Architectural Education in the Intermediate Zone

Oussouby Sacko on African architectural identity and his studies in China, interviewed by Cole Roskam

International Conference Centre of Bamako, Mali. © MyLoupe/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Oussouby Sacko, President of Japan’s Kyoto Seika University, was born in Bamako, Mali and educated in architecture in Nanjing, China. Cole Roskam, Associate Professor of architectural history at the University of Hong Kong, spoke with Sacko in the context of his research examining the history of China’s involvement on the African continent. This research is part of Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture.

CR: We could start, perhaps, with your initial interest in architecture. Was architecture something that was with you as a high school student in Bamako, or was it something that you discovered later, perhaps in China?
OS: When I was in Mali, we didn’t have any architectural schools and we didn’t have any universities that taught architecture. The heritage of the colonial era was an orientation toward science and technology in high schools. The French left a professional school that trains technicians to work in construction and in technology, and also an institution of higher education, the École nationale d’ingénieurs, which trains engineers but not architects. If you are a Malian high school student, you graduate high school and go to one of those kinds of schools.

At the École nationale d’ingénieurs, we were supposed to be trained to be high-ranking engineers and to take care of governmental and national projects. So, for us, architecture was a kind of a dream. You could study it only if you had the opportunity to get out of the country. Anyone in architecture would have to have been selected for the government exchange program. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is that we didn’t know the difference between architecture and engineering. To us, the engineer was the one doing things and the architect was the manager, like the brain of the operation. The architect’s position was kind of a dream job, so if you could get the government scholarship and go abroad and do architecture, that was the ideal.
CR: The government’s scholarship—was it specifically to send students to China, or were there other countries and other options that you could have selected?
OS: You were selected during your last year of high school according to your grades. You had to give them three choices of what you want to study. So, for example, architecture, urbanism, and engineering were my three choices. But the decision about where you could study really came down to the two countries’ relations. During my days, most students were going to Russia, to the Soviet Union, but also to Eastern European countries. Architecture students were selected to go to those countries or to Algeria, Morocco, or Senegal. Dakar had a good regional architectural school, so we had a number of people selected to go there. China was very rare.
CR: Yes, I read that you were one of thirteen students selected to go to China as part of this cohort. What were your thoughts when you found out you would be going and that you would have the opportunity to study architecture?
OS: I was shocked. I went to the Ministry of Education, to the scholarships department, and I told them that I didn’t want to go to China. The guy in the office, he said, “No! China’s really cool, you know, it has Hong Kong and everything.” At that time, Hong Kong was not part of China, but I didn’t know, and I thought, “Okay, okay, we have Hong Kong. No problem.” One of my schoolmates was also selected to go to China, so there were two of us for architecture. That was encouraging too.
CR: Where would you have preferred to go at that time?
OS: Senegal was more concentrated on West Africa—on architecture, design, history, all those things. I also thought Germany. It was a big possibility that when I said I didn’t want China, they would send me to Russia [laughs], and, you know, in the Soviet Union, people were sent wherever, so, I don’t know, I kept China. It wasn’t the best option, but it was a good one.
CR: You were initially sent to China for one year of language training, and then subsequently, were you told that you would be going to study in Nanjing? Or were you given a choice of architecture programs?
OS: I arrived in China in 1985, and we moved to Nanjing in September 1986. At the time, China was beginning to open up its schools to foreigners after the Cultural Revolution, so we were, I think, test cases. They opened up some first in Beijing. Tsinghua University was opened, and then they started to receive a few foreign students, including Malians and other Africans, but they also had problems dealing with students and their embassies. Then Tongji University in Shanghai opened up to us. Nanjing was new for foreign students in architecture at that time. They were trying to avoid having too many Africans in Beijing or at the same school. They wanted to spread us as much as possible.
CR: Reform at that point was six, seven, eight years old. What were your impressions of Beijing and Nanjing as cities, as built environments?
OS: After being chosen as Malian government scholarship students, we spent a few days in Paris, and we so had an idea of Paris, but no idea of Beijing. We thought Beijing might be bigger or, you know, more developed than Paris. But when we arrived in Beijing, we were shocked. The airport was not so big and everyone was always wearing the same clothes and riding on bicycles. When the embassy sent someone to pick us up, we kept asking him if we were on the outskirts of the city. When we arrived at the school, we asked, “Where are we? We’re not going to Beijing?” And he said, “You’re in Beijing.”

When we went to Nanjing, it was different because the city was quite compact. It was not as big as Beijing, and also it had a kind of controlled urban system. That was the first impression. You could really see the difference.

One thing very interesting about being in China was that, once we were on holiday, we just ran for Hong Kong. That was an alternative, where we met the open world. My first time eating McDonald’s was in Hong Kong and my first time eating Kentucky Fried Chicken was in Hong Kong. That’s where we met the image of Europe, of the United States, of development. Any vacation, we just—[claps hands] let’s go to Hong Kong.

CR: Did Hong Kong’s architecture make an impression on you?
OS: All the advanced projects were in either Hong Kong or Japan. Our professors were showing us a lot of those projects. This was also a time when people were looking a lot at national architectural identities.
CR: That’s a good segue to pedagogy, to how the architecture program at Southeast (Nanjing) was structured for you as an exchange student. How were design and history and structure and all these other elements assembled and presented?
OS: As at every architecture school, we were taught about some basic theories of design and also about, you know, architectural methodologies. You had the technical side of building and then the aesthetic side of building and then you also had history courses, two different programs. One was Chinese history and one was the Occident, Western history.

We started with small buildings—one building, like a house, same as at every school. By the third year, we also had some group projects, and only in the third year did they teach us the history of foreign architecture. And then the last year we had architectural design projects for studio. We also had interior design, basic computer design, and we had classes on what they called “historical buildings.”
CR: Were the Chinese architectural history courses primarily focused on imperial China—your traditional temples and things—or did they walk you through socialist Chinese architecture?
OS: No, no, no. All imperial. We had two. One is what they called “Classical Chinese architecture.” They had a kind of theory that the world’s architecture all followed Chinese architecture.

Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, China, designed by I.M. Pei. © Cole Roskam

CR: China at the centre and the world around China. And so how did the program influence your method and approach as a designer? I know you are interested in the vernacular and in heritage. Were these topics that initially came up in relation to Chinese architecture that you then applied to Mali?
OS: I was actually influenced by two or three things. In the third year, when we started to do projects in world architectural history, there was some project about I.M. Pei—I don’t remember exactly—but it was about modern and postmodern architecture and about historical buildings. I.M. Pei did a building in Beijing.
CR: The Fragrant Hill Hotel.
OS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a modern building with a traditional roof. We also had the opportunity to visit Shanghai, to see the colonial architecture and its preservation.

And then at the end of the third year, we had to do an internship. I chose to do mine in Mali, so I went back to Mali for a few months. And that was the first time I really considered Malian architecture and asked what the problems are. At that time, no one was talking about Mali’s architectural heritage. People were graduating from all over, so there were students coming back from the Soviet Union, from Algeria, from Morocco, and they were making all different types of buildings.

In Mali, it was only in 1988 that the historic cities of Djenné and Timbuktu were registered as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There were a lot of questions about these places, about how to conserve them or how to use them as references. And I felt, you know, that it was the same in China—they were also preserving their buildings, reconsidering them, taking them as references for new designs.

This was also when China moved toward accepting its architectural history and heritage. We had been taught the Western style of architecture, but at a certain point, we had to reevaluate or to reconsider, you know, China’s historical side. But the problem was that colonialism was at the centre of everything. To consider the past was not quite taboo, but it was difficult for some professors.

That was really a contradiction. Contact with the West at that time was just starting, little by little, so, I mean, we were told about modern buildings, but when we went to Europe, we saw a lot of historical buildings, a lot of conservation. We knew a lot about Le Corbusier and about modern architectural theory and the Bauhaus, but not a lot about the time before Corbusier. We had a brief introduction to Western architectural history, but learned very, very little about architecture in Africa or in other regions unless it was historical and directly related to China.
CR: So, having witnessed what was happening in China and the contradictions there, how did that inform your work in Mali and what you wanted to do at that point as an architect?
OS: I wanted to have a position about what kind of architecture we wanted to have in Mali. In the section I was working with, we checked whether or not the designs fit Malian regulations and also made so aesthetic decisions. But actually, the aesthetic side—that was very individual. So the guy who had studied in Romania would say, “No, no, this is no problem,” and the guy from Russia would say, “No, no, no, so-and-so has to be bigger.” Everyone was bringing something from their own education. There were a lot of theories about architecture and about architectural identity. There were a lot of theories, but there was no practical orientation about what to do. I felt we needed to really have this type of orientation in Mali. But then, of course, after the internship, I went to do a master’s program in China.
CR: How aware were you of Chinese design projects being built in Mali and other countries like Ghana, etc. when you were a student? Was that something students were talking about?
OS: China was working on different publicly oriented buildings in Africa in general. In the beginning, it was Chinese-supported industries and construction companies that were interested in establishing themselves in Mali. Had I gone back to Mali, I would have been working for the Malian government on these kinds of projects. Very few of us had studied in China, so they were putting us on all these Chinese projects.

Of course, we started to learn about projects. The idea for the Chinese was mostly to impress us with big public facilities. If you have to design a big conference centre—which, you know, is really a gate for international offices—you really have to consider what you’re doing for Mali, actually. But there was no consideration for these kinds of things in Chinese projects, no identity performance or vocabulary in public building unless the project was designed by a Malian or West African architect. In China, they have that same kind of problem. And that’s why I started to ask myself if China is a good place to pursue the kind of architecture I wanted to pursue, and if China is the best place to develop the type of architecture I wanted to design. These were the questions I was asking myself.
CR: You were aware of these power imbalances and what was happening, and you weren’t comfortable with it.
OS: Yes, that’s right.

CR: I have one more question related to the research collaborative I’m involved with. I’m one of ten scholars, and we’re all looking at different aspects of African architectural history after World War II. As you said, when you were a student in the 1980s, there was no architectural history of Africa that you were being taught in school, there was no appreciation or understanding of those monuments. Our project, called Centring Africa, aims to participate in the re-centring of Africa as an important source of architectural knowledge. I was just curious to hear your thoughts on that kind of work, as someone who has a background in design but is also an educator and an administrator.
OS: I became involved—maybe ten years ago—in a project about the evolution of public buildings in West African cities. At that time, I worked in Guinea, in Conakry, and then in Bamako too, and had a Japanese grant. In Conakry, as you know, there are a number of public buildings that came from the Soviet Union, from North Korea, and from China, but they were mostly cultural activity centres—parks, concert and conference halls, museums, and so on. You can see the clear influence of those countries up until the 1970s, when I think it started to become more diverse. Then, in the 1980s, they cut back European influence, directly or indirectly, on the urban area. At that time, Europeans designed a lot of cultural buildings all over Africa, but because the cost of European companies’ construction was really high, Chinese companies came in. By 2000, there were a lot of Chinese construction companies. They weren’t designing, actually, but they were constructing. I was personally involved in one of the pavilions at Mali’s airports. I was the design partner of one of them, but the construction was done by a Chinese construction company. Recently, these companies started to do both—they started to have a total consideration of the project and of the culture of the project.

In the early 1990s, Africa was in more of a crisis of urbanization because the urban population was growing very fast and countries needed to have more facilities, more housing, you know, for African cities. For example, in Mali, they started to consider a lot of countries— it was not only China—as partners for constructing the urban areas, so you can see a lot of signatures from Senegal, Burkina Faso, Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Spain. They were different types of transitions from different countries, so the architecture is very diverse, but not tied to the identity of the place.

Actually, I don’t know how you define identity. For me, it’s really important to have some orientation about what we really want in architecture or as architectural identity. We have cities with different orientations, different vocabularies, where everyone does what they want, and we execute projects independently. If Saudi Arabia comes in with a project, we do that; if Turkey comes—now we have a lot of Turkish construction companies, actually. We have also some from Portugal and from Spain.

So I think your project is very important as we talk about what kind of architectural identity we should give to African cities. We—African architects living abroad—we were not really involved in building the identities of these cities. Opportunities depended on partners, not on an affiliation with a country. Foreign people or governments that finance projects were often more involved than local architects. Recently, of course, specific architects have been invited for specific projects. In Abuja in Nigeria, even Kenzo Tange was involved. But why that [laughs]?

I just contributed to a book in Japanese on African architecture, Today’s African Contemporary Culture, which asks what architecture we define as African. To have this kind of discussion and to ask these questions is very important. All of what are called “African identity buildings” are being built by the Chinese. The recent building in Dakar, the Museum of Black Civilisations—even that building is by the Chinese. When are we going to have our own architectural design? With the book, I was really trying to develop an idea of African architecture. Is it vernacular architecture that we define as African? Or is it architecture designed by African architects? Or is it simply architecture that exists in Africa?

Cole Roskam conducted this interview as part of his research for the Multidisciplinary Research Project Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture.

Architectural Education in the Intermediate Zone

Oussouby Sacko on African architectural identity and his studies in China, interviewed by Cole Roskam

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