This Week in Africa's Built Environment

A short roundup of what's worth your attention this week, one opportunity, one piece of research, and one project.

Opportunity

The Plan Journal is compiling a special issue titled "Africa," positioning the continent as a center of architectural thought rather than a peripheral case study. Complete manuscripts are due September 7, 2026, and the call covers indigenous knowledge systems, decolonisation, urban transformation, and experimental practice.

Read the full breakdown: [A Call for Papers Worth Knowing About: The Plan Journal's Africa Issue]

Research

A 2021 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B identified something the rammed earth literature rarely says plainly: academic interest in earth construction is growing fast, but real adoption is stalled, and most of the barriers practitioners report are non-technical. No unified standards. No procurement pathways. The material performs. The system around it does not.

Read the full breakdown: [Why Traditional Materials Are Outperforming Their Industrial Replacements]

Community-led earth construction in action: The building process behind Kéré Architecture’s iconic Gando Primary School.0

Project

Lycée Schorge Secondary School, Koudougou, Burkina Faso. Kéré Architecture, 2016. Nine modules in a ring around a central courtyard, laterite stone walls, eucalyptus screen, passive wind towers on every roof. The plan logic comes directly from traditional West African settlement clusters. The building also includes a dental clinic, which says more about its ambitions than the architecture does.

Read the full breakdown: [What Happens When a Building's Form and Climate Share the Same Logic: Lycée Schorge]

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NURU curates opportunities, research, and projects shaping Africa's built environment, week by week.

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