European colonists who built homes and castles of cement and stone along Africa’s Gold Coast had a major influence on West African architecture that continues to this day, Taubman College scholar Kuukuwa Manful suggests in a new essay.

Writing in the Architectural Review, Manful, assistant professor of architecture, notes that the prevalence of cement structures in what is now Ghana would eclipse the traditional use of earthen building materials such as clay. Her essay is titled “Brutality made concrete: Tropical Modernism at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the V&A.”

“These buildings on the coasts of Africa were brutality made manifest. Many of them were constructed and expanded following violent attacks on local populaces, the burning down of their homes, and the destruction of their religious icons,” Manful writes. “Along with requirements for new materials for Gold Coasters came the need for new construction technologies and different expertise in architecture and construction, contributing to what I describe as ‘unformalisation’ — the destruction and diminishing of Indigenous architecture and architects by the colonial state.”

She concludes that this “dominance of Eurocentric approaches to architecture and construction — and the (hi)stories told about it — continues to this day, despite much recent work around dismantling the colonial foundations.”

In a related talk at the University of Florida, Manful put forward the construction of social class hierarchies as an ironic and unexpected outcome of the post-independence nation-building in Ghana under socialist President Kwame Nkrumah. It is drawn from her ongoing book project, The Architecture of Education, which is an account of the making of and belonging in modern Ghana told through the lens of sociopolitical and physical architecture of schools and foregrounding numerous overlooked and diminished actors, sources, and accounts.