bridge That’ll Span the Ankobra,” Ghanaian Times, 30 Aug. 1960, 2.
30. “Commonwealth in Action,” Ghana Review 7, no. 1 (1967), 3–6; “Work
on the £G11 Million Kwame Nkrumah Commercial Centre to Begin,”
Evening News, 11 Apr. 1962, 1, 6.
31. On the architects from Italy, see Renato Severino, Equipotential Space:
Freedom in Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1970), 16–19; compare the
project of the Marine Drive in Accra by Valle, Angrisani, and Pacello, Edilizia Moderna 89–90 (1967), 62.
32. “New Terminal for Accra Airport,” Daily Graphic, 17 Aug. 1964, 1;
“New Airport,” Daily Graphic, 15 July 1965.
33. “Korle to Be Turned into a Holiday Resort,” Ghanaian Times, 3 Feb.
1961, 5; “Germans to Build Houses in Accra,” Evening News, 27 July 1966, 1.
34. Ola Uduku, “Bolgatanga Library, Adaptive Modernism in Ghana 40
Years On,” in The Challenge of Change: Dealing with the Legacy of the Modern
Movement—Proceedings of the 10th International DOCOMOMO Conference,
ed. Dirk van der Heuvel, Maarten Mesman, Wido Quist, and Bert Lemmens
(Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2008), 265–72; Max Bond, Studio and Practice Hall
for the National Orchestra, drawings, 1964, AESL Archives, Accra.
35. Doxiadis Associates, “Kwame Nkrumah Commercial Area—Accra,
Ghana,” Ekistics: The Problems and Science of Human Settlement (August
1961), 110–25; Viviana d’Auria and Bruno de Meulder, “Unsettling Landscapes: New Settlements for the Volta River Project between Tradition
and Transition (1951–1970),” OASE, no. 82 (2010), 115–38; Viviana
d’Auria, “From Tropical Transitions to Ekistic Experimentation: Doxiadis
Associates in Tema, Ghana,” Positions: On Modern Architecture and Urbanism/Histories and Theories 1 (2010), 40–63.
36. Robert Legvold, Soviet Policy in West Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); Sergey Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold
War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964 (Washington,
D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010).
37. Ghana Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Sovetsko-ganskoe
sotrudnichestvo, 1961.
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38. “Workers’ Flats,” Daily Graphic, 6 Nov. 1965, 10; “This’s the Soviet
Union,” Evening News, 11 July 1961, 6; “Housing the Soviets,” Daily
Graphic, 8 Nov. 1965, 11; “A Fine Art School,” Evening News, 27 June
1961, 4; “Workers’ Housing Estates in Shanghai,” Evening News, 24 May
1962, 4; “Modern Buildings at New Belgrade,” Evening News, 16 Nov.
1962, 2; “Visit to First Socialist Town,” Daily Graphic, 4 Apr. 1964, 6–7;
“Hungary on the High Way to Socialism,” Evening News, 26 Nov. 1962, 5;
“Constanta, Seaport on Black Sea,” Evening News, 23 Aug. 1963, 5; “This
Is Poland,” Evening News, 27 July 1961, 6; “Osagyefo’s Activities in Pictures,” Evening News, 9 Aug. 1961, 6; “Raised from War Ruins,” Evening
News, 27 July 1961, 4; “It’s Warsaw Day,” Daily Graphic, 17 Jan. 1964, 7;
“State Farm at Lublin County,” Evening News, 31 Oct. 1963, 4.
39. See Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political
Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981);
Benno J. Ndulu, Stephen O’Connell, Jean-Paul Azam, Robert H. Bates,
Augustin K. Fosu, Jan Willem Gunning, and Dominique Njinkeu, eds.,
The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa, 1960–2000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
40. “Project Our Personality by Socialism,” Daily Graphic, 2 Jan. 1963, 3.
41. Deborah Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32, 313; Cole Roskam, “Nonaligned Architecture: China’s Designs on and in Ghana and Guinea, 1955–
92,” Architectural History 58 (2015), 261–91.
42. “Semi-annual Report on Sino-Soviet Bloc Politico-economic Relations
with Ghana,” 22 Dec. 1959; “International Communist Prospects in Ghana,”
26 May 1960; “Projects to Be Undertaken by Communist Countries,”
1 Sept. 1960; “Soviet Union Trying to Move in on Volta River Project,”
13 Nov. 1960; “Note to the Secretary of State,” 21 Dec. 1960; “Report on
Sino-Soviet Bloc Politico-economic Relations,” 23 Dec. 1960. All of the
preceding are found in Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files,
Ghana 1960–January 1963, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
43. “Agreement between the USSR and Ghana on Economic and Technical Cooperation,” signed 4 August 1960 in Moscow, in A Calendar of
Soviet Treaties, 1958–1973, ed. George Ginsburgs and Robert M. Slusser
(Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1981), 107;
“The Ghana Metal Industries Limited,” Ghanaian Times, 29 Sept. 1961,
9; “Factories Are Coming: The Jobs Are Coming,” Evening News, 16 Nov.
1962, 1; “Model of Pwalugu Tomato Processing Plant,” Evening News, 19
Feb. 1963, 1; “Sardine Factory for Tema,” Evening News, 13 May 1964, 1;
“Why This Economic Sabotage?,” Evening News, 1 Oct. 1965, 5; “At Asutsuare . . . ,” Daily Graphic, 12 Feb. 1966, 6–7. See also “Polish Firm to Build
Cement Factory,” West African Builder and Architect 2, no. 5 (1962), 108.
44. “Czech Factories for Ghana,” West African Builder and Architect 1,
no. 4 (1961), 107; “Transfuzní stanice pro Ghanu,” Architektura SSR 6
(1964), 351. The bus assembly plant for Accra (1963) was designed by
Attila ­Em dy for IPARTERV, Industrial Buildings Consulting Co. Budapest, private archive of Attila Em dy, Budapest. The print works near Tema
(1964) was designed by Kurt Fiedler for VEB Zentrales Projektierungsbüro
“Polygraph” Leipzig; see “Ghana: Regierungsdruckerei in Tema,” Deutsche
Architektur 13 (Sept. 1964), 539–47; “Sugar Factory Combine at Asutsuare
near Akuse in Ghana,” Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw, Cekop 2309,
1/104, no. 15.
45. “Agreement between the USSR and Ghana on Technical Aid,” signed
in Accra on 12 June 1961, in Ginsburgs and Slusser, Calendar of Soviet Treaties, 147; “Exchange of Notes between the USSR and Ghana Concerning
Soviet Technical Aid to Ghana in a Construction of a Residential Area in
the Town of Tema,” sent 7 Feb. 1965 in Accra, in Ginsburgs and Slusser,
Calendar of Soviet Treaties, 288; “Soviet to Aid Ghana. Pact Is Signed for
Designing of Residential Areas,” New York Times, 13 June 1961, 2; Anatolii
Nikolaevich Rimsha, Gradostroitel’stvo v usloviiakh zharkogo klimata (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1972), 191, 193; Anatolii Nikolaevich Rimsha, Gorod i
zharkii klimat (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1975); “Soviet Experts in Accra,” Daily
Graphic, 9 Aug. 1961, 1.
46. “African Unity Tower for Accra,” Daily Graphic, 20 June 1964, 1.
47. “Ghana’s Many Pacts with the East,” Daily Graphic, 5 Mar. 1962, 5. For
discussion of the Development Plan of Conakry (1963) by the Yugoslav
(Croatian) Urban Planning Institute, see Jennifer Czysz, “Urban Design as
a Tool for Re-imagining a Capital City: Planning Conakry, Guinea, after
Independence” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001).
48. “Pact for Olympic Stadium Signed,” Daily Graphic, 25 June 1964, 1;
“Olympic Stadium for Ghana,” Evening News, 13 Apr. 1964, 1; “Sporten
kompleks v Akra—Gana,” Architektura (Sofia), nos. 9/10 (1963), 12–17;
“Kompleks ‘krajbrezna zona’ v Akra—Gana,” Architektura (Sofia), no. 7
(1964), 34–38; Encho Balukchev, personal dossier, Society of Bulgarian
Architects Archive, Sofia.
49. Ákos Moravánszky, “Peripheral Modernism: Charles Polónyi and the
Lessons of the Village,” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012), 333–59;
Anikó Polónyi, telephone interview by author, February 2013.
50. The drawings of designs by Charles Polónyi as project architect
(Vic Adegbite, chief architect) in the AESL Archives include Bungalow Allocation Housing in Accra, Airport Estates, 1964; Garden of the
Ghana News Agency, 1964; Extension to the Old Chapel Wing of the Osu
Castle, 1964; and Osu Castle Mausoleum, 1965. See also Vic Adegbite
(chief architect), Teresa Kulikowska (design architect), drawings checked
by Charles Polónyi, Furniture for the Extension of the Osu Castle, 1964,
AESL Archives, Accra. In addition, see Charles Polónyi, An ArchitectPlanner on the Peripheries: The Retrospective Diary of Charles K. Polónyi
(Budapest: M szaki Könyvkiadó, 2000), 53–80.
51. Zvonimir Žagar, telephone interview by author, February 2013;
Nebojsa Weiner, telephone interview by author, February 2013; I. C.,
“In Memoriam Miro Marasovi ,” Gra evinar 56 (2004), 323.
52. Zdenka Ciko, email correspondence with author, March 2014;
“Osagyefo Opens Police ‘House,’ ” Daily Graphic, 11 June 1962, 5;
“Osagyefo Will Open New Police H’quarters,” Evening News, 3 June 1962, 8.
53. Evlogi Raychev and Encho Balukchev, interview by author, July 2014,
Sofia; Ivan Naidenovich, personal dossier, Society of Bulgarian Architects
Archive, Sofia. Besides Naidenovich, other Bulgarian architects working at the GNCC included Evlogi Raychev, S. T. Ploskov, T. I. Todorov,
and Z. Doytchev. On Bulgarian export projects, see Grigor Doytchinov,
“Pragmatism, Not Ideology: Bulgarian Architectural Exports to the ‘Third
World,’ ” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 3 (2012), 453–73.
54. I compiled the list of the Polish architects during my research at the
AESL Archives in Accra in June 2012 and corroborated it by querying the
SARP Archive (Warsaw) and other archives, and through interviews with
Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Polish architects.
55. Jacek Chyrosz and Stanisław Rymaszewski, “Mi dzynarodowe Targi w
Akrze, 1.2.1967–19.2.1967,” Architektura (Warsaw) 4 (1969), 143–46.
56. Chyrosz, interview by author, June 2011; Stanisław Rymaszewski,
interview by author, June 2011, Warsaw.
57. State House Complex (Job 600), drawings and photographs, 1965,
private archive of Witold Wojczy ski, Warsaw; see also SARP Archive,
Warsaw, dossier 770.
58. Ryszard Kapu ci ski, Gdyby cała Afryka (1971; repr., Warsaw: Agora,
2011), 248; see also Charles L. Sanders, “Kwame Nkrumah: The Fall of a
Messiah,” Ebony, Sept. 1966, 138–46.
59. See, for example, O. J. Ludlam (chief architect), J. Laube (superintendent architect), A. Gadomska (project architect), Accra High School,
drawings, 1967, AESL Archives, Accra; E. Y. S. Engmann (engineer in
chief), O. J. Ludlam (chief architect), J. Kotli ski (superintendent architect, hospitals), Extension to the School of Hygiene, Korle Bu Hospital,
drawings, 1970, AESL Archives, Accra; S. F. Kwaku (chief engineer), Vic
Adegbite (chief architect), J. Kotli ski (project architect), New Laboratory
A r c h i t e c t s f r o m S o c i a l i s t C o u n t r i e s i n G h a n a ( 1 9 5 7 – 6 7 ) 439
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C.R.I., Ghana Academy of Sciences, drawings, 1964, AESL Archives, Accra;
E. Lartey (engineer in chief), Vic Adegbite (chief architect), K. Sierakowski
(architect), I. Naidenovitch (architect), Prison Headquarters, Accra, drawings,
n.d., AESL Archives, Accra. See also SARP Archive, Warsaw, dossier 623.
July 1963, 6; “Self-Help Spirit Grips the Villages,” Evening News, 25 July
1963, 6. Designs for resettlement villages were also provided by architects
at Kumasi University; see the articles on this subject in the Kumasi special
issue of Arena: Architectural Association Journal 82 (July/Aug. 1966).
60. The women included Anna Gadomska, who contributed to designs
of numerous schools, including the extension of Accra Academy (1967),
designs for students’ lodgings (1967–69), and the design of the ITF;
Barbara Zb ska-Bartoszewicz, who designed numerous housing projects
in and outside Accra (1965–67) as well as the Kumasi Relay Station (1967);
and Emilia Massalska, who, during her two stays in Ghana, was responsible for hospital buildings in Accra and Sunyani (1966–71) as well as
the layout of the Central Department Area in the ministries complex in
Accra (with Kami ski, 1968). Others were Teresa Kulikowska, responsible for the interior design of the Osu Castle (1964); Maria Hatt, the
designer of the telecommunication engineering school in Accra (1966);
and Maria Waschko, who designed an office building, a hotel, and
bungalows in Accra (1969–74); see AESL Archives, Accra. At TCPD,
Maria Ostrowska-Podwysocka contributed to master plans of numerous
Ghanaian cities, including Sekondi-Takoradi, and Gra yna JonkajtysLuba, together with her husband, Jerzy Luba, delivered detailed traffic
master plans of Accra, the Labadi Slum Clearance project, and numerous landscaping projects, including Marine Drive and Korle Bu Lagoon in
Accra; see SARP Archive, Warsaw, dossiers 344, 711, 759.
61. “Pomnik Prezydenta Nkrumaha,” Kontynenty 5, June 1964, 8; “Polish
Sculptress Show-Piece,” Ghanaian Times, 18 May 1965. The monument
was destroyed after the 1966 coup.
71. E. Lartey (engineer in chief), Vic Adegbite (chief architect), E. Daszkiewicz (architect), Standard schools and colleges, single story, 4 classrooms, drawings, n.d., AESL Archives, Accra; E. Y. S. Engmann (engineer in chief), O. J. Ludlam (chief architect), E. K. Osei (superintendent
architect), Jan Laube, Anna Gadomska, I. Naidenovitch, Accra Academy,
drawings, 1967, AESL Archives, Accra.
72. “Ghana’s Changing Cities and Towns,” Evening News, 19 Feb. 1964,
6; for the series “The Changing Face of Ghana,” see Ghanaian Times,
21 June 1961, 3; 22 June 1961, 3; 24 June 1961, 4; 28 June 1961, 3. See
also “Progress in Ghana Is Evident in New Buildings,” Evening News, 30
Sept. 1961, 5; “Flats for All Workers,” Evening News, 17 May 1962, 3;
“Extensions to Korle Bu Hospital,” Evening News, 28 June 1963, 6. On
the cathedral and the cinema, see “New £40,000 Cathedral for Tamale,”
Daily Graphic, 16 Mar. 1963, 6; E. Y. S. Engmann (engineer in chief), O.
J. Ludlam (chief architect), J. T. Laube (project architect), Regal Cinema,
Accra, drawings, 1970, AESL Archives, Accra.
73. “Osagyefo Will Open New Police H’quarters.”
62. Hannah Schreckenbach, email correspondence with author, December 2012; Hannah Schreckenbach, with the assistance of Jackson G. K.
Abankwa, Construction Technology for a Tropical Developing Country (Eschborn: German Agency for Technical Cooperation for the Department of
Architecture, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, 1983).
63. Jacek Chyrosz, telephone interview by author, July 2012.
64. Anikó Polónyi, telephone interview by author, February 2013; Łukasz
Stanek, ed., Team 10 East: Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism
(Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art; Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014).
65. Jacek Chyrosz, interview by author, June 2012, Warsaw; Przemysław
Kaniewski, Polska Szkoła Architektury w Wielkiej Brytanii 1942–1954 (Warsaw: Marek Woch, 2013).
66. Schreckenbach, email correspondence with author, December 2012.
67. See “Annual Report of the Ghana National Construction Corporation.”
68. These papers addressed a limited readership but reached a much
broader audience than professional journals such as West African Builder
and Architect or debates at KNUST; see Jennifer Hasty, The Press and Political Culture in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Given
that most articles did not carry bylines and that, by the mid-1960s, the
newspapers were subject to increasingly tight censorship, one can only
speculate about the authors, who seem to have included journalists, practicing architects, state officials, and, sometimes, academics. See “Kumasi
Stadium—A Real Sculpture in Concrete,” Daily Graphic, 21 June 1961,
7; see also the critique of the design of the National Theatre in Accra by
Dorothy Padmore, “It Means Living Theatre Not Building,” Ghanaian
Times, 12 June 1961, 10; and “Exciting Housing That Fuses 2 Worlds,”
Daily Graphic, 19 July 1961, 7.
69. “Modern Buildings Are Simple in Form—but Old Designs Are Still in
Use,” Daily Graphic, 19 May 1961, 18.
70. “Rural Housing—Akosombo Offers Possible Solution,” Daily Graphic,
20 May 1961, 12–13; “New Hall for Apam,” Daily Graphic, 23 Apr. 1962,
6; “The 3 Types of Roofs to Think About,” Daily Graphic, 11 Jan. 1962,
4; Asirifi Danquah, “Self-Help Gives Agogo a New Look,” Daily Graphic,
27 Sept. 1965, 5; “Forward to Work and Happiness,” Evening News, 12
74. Ibid.
75. See the photographs in Evening News, 7 Mar. 1960, 1, and 5 May 1960,
2; “President Nkrumah Opens TUC H’D Quarters,” Evening News, 9 July
1960, 7.
76. “Ghana’s Changing Cities and Towns,” 6; “Kumasi City Hotel Is Now
Completed,” Evening News, 22 June 1964, 5.
77. Žagar, telephone interview by author, February 2013; Weiner, telephone
interview by author, February 2013.
78. “Origins of the Conspiracy,” Evening News, 11 Dec. 1961, 2–7.
79. “Ex-GNCC Boss Toured 5 Nations in a Month,” Evening News, 10
Dec. 1966, 2; “Release ‘Job 600’ for Concerts,” Daily Graphic, 13 June
1966, 1; “Did the Peduase Lodge Cost £750,000?,” Evening News, 16
July 1966, 1; Kweku Tsen, “Peduase Lodge: Architectural Masterpiece of
Ghana,” Graphic Online, http://www.graphic.com.gh (accessed 18 Dec.
2013). See also “The Estate of Nkrumah,” Daily Graphic, 5 Mar. 1966, 5;
“Fathia’s Villa . . . in Cairo,” Daily Graphic, 11 Mar. 1966, 1; “Palaces for
Two Chiefs,” Daily Graphic, 1 Apr. 1966, 1.
80. “Kumasi City Hotel Is Now Completed,” 5.
81. “This Is the New Ghana Kwame Nkrumah Is Building,” Evening News,
21 May 1963, 6.
82. “Progress in Ghana Is Evident in New Buildings,” 5.
83. “Accra: Fast Developing City . . . ,” Evening News, 17 Feb. 1966, 5.
84. “The Kingsway Street Map of Accra,” 1958, G8854.A2 1958.H3,
Geography and Map Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.; “Accra. Compiled, drawn, and photo-lithographed by the Survey of
Ghana,” 1965, G8854.A2 1965.G5, Geography and Map Reading Room,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
85. Jerzy Luba and Gra yna Jonkajtys-Luba, Traffic Studies for
Accra, TCPD, 1960s, Jerzy Luba and Gra yna Jonkajtys-Luba Archive,
Warsaw.
86. “Progress in Ghana Is Evident in New Buildings”; “Ministry Building”; “New Residency for the Western Regional Commissioner,” Evening
News, 30 June 1964, 5; “The People’s Shop,” Evening News, 7 July 1962, 1;
Polónyi, An Architect-Planner on the Peripheries, 55.
87. “The Task Ahead,” Evening News, 7 Aug. 1964, 9; Rymaszewski,
“Handing Over Notes,” 5.
88. “Flats for All Workers”; “A New Accra Rises on the Hills,” Evening
News, 26 July 1962, 1; “2000 More Houses for the Workers!,” Evening
News, 18 July 1963, 1; “People’s 7-Year D-Plan,” Evening News, 11 Mar.
1964, 5; “The People Are Being Housed,” Evening News, 11 July 1964, 5;
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“Government Votes £20m for Housing,” Evening News, 11 July 1964, 5;
“Cheap Houses for the People,” Evening News, 15 July 1964, 5; “600 More
Workers’ Houses to Be Built,” Evening News, 21 Aug. 1964, 5; “More Flats
for Workers,” Evening News, 9 Oct. 1965, 5.
89. “Houses for the People,” Daily Graphic, 24 Nov. 1960, 10–11.
90. “Ghana Has Hotels Galore for All!,” Daily Graphic, 29 June 1961, 9,
15; “Takoradi’s New Hotel,” Daily Graphic, 18 Mar. 1963, 1–3; “ ‘Unity’
Motel Opened,” Daily Graphic, 12 Aug. 1963, 3.
91. “This Gives Hotels a Chance to Expand Business,” Daily Graphic, 16
Mar. 1960, 7; “Accra Takes a New Look,” Daily Graphic, 7 Aug. 1962, 7.
92. “Krobo, Your New Building Is Too Ostentatious!,” Evening News,
13 Apr. 1962, 1; “Exclusive Pictures of Krobo’s New Mansion,” Evening
News, 14 Apr. 1962, 1; “Who Owns This Building?,” Evening News,
11 Dec. 1963, 1; “Don’t Miss Tema Dance,” Ghanaian Times, 27 July
1961, 5.
93. “Osagyefo Brought Big Changes to Ghana,” Evening News, 19 June
1964, 5. See also the series “This Is the New Ghana Kwame Nkrumah Is
Building,” Evening News, 17 May 1963, 8, 20 May 1963, 6, 21 May 1963,
6, and 23 May 1963, 6; “Rapid Progress,” Evening News, 4 Oct. 1963, 6;
“Spectacular!,” Evening News, 21 Oct. 1963, 6.
94. “He Turns the Key,” Daily Graphic, 26 Aug. 1960, 8–9; “£10,000
Centre for Achiase . . . ,” Daily Graphic, 6 June 1961, 8–9; “Law School
Building Opened in Accra,” Daily Graphic, 6 Jan. 1962, 6–7; “New £4,500
Gymnasium for Adisadel,” Daily Graphic, 19 June 1963, 7; “Kwame at
Cape Coast Varsity,” Daily Graphic, 8 Dec. 1965, 8–9; “Pioneers Getting
Ready for Queen,” Evening News, 25 Oct. 1961, 6; “Forward to Work and
Happiness”; “Opening of Sampa’s £20,000 Health Centre,” Daily Graphic,
26 May 1960, 8–9.
95. “Facilities for Educating Girls Have Now Doubled,” Evening News,
6 Nov. 1961, 5.
96. Evening News, 18 July 1962, 1.
97. “Women Challenge Men for Top Jobs,” Daily Graphic, 6 Nov. 1961, 9.
Regarding the cold storage in Tema, see Daily Graphic, 10 May 1963, 8–9.
98. “Nunoo Sees Ministry’s Stand at Trade Fair,” Daily Graphic, 30 Jan.
1967, 4; “Some Facts You Must Know,” Daily Graphic, 17 Jan. 1967, 7, 10;
“The Big Trade Fair Site at a Glance,” Daily Graphic, 17 Jan. 1967, 8–9.
See also Bianca Murillo, “Ideal Homes and the Gender Politics of Consumerism in Postcolonial Ghana, 1960–70,” in Homes and Homecomings:
Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return, ed. K. H. Adler and Carrie
Hamilton (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 106–21.
99. “Uphold the Dignity of African Personality—Osagyefo,” Evening
News, 6 Dec. 1963, 1.
100. Joe Joseph, “The Summit—Your Civic Duties . . . ,” Daily Graphic,
12 Oct. 1965, 5.
101. “Osagyefo Inspects ‘Castle,’ ” Ghanaian Times, 25 Aug. 1960, 1;
“Ghana’s Building Heritage: Lessons from Ancestors,” Daily Graphic, 20 May
1961, 9; “Reprieve for 12 Old Houses,” Daily Graphic, 5 Jan. 1963, 1; “African
Artists Are Destined to Develop a Creative Tradition,” Evening News, 22
Mar. 1963, 5–6. Jan Laube and Stanisław Rymaszewski were appointed
by the government to survey colonial architecture by means of measured
drawings; see, for example, the measured drawings of late nineteenthcentury bungalows in Kumasi by Rymaszewski, Stanisław Rymaszewski
Archive, Warsaw; and R. B. Nunoo, director, Ghana Museum, Accra, “Testimonial to Mr S. H. Rymaszewski,” 17 Jan. 1974, Stanisław Rymaszewski
Archive, Warsaw.
104. “What Have You for the Masses?,” Ghanaian Times, 27 July 1961, 5;
J. F. Seebach, “Save the Temples,” Daily Graphic, 7 June 1961, 7.
105. “Plan Blends the Old with the New,” Daily Graphic, 14 Sept. 1959, 5;
“An Idea for Ghanaian Architects,” Evening News, 19 June 1961, 5.
106. “Exciting Housing.” See also Kultermann, Central and Southern
Africa, 88–89. Another article praised a hotel at Akosombo Dam for merging old and modern building traditions and forms: “The Past Leads to the
Present,” Daily Graphic, 2 Aug. 1961, 7.
107. Vic Adegbite (chief architect and project architect), J. Chyrosz
(project architect), Proposal, residence Bolgatanga, drawings, 1962, AESL
Archives, Accra.
108. “What Is Good for the Tropics?,” Daily Graphic, 7 Aug. 1962, 9;
“House Designs for Tropics,” Daily Graphic, 21 Aug. 1963, 7; “Project African Personality in Our Buildings,” Evening News, 30 Sept. 1961, 7; “Let’s
Make Good Use of Our Local Materials,” Evening News, 30 Sept. 1961, 6, 9.
109. Jacek Chyrosz, interview by author, June 2010, Warsaw.
110. “20 Russians Sent Away . . . and Four Chinese Too,” Evening News,
17 Mar. 1966, 1.
111. “At Trade Fair Site,” Evening News, 7 July 1966.
112. See note 38.
113. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone
(New York: Reinhold, 1956), 23; see also Michel Écochard, Jane Drew, and
Maxwell Fry, “Deux études d’urbanisme applicables au Sénégal” (n.p., 1962);
Drew and Fry, Village Housing in the Tropics; Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew,
Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones (New York: Reinhold, 1964).
114. Rémi Le Caisne, “Les conditions de l’architecture en Afrique tropicale,” Techniques et Architecture, nos. 5/6 (1952), 45–48; Johan Lagae,
“Building ‘Le Nouveau Congo’: Fifties Architecture and the Emergence
of the Modern Cityscape in the Belgian Congo,” in Additions to Architectural History: XIXth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Macarthur and Antony Moulis
(Brisbane: Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand,
2002); Johan Lagae, “ ‘Kongo zoals het is’: Drie architectuurverhalen uit
de Belgische kolonisatiegeschiedenis 1920–1960” (PhD diss., Ghent University, 2002), 316–17.
115. Chyrosz and Rymaszewski, “Mi dzynarodowe Targi w Akrze.”
116. “Konkurs dla Konga Belgijskiego: Nagrodzona praca polska,” Architektura (Warsaw) 10 (1959), 463; SARP Archive, Warsaw, dossiers 401, 852.
117. Jacek Chyrosz, telephone interview by author, February 2013.
118. “Ghana Factory for the Production of Weather Proof Plywood,” West
African Builder and Architect 1, no. 2 (1961), 45–46; “Czech Factories for
Ghana”; “Structural Use of Exterior Grade Plywood in West Africa,” West
African Builder and Architect 5, no. 2 (1965), 41; “Low Cost Housing in
Nigeria,” West African Builder and Architect 7, no. 6 (1967), 171.
119. Fry and Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, 24.
120. “Schedule of various overseas orders for Ghana International Trade
Fair,” 10 Aug. 1966, AESL Archives, Accra.
121. Jacek Chyrosz and Nebojsa Weiner, telephone interview by author,
February 2013. Of particular importance for the construction of the ITF
was the firm A. Lang; among other contractors operating in Accra and
Kumasi, Weiner mentions J. Monta and E. Tonone.
122. See Crinson, Modern Architecture, 139–41; Jane Drew, “Recent Work
by Fry, Drew, Drake & Partners and Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun in West
Africa,” Architectural Design 25, no. 5 (May 1955), 137–74.
102. “Castle Will Be Ready Soon for Queen’s Visit,” Ghanaian Times,
1 Aug. 1961, 1.
123. “Dylematy tropiku,” Fundamenty 1, no. 576 (1968), 13.
124. Maciej Ziółek, “Budownictwo w warunkach klimatu tropikalnego,”
In ynieria i budownictwo 7 (1965), 216–20.
103. E. Y. S. Engmann (engineer in chief), O. J. Ludlam (chief architect),
W. Wojczy ski (project architect), Osu Castle, extension to the offices of
the prime minister, n.d., AESL Archives, Accra. For Polónyi’s projects for
the Osu Castle, see note 50.
125. For example, Ziółek’s paper (ibid.) was illustrated with photographs
of West African architecture by Drew, Fry, and Scott. In another paper,
Ziółek suggested that designers should learn from countries with extensive
experience in tropical construction, and his bibliography included French,
A r c h i t e c t s f r o m S o c i a l i s t C o u n t r i e s i n G h a n a ( 1 9 5 7 – 6 7 ) 441
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Russian, U.S., and Israeli sources in addition to British ones. Maciej Ziółek,
“Problemy budownictwa w warunkach klimatu tropikalnego,” Informacja adresowana 58 (1968), 1–14. For Soviet publications, see V. L. Voronina,
Narodnye traditsii arkhitektury Uzbekistana (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo arkhitektury i gradostroitel’stva, 1951); Vladimir Nikolaevich Punagin, Tekhnologiia
betona v usloviiakh sukhogo zharkogo klimata (Tashkent: Fan, 1977); S. A.
Mironov and E. N. Malinskii, Osnovy tekhnologii betona v usloviiakh sukhogo
zharkogo klimata (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1985); L. N. Kiselevich, V. A.
Kossakowskii, and O. I. Rzhehina, Zhillishchnoe stroitel’stvo v usloviiakh zharkogo
klimata (Moscow: Izdatelstvo literatury po stroitel’stvu, 1965); Rimsha,
Gradostroitel’stvo v usloviiakh zharkogo klimata; Rimsha, Gorod i zharkii klimat.
126. Bogodar Winid, “The Centre of African Studies of Warsaw University,”
Studies on Developing Countries 2 (1972), 151–58; Stanisław Grzywnowicz
and Jerzy Kiedrzy ski, Prawa i obowi zki specjalisty (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa
UW, 1972).
127. “Naco Louvre Windows” (advertisement), West African Builder and
Architect 8, no. 1 (1968), A5; “Naco Louvre Windows” (advertisement),
West African Builder and Architect 8, no. 2 (1968), A5.
128. Ghana Review 7, no. 2 (1967).
129. “Volta River Authority—Offices.”
130. Witold Wojczy ski, interview by author, June 2011, Warsaw.
131. Jacek Chyrosz and Stanisław Rymaszewski, interview by author,
June 2011, Warsaw. For example, among nineteen architects present at
the GIA meeting on 29 September 1964, eleven were from socialist countries (ten of them from Poland): J. Nowosadski, K. Sierakowski, J. Przeradowski, J. Chyrosz, S. Ploskov, J. Kotli ski, Z. Lewa ski, E. Massalska,
W. Wojczy ski, J. Dru y ski, and E. Szymczak. See “Minutes of the General Meeting of Ghana Institute of Architect[s] Held on Tuesday 29/9/64,”
Max Bond Papers 1951–2009, 2009.015, Box 26, Avery Drawings &
Archives Collection, Columbia University, New York. The GCSA merged
with the GIA in 1965.
132. Carl E. Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23,
no. 4 (1981), 565–90.
133. Fry and Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, 24.
134. “International Trade Fair to Be Held in Accra,” West African Builder
and Architect 3, no. 6 (1963), 116; “Special Import Licenses for Trade Fair,”
West African Builder and Architect 4, no. 2 (1964), 42; “International Trade
Fair,” West African Builder and Architect 4, no. 4 (1964), 86; “Trade Fair
Postponed,” West African Builder and Architect 5, no. 1 (1965), 19.
135. Chyrosz and Rymaszewski, interview by author, June 2011; Jacek
Chyrosz, telephone interviews by author, February 2013.
136. Chyrosz and Rymaszewski, interview by author, June 2011; Žagar,
telephone interview by author, February 2013; Weiner, telephone interview by author, February 2013.
137. Polónyi, An Architect-Planner on the Peripheries, 82.
138. Stanisław Rymaszewski, interview by author, August 2010, Warsaw.
139. Ibid.
140. O. J. Ludlam, chief architect, Public Works Department, Accra, Ghana,
“Letter of Reference for Stanisław Rymaszewski,” 24 Jan. 1972, Stanisław
Rymaszewski Archive, Warsaw. During his second stay in Accra, Rymaszewski
continued to work on the ITF, preparing the second fair in 1972.
141. Rymaszewski, interview by author, August 2010. See also “Report on
Sino-Soviet Bloc Politico-economic Relations.”
142. Polónyi, An Architect-Planner on the Peripheries, 82.
143. Jerzy Luba and Gra yna Jonkajtys-Luba, Labadi Slum Clearance
Project at TCPD, photocopies of drawings, 1965, Archive of Gra yna
Jonkajtys-Luba, Warsaw; Jonkajtys-Luba, interview by author, June 2011.
144. Polónyi, An Architect-Planner on the Peripheries, 25, 46, 184.
145. “Socialist Europe as I Saw It,” Ghanaian Times, 4 Sept. 1961, 5.
146. Julie Hessler, “Death of an African Student in Moscow: Race,
Politics, and the Cold War,” Cahiers du Monde russe 47, nos. 1/2 (2006),
33–63.
147. “Yugoslavia Ready to Co-operate with Ghana,” Ghanaian Times, 11
Feb. 1961, 2; Nkrumah quoted in K. F. Buah, A History of Ghana (London:
Macmillan, 1980), 187.
148. J. C. Moughtin, ed., The Work of Z. R. Dmochowski: Nigerian Traditional Architecture (London: Ethnographica, 1988), 15–16; Zbigniew
Dmochowski, An Introduction to Nigerian Traditional Architecture, 3 vols.
(London: Ethnographica, 1990).
149. Polónyi, An Architect-Planner on the Peripheries, 46; Moravánszky,
“Peripheral Modernism.”
150. Marek Arpad Kowalski, Dyskurs kolonialny w Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej
(Warsaw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2010).
151. Artur Domoławski, Kapu ci ski non-fiction (Warsaw: wiat Ksi ki,
2010), 24; Kapu ci ski, Gdyby cała Afryka; Ryszard Kapu ci ski, The Shadow
of the Sun (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
152. Interview by author, June 2012, Accra.
153. See, for example, Manuel Herz with Ingrid Schröder, Hans Focketyn,
and Julia Jamrozik, eds., African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence—Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia (Zurich: Park
Books, 2015); Hertha Hurnaus, Benjamin Konrad, and Maik Novotny,
Eastmodern—Architecture and Design of the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia
(New York: Springer, 2007); Lu, Third World Modernism. For a recent
critical review, see Carmen Popescu, “At the Periphery of Architectural History—Looking at Eastern Europe,” ARTL@S Bulletin 3, no.
1 (2014), 8–17.
154. Grzywnowicz and Kiedrzy ski, Prawa i obowi zki specjalisty, 21–22.
155. Stanek, Postmodernism Is Almost All Right; Stanek, “Mobilities of
Architecture.”
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