Since its creation by architect and professor Lesley Lokko OBE in 2021, the African Futures Institute has been promoting a new model for education around teaching, research, and public events. Organised as a network of African changemakers, it mainly operates through partnerships and temporary spaces across Africa, as well as their flagship programme, Nomadic African Studio.
Explore the African Futures Institute headquarters
Now five years in, the institute has reimagined and transformed a former tile warehouse as its headquarters. Located in Osu, one of Accra’s most dynamic neighbourhoods, the new space will retain the character of the original warehouse while balancing environmental responsiveness and spatial flexibility. The construction was developed collaboratively by a team comprising Lokko, Patrick Gentilezza (Buro Ghana), Patti Anahory, Laurence Lord and Fred Swart, bringing together architectural direction, design development, construction expertise and fabrication.
Until now, the African Futures Institute (AFI) had mostly been defined by its itinerant character rather than as an organisation with a permanent home: this first institutional building lays a significant stone in the organisation’s history. Nothing too conventional, however, as the space has been conceived to embody AFI’s adaptative approach to architecture, with flexibility, openness, and experimentation at its heart. More than an architectural milestone, it is a piece of civic infrastructure, a platform where teaching, making, conversation, exhibition and performance could live under one roof.
‘We wanted a building that could hold many futures at once,’ says Lokko. ‘Not a monument to an institution, but a framework for activity – somewhere that can be a school in the morning, a studio in the afternoon and a public room at night. Architecture, for us, begins with the possibility of bringing people together.’
While providing a new physical home for AFI’s team and archives, the building will host educational programmes, lectures, exhibitions, film screenings, residencies, and public events in the Urban Room. A new space for collaboration, designed to weave itself into Accra’s culture and everyday life.