Building blocs: how Ghana’s architecture was reimagined with a little help from communist Europe

The most visible trace of their presence today is in the buildings belonging to the architectural school known as Tropical Modernism. Matching fashionable concrete minimalism to local climatic conditions — balconies, cantilevered windows and open-plan interiors were all common — architects such as Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were enthusiastic and optimistic proponents of this architecture “gone native” in the 1950s. In Ghana (then the Gold Coast), Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Gambia versions of the same metropolitan design sprung up.

Only when those countries secured independence did styles begin to truly diverge. And this was also when Ghana came to occupy a unique place in African architecture.

Under the auspices of the state planning department, the Ghana National Construction Corporation (GNCC), much was undertaken: from housing for poor workers to damming the Volta River, from hospitals and railways to government buildings and public squares. The GNCC realised health, transport, and industrial facilities according to designs delivered by Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, and Poland, and these countries sent specialists to supervise the construction of the buildings. In an inversion of colonial hierarchies, these Europeans were employees of the GNCC. Stanek cites a Ghanaian architect in Accra who notes that, “it was the first and the last time that a white man had an African boss in Ghana. It never happened before and it never happened after.” Among the most notable constructions of the GNCC under Nkrumah is the vast Independence Square, constructed in 1961 and used to host parades and political speeches, and the development of the State House complex (1965), today’s Parliament of Ghana.

It was Poland however that occupied a central role in this socialist exchange. Twenty-six different Polish architects worked at the GNCC during the 1960s, on projects including hospitals, police stations and educational facilities in the capital.

Warsaw itself was in the process of rebirth after having been levelled during the Second World War, and Polish architects brought their experience of large-scale urbanisation with them to Ghana. The planned redesign of Accra’s Labadi neighbourhood in 1965, for instance, was based on the post-war remodelling of the Powiśle district of Warsaw by Grażyna and Jerzy Luba.

For Łukasz Stanek, these Polish efforts demonstrate the dynamic between Ghanaian, eastern European and international socialist interests. “Of course, the programs were coming from those in political power in Ghana and their international advisors, many among them from socialist countries. But the architects gave them particular shapes,” he says. “One can see the work of those Polish architects in continuity with what they were doing before, in late 1950s and early 1960s Warsaw. The way they used concrete, the way they designed details, the way they mixed rough and smooth surfaces.” There were more practical considerations, too: “You have to remember that most of the Poles were coming from war-destroyed Warsaw, and the housing conditions in Warsaw were terrible. It was a shock for them [in Accra] that they had a whole house.”

The parallels between Warsaw and Accra come together in arguably the most significant realised GNCC project for the Ghanaian capital: the International Trade Fair, designed by two young Polish architects, Jacek Chyrosz and Stanisław Rymaszewski. In a recent article Stanek describes the Fair’s pavilions, approaches and exteriors as possessing “a sense of radical modernity, with unadorned walls, sharp edges against the sky, large spans, an abstract geometry of volumes, levitating roofs, rhythmic patterning, and rough concrete surfaces contrasted with plaster walls.”

Planning for the Trade Fair began under Nkrumah in 1962, but by the time it opened in 1967 he was gone, deposed in a putsch led by Arthur Ankrah the previous year. Ironically, his reliance on foreign planners for industrial and infrastructural works was one factor in the financial crash that contributed to his downfall. In an indication of Ankrah’s rejection of his predecessor’s overt socialism, the inaugural Fair featured no representatives of the USSR or the People’s Republic of China.

Polish architects would go on to work in many other states during the Cold War, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya and Kuwait among them. But perhaps nowhere else were they in sync with local workers as they were in modern, independent Ghana.