Makoko is a fishing village, mostly built on stilts, on a lagoon in Lagos, Nigeria. NLE´’s prototype floating school offers a sustainable solution for this community to expand and build necessary facilities. The school awaits official sanction, but “it has drawn the attention required to stimulate the support that a development like that will need,” Adeyemi says.Courtesy Iwan Baan

Focusing on growing African cities, Nigerian architect Kunle´ Adeyemi creates buildings with the potential for long-lasting impact.

When the Makoko Floating School was completed in March 2013, it received wildly enthusiastic critical acclaim from the international news media. The simple A-frame structure, buoyed by recycled plastic barrels in a lagoon in Lagos, Nigeria, was designed by NLE´, a Lagos- and Amsterdam-based studio founded by the architect Kunle´ Adeyemi. The project, intended as a model for how Lagos’s floating community could build simple, sustainable structures for themselves, subsequently faced a few challenges. One of the biggest was winning over local officials, who simply did not know what to make of such a building.

“We want this validated as a prototype for building and living on water, which I don’t think there is a precedent for,” 38-year-old Adeyemi explains. “To enable its replication—or even the replication of such an idea, not necessarily in form, but in the way of building on water—now the government’s support is crucial.” More than a year later, that support finally seems to be on its way. The Nigerian government has granted its approval, and the changes to the structure required by local authorities have been made. At the time of writing, a team of officials had just completed an inspection. Adeyemi remains hopeful in the face of a long struggle......Continue Reading

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