Ecosystems, Building Materials, and Building Cultures

Nzinga B. Mboup discusses non-standard building materials with Stephanie Idongesit Ete, Cyan Cheng, and George Massoud

The following text is an excerpt from the CCA c/o Dakar event: Ecosystems, Building Materials, and Building Cultures. The event took place at the Africa Center in London on 6 November 2025 and features Nzinga B. Mboup in conversation with Stephanie Idongesit Ete, Neba Sere, Cyan Cheng, and George Massoud.

Nzinga B. Mboup: From the outset, it was very clear to me that CCA c/o Dakar gives us a framework to gain a better understanding of Senegalese architectural traditions; to bring to the forefront the rich material heritage and diverse constructive practices that is absent from contemporary practice. As a young practitioner, this research has generated a lot of knowledge and allowed me to connect with an ecosystem of architects—both from the African continent and internationally—that share an interest in non-extractive practices, and are crafting material alternatives embedded in culture, landscape, and people. The event today has been thought of as a workshop to give us an opportunity to learn from each other and know collectively what questions to ask. Stephanie, we met when you were doing research on your exhibition project The Dakar–Lagos Corridor: Material Culture.

Stephanie Idongesit Ete: That research started with a fascination and a desire to be more connected with architecture and landscape in West Africa. I’ve always been fascinated with how our buildings come together: the textures, the social histories, and the building techniques. Architecture is a material culture, but when we talk about material culture and architecture, we’re thinking about how material is sourced? What’s the social context, the historical context, the environmental context? What stories and narratives are tied to architecture and what can we learn from them? These are some of the questions that I was fascinated by as I was looking at the different materialities [in West Africa].

I found this example of reinforced concrete in Gorée, which is a small island of Dakar. What I found distinct about it was the way concrete was made at that time; it was made using seashell with stone aggregates and seashell as the lime agent to create the concrete. It’s very specific to that location.

I could also make comparisons when I went to other countries. When I went to Ghana, I came across a lady who would collect crafts from the seaside on the coast and she would see that people were decorating their buildings with shell, inspiring her to implement the technique on her own shop in the center of Accra. The method is tied to the coastal setting, but it’s also being practiced by different people [across the region]. It’s a study of material, but also the stories that are tied to material.

Stephanie Idongesit Ete, Exposed concrete aggregate made of stone and seashell, Gorée, Senegal, 2023. Digital Photography. © Stephanie Idongesit Ete

NBM: Working with non-standard materials forces you to be involved in the ecosystem—to know where you’re going to source the materials, how you’re going to transform them, and how they’re going to perform over time. My outlook on this rich history is looking at the past, and the present to better understand the sort of ties between the various materials and ecologies that are associated with them. The type of materiality that you can find in Dakar—once you start to pay attention—goes beyond the now very common glass, aluminum, and steel indistinct architecture that is being produced nowadays. Throughout our history, we’ve always had a diversity of materiality and constructive techniques.

Although concrete is not the main material that I work with, I’m interested in better understanding it and diving deeper into its history, because it is so ubiquitous. Everybody calls concrete a traditional building material, but it does have a history which is also tied to the colonial past as the main cement company emerged in the last 70 years. Before that, cement was imported into Senegal.

With each material, there’s a different question related to its ecology. I find limestone very interesting because it’s association with French colonial architecture in the region. It’s still used today as a cladding or for paving but no longer as a main material to erect load-bearing walls. One of the connections that I made is how the introduction of cement reduced the use of quarried limestone blocks for building because now it goes straight into concrete one way or another; either to produce cement clinker or as an aggregate in concrete.

Nzinga B Mboup, UCAD Auditoria, Dakar, Senegal, 2025. Digital Photography. © Worofila

NBM: The production of cement generates a geography of extraction made possible by the various permits that the government grants to cement companies to mine the sand, clay, and limestone. There is an obvious concern about the impact that it has on the territory, but also on the people. Behind the machine you have a whole human ecology that is in contact with these toxic and polluting materials and the architecture of concrete that it generates results in thermal discomfort in the hot climates of our region.

As Stephanie mentioned, shells are a very big part of our architecture. It’s not commonly used anymore, but there are traces of it in traditional architecture from pre-colonial times where concrete aggregates were made up of shells, especially in the region of the Saloum delta. I recently spoke to the architect Thierry Melot, key figure of the regional modernist movement of the 1970s who told me that his inspiration for the shell-cladded auditoria of the University Cheikh Anta Diop came from the decoration of flowerpots which he’s always seen the women sell on the roadside are often decorated with these shells. He told a very interesting story about the construction site, and the workers were competing amongst each other to see who could install the most shells on the facade of the university auditoria and how they applied them with white cement. Tying these architectural stories to local craftsmanship is key. Unless we’re able to revisit and better understand our material’s ecology and endogenous know-hows, their application and translation in contemporary architectural production will be limited. Additionally, we must remain critical in making material choices by rooting them in the realities of their ecosystem nowadays.

Nzinga B. Mboup, Image of a pot decorated with seashells, Dakar, Senegal, 2026. Digital Photography. © Nzinga B. Mboup

Cyan Cheng: We’ve been working with a Chinese village, Shigushan, for about 10 years. Shigushan is a site of both resource and labour extraction. The village supplies stone for the Chinese construction industry, as well as migrant labourers. China has almost 300 million rural workers who migrate from these villages to urban centers, often leaving their families behind in the process. Over the years we learned that the most meaningful thing we could give back was spending time with them. Genuine attention and appreciation are rare, so we keep going back year after year. We documented their daily lives as well as all kinds of improvisation and then we screened this back to them. On the screening day, the whole village came out, and they loved seeing themselves on the big screen. When we had the opportunity to bring this story to London last year, we activated another set of relations through dry stone

Dry stone is a shared material register. In Shigushan, foundations are often built from dry stones salvaged from demolished structures, frequently with dry stone wallers working alongside excavators. Foundations remain provisional; they host uncertain futures, oscillating between potential homes and ruins depending on family circumstances. While waiting—sometimes for years—they function as kitchen gardens or children’s playgrounds. Walling here is neither permanent nor terminal, but an open-ended negotiation with time.

Chen Zhan, Dry stone wallers working alongside an excavator during simultaneous demolition and reconstruction process in Shigushan village, China, 2023. Digital Photography. © field-0

CC: Dry stone walling is a traditional practice both in Shigushan, but also here in the British countryside. We built this one-to-one scale foundation of a village house on Bedford Square in London as a critique of privately owned public spaces in London. To build dry stone walls in London invokes the British history of enclosure, during which common land was transformed into privately owned parcels. Dry stone walls served as the physical inscription that made land legible, divisible, and governable. In this sense, the domestic foundation superimposed onto a privately owned public space unsettled entrenched distinctions between public and private that enclosure helped consolidate in Britain.

Chen Zhan, Close up of a dry stone foundation under construction, Bedford Square, London, 2024. Digital Photography. © field-0

CC: This dry stone foundation is a temporary assemblage of materials coming from the earth. Pullback stones, sand, soil, wood chips, recycled glass aggregates, hemp blocks and herbal plants. After the installation, all the materials had a second life: either back to the quarry, to communal gardens, or to the next building site. The site operated as an evolving common. It was a lunch spot for students and workers, a playground for children in the afternoon, and a nighttime habitat for foxes, while the breathing spaces between stones accommodated insects and small fauna.

NBM: These techniques like dry stone walling—which is remarkable because it uses no mortar—are found in various vernacular constructions around the world and have demonstrated the durability of natural construction. I think this is a great segway to invite George Massoud from Material Cultures to join us.

George Massoud: We’re a mission-led organization working towards bioregional construction based here in London, but we work across the country. Through our work we argue for the reintegration of architecture with agriculture because we believe that buildings are linked to their landscapes of extraction.

It’s important for us that design is reflective of a culture and the people and organizations that make it. Participation is a key part of our design process. A lot of the research questions are around how we can move towards a circular economy but also more regenerative land management practices. Through understanding how resources are managed, by tracing supply chains, and understanding what bioregions are, how we can work within those constraints becomes an integral part of the design process. This multidisciplinary approach often means that we are connecting many different kinds of expertise that are not always speaking to each other; from forestry, to policy, to activism, to architecture.

GM: It’s very challenging working with natural materials. We face a lot of issues, especially when it comes to cost and supply chains. We like to work as locally as possible and there’s a cost associated with that. We often try to work with very simple building systems because when you are trying to integrate a participatory process in the build itself, it’s important that the knowledge can be transferred in an accessible way.

Working with natural materials means that you have to slow down, which is often against the tide. Everybody wants things done yesterday and sometimes it just takes a long time to dry a hempcrete wall in the winter. You become a lot more attuned to the seasons, and it forces you to work in a slightly different way.

NBM: There’s also a search for autonomy in being able to localize where the materials are from and making sure that people can easily access them. In the context of West Africa, the material of empowerment in construction is cement because of how ubiquitous it is. It’s sold in every hardware store and is easy to manipulate, allowing any layman to produce masonry blocks, easily molded in situ by adding sand and water.

GM: It’s interesting to think about what that material represents. Cement, concrete, and glass represent power, longevity, and permanence. With natural materials, we have been socialized to see them in a very primal way, and I think there is an opportunity for unlearning and relearning there.

SIE: When I was meeting different architects and learning about how they practice, in one of the conversations it was said that concrete is a local material because of how easily you can find cement. In certain cities, you’ll find bags of cement on every corner, allowing anyone to build. In a sense, it is very democratic to provide people the ability to build for themselves. To tell people to build with earth is a mentality that’s hard to return to. They feel like they’ve moved past it, but there is potential.

NBM: This conversation is still evolving for all of us but as I get deeper into this research, there are many stories of monopoly, of sabotage, and of exploitation that are embedded in these materials. Knowing the history reveals that it’s no accident how we ended up with these material cultures that we have nowadays. As this research progresses, I think people find it empowering to be able to move forward with different considerations (technical, cultural, human, ecological, etc.) for material choices. The goal we all share here is to be able to contribute to building a fairer world and celebrating the best of what each of our geographies and cultures have to offer.

Ecosystems, Building Materials, and Building Cultures

Nzinga B. Mboup discusses non-standard building materials with Stephanie Idongesit Ete, Cyan Cheng, and George Massoud

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