Each year, the Womxn in Design and Architecture Conference (WDA) celebrates the work and memory of a pivotal architect or designer with contributions from international historians and scholars, in addition to artists, musicians, curators, and practitioners. This year, they will honor the life and work of Alero Olympio with presentations and remarks by Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Erandi de Silva, Prof. Lesley Lokko OBE, Baerbel Mueller, Renee C. Neblett, and DK Osseo-Asare, among others.
Alero Olympio was an architect and builder of radical ecologies. Born in Ghana and working extensively between Scotland and her homeland, Olympio theorized and exercised a rigorous dedication to social and environmental sustainability at all scales. She envisioned building methods and materials as emergent sites of potential, rejecting industrialized products in favour of inherited, place-specific knowledge systems. Locally sourced Laterite clay and African hardwood were essential materials in her new architectural language, as she championed the ongoing protection of West African timber resources and delicate forest ecosystems. Olympio’s work codified an intimately ecological approach to architecture, one embedded within the specific material and social conditions of its place, and an innovative and distinctly African mode of practice.
The conference proceedings will call on the discipline with timely topics and inquiries, such as the wide-reaching sustainable potential of local building materials and place-specific methods, the role of the architect in forging cross-cultural exchange, and the impact of architecture as a site for community-building and cultural transformation. Olympio’s work exists at a nexus that continues to be central to contemporary architectural discourse: intertwining biogenic materiality and social resiliency.
