Few architects have shaped the conversation around contemporary African architecture the way Diébédo Francis Kéré has, a Pritzker laureate who’s spent his career proving that laterite, brick, and climate logic can produce buildings as sophisticated as anything built in glass and steel. His latest project, the Centre des Cultures et Spiritualités Ewés, is rising in Notsé, Togo, commissioned by the Kothor Foundation to honor the Ewé people’s history and spirituality. The masterplan wraps around the historic Agbogbo wall and the Agbogbodzi Sanctuary, sacred sites the design was built to protect and elevate, not compete with. Red laterite brick carries the whole complex, low-rise, fluid forms shaped for natural ventilation, with courtyards and light shafts doing the cooling work instead of mechanical systems. A spiraling tower rises at the center, meant to symbolize the link between ancestors, divinity, and the heavens, while the main gateway takes its form from the Ewé royal stool, a symbol of authority reimagined as architecture. Inside, the center holds a sanctuary, temples, an open-air amphitheater, exhibition halls, an auditorium, and a reconstructed royal palace, a full cultural ecosystem, not a single museum building. 7,000 m², under construction since October 2024, expected complete February 2026. This is Kéré’s first project in Togo, joining an expanding body of work across West Africa that includes the Benin National Assembly and Thomas Sankara’s mausoleum in Ouagadougou, proof that this design language isn’t a one-country experiment. It’s becoming a continental architectural voice. Notsé, Togo · Architecture: Kéré Architecture · Client: Fondation Kothor · Under construction, completion expected 2026

Ten houses just outside Kampala are proving that low-cost housing doesn’t have to mean low ambition. Marc Thorpe designed these bungalows almost entirely from Ecoblock, a bio-brick made from 90% local soil, with cement, sand, lime, and water filling the rest. It’s a bioclimatic material, insulating against heat and sound, more resistant than cement block, and it cuts carbon emissions by roughly 30% compared to conventional construction. Fully local, fully recyclable. Each single-storey home gets flat roofs designed to carry solar panels, generating its own electricity instead of depending fully on the grid. Rainwater harvesting runs off the same roofs into a private water tower, one per house, not shared. That detail matters: Thorpe built it that way specifically so no single household gets left without water if a drought hits or a shared system fails. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, living and dining space, wrapped in shaded terraces that block the harsh sun and hold the wood-burning stoves already common in Ugandan homes. Nothing about the plan asks families to abandon how they actually live, it builds around it. This project, working with Échale and Stage Six, targets middle- and lower-income families in a country facing a real housing shortage. Ten houses is the pilot. If it scales, it’s a genuine answer to the question everyone in this conversation keeps circling: does affordable housing across Africa have to mean cheap materials and imported thinking, or can it mean smart, local, and dignified. Kampala, Uganda · Design: Marc Thorpe, with Échale and Stage Six · Renderings: Truetopia