British Council, Lagos
Bristish Council
Lagos, Nigeria
Architect: Allies and Morrison
In 2004, the British Council decided to relocate and rationalise its Nigerian headquarters in Lagos to the eastern district of Ikoyi. The site is a large leafy compound, which, in its physical insularity and lack of engagement with the public realm, is typical of the hermetic character of the neighbourhood, and, indeed, of Lagos generally. Following an initial feasibility study by the Council’s in-house architects, London-based Allies and Morrison were appointed to refurbish the existing staff houses on the site and design a new learning and information centre that would act as a flagship for the Council’s activities in Nigeria.
At the heart of the project was the dilemma of how to engender a sense of physical openness and accessibility against the intrinsic insularity of the surroundings, security concerns and the intensely hot and humid equatorial environment. Allies and Morrison’s response is eminently practical, yet also subtle and considered, as the building gradually reveals itself through a sequence of permeable layers of metal, timber and glass.
Placed along the north-west edge of the garden compound, the new building is a plain, two-storey volume enclosed by crisply rendered white walls. Set back from the street, overlooking a small, semi-formal garden, its short north-west end forms its main public face. Instead of the more usual protective wall, however, the building is delicately veiled behind an open metal screen giving it a dignified and comprehensible street presence, albeit necessarily at arm’s length.
The metal screen marks the compound boundary, and its vertical bars are reprised in an intermediate colonnade of ribbed iroko that extends across the width of the building, framing and defining the main entrance. Resembling a giant garden trellis, the colonnade, an obvious archetype for hot climates, shades and protects, moderating between inside and out. Though essentially free-standing, the timber structure is lightly connected to the building’s concrete walls for lateral support. Behind the colonnade is an inner membrane of clear glass held in anodised bronze mullions that encloses a double-height information centre.
Materials are chosen with an appropriate regard for local sources and aptitudes. The locally sourced iroko timber of the colonnade is immaculately jointed and worked, but the concrete, which proved more of a technical challenge, is largely rendered, in the vernacular way, or simply left raw and boardmarked, its roughness a foil to the creamy Ancaster limestone of the floor. The hot, wet Lagos climate meant that some air conditioning was necessary to cool the interior and protect computers and books, but it is a much less demanding environmental control strategy than the local, aggressively airconditioned norm.
Throughout the project, there is a sense that, while intelligently acknowledging place and tradition, the design team was determined not to let the more unforgiving local conditions compromise what has turned out to be a very decent piece of modern tropical architecture.
The materials are a mixture of the local language of rendered stuctures and some carefully implemented translations of details which are more recognisably British. The timber screen which is shared by both the new garden and the building further accentuates the sense of transparency by graduating the otherwise formal transition from outside to inside.
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