Modernist architecture, the promise of independence: A new exhibition on Ghanaian architecture in Los Angeles
IN the 1960s, Accra was a place where anticolonial politics, cultural diplomacy, and promises of a changed everyday life came together. Kwame Nkrumah imagined the city as a showcase of African statehood, and he invited architects to help give that imagination durable form.
The exhibition Intersections: The Architecture of Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi in Ghana—currently on view at Wende Museum in Los Angeles, USA—returns to that moment. It proposes to understand post-independence modernism in Ghana, begin not with spectacular monuments, but with housing, its compromises, its ambitions, and its afterlives.
This original approach was proposed by the curatorial team, whose core is the Accra-based Office Southeast, specialised in architectural and urban research. Geographer, Michael Dziwornu, and architectural historian, Ukasz Stanek, argue that housing is where ideology meets plumbing, where climate becomes a design constraint rather than a slogan, and where the state’s promises are tested in the lives of families.
At the centre of the exhibition are two architects whose biographies, taken together, read like a map of 20th-century geopolitical entanglement: Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi. Polónyi was Hungarian architect and a member of the modernist group Team 10. Even if he was not a supporter of socialism, he arrived in Ghana through Hungarian technical assistance programmes aligned with Ghana’s stated turn toward socialism.
![IT must be one of the most difficult – and exasperating – tasks in the world to be the President of a nation like Ghana. For you may travel all over4 the world, talking to the leaders of “the developed nations”, to try persuade them that the pandemic that is afflicting the world, Covid-19 (with its variants) is a truly global destroyer and thatnowhere is safe from it, until everywhere is safe. You may deploy your most eloquent language to point out that although, the scientists of the “developed countries” have managed to manufacture a vaccine that has been seen to work against the pandemic, the politicians of the “developed countries” are, contrary to undertakings they have made to the World Health Organisation (WHO) hoarding the vaccine in their countries. Reports suggest that whereas the governments of the “developed countries” are targeting 100 percent of their populace for vaccination, and getting closer to their objective every day, less than 10% of the populace of the developing countries have so far been vaccinated, as a result of a lack of vaccines. Is this fair? you ask. Air travel (you continue) has made international contacts extremely easy. And since the Covid-19 virus and its latest variant (Omicron) in particOman Ghana versus Covid-19 08 www.ghanaiantimes.com.gh GHANAIAN Times Features TUESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2021ular, are very transmissible. So it is in everyone's educated self-interest to see that all people on the planet are fully vaccinated. As a result of your Government's efforts, you hear that plenty of vaccines have arrived in your country and you are emboldened to announce that your Government will soon be able to vaccinate its entire adult population. Then, you get the shock of your life: an intelligence report tells you that some mischievous people are spreading the fake news that if a person allows himself or herself to be vaccinated, the “vaccine will make that person vote for your governing NPP whether he/she wants to do so or not!” WHAAAAT! How does one counter such fake news? If the Government say it is not true, the conspiracy theorists shoot back, “And are you so naïve as to expect them to admit that the vaccine will make you vote for the NPP?” Wow! Are people so wicked that despite the gains that the world has already made through vaccination (such as the elimination of small pox from the world and the near-extinction of polio and yellow fever) they try to dissuade others from taking advantage of anti-Covid vaccination? Especially since people who are clever enough to invent such fake news must know of the horrible pain that Covid-19 subjects people to, before it finally kills them? What makes the anti-Covid vaccination story doubly awful is that its seeds are sown on pre-fertilised ground. In the past, some wicked scientists in the developed countries have allowed themselves to be used by their [usually racist] governments to administer harmful vaccines and other medications to people, using the lie that such interventions can save them from certain disease. One of the most devastating such deceptions occurred in the United States in 1932. Below is the horrible story as told on the OFFICIAL website of the US CENTRES FOR DISEASE CONTROL [CDC]: https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm QUOTE: THE U.S. PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE SYPHILIS STUDY AT TUSKEGEE In 1932, the USPHS, [US Public Health Service] working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphillis. It was originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphillis in the Negro Male” (sic) [now referred to as the “USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee”]. The study initially involved 600 Black men — 399 with syphillis, 201 who did not have the disease. Participants’ informed consent was not collected. Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphillis, anaemia, and fatigue. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance (sic)! By 1943, penicillin was the treatment of choice for syphilis and becoming widely available, but the participants in the study were not offered treatment. In 1972, an Associated Press story about the study was published. As a result, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs appointed an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to review the study. The advisory panel concluded that the study was “ethically unjustified”; that is, the “results [were] disproportionately meagre, compared with known risks to [the] human subjects involved.” In March 1973, the panel advised the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to instruct the USPHS to provide all necessary medical care for the survivors of the study. The Tuskegee Health Benefit Programme was established to provide these services and in 1975, participants’ wives, widows and children were added to the program. In 1995, the program was expanded to include health, as well as medical, benefits. The last study participant died in January 2004. The last widow receiving THBP benefits died in January 2009. ... I973, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the study participants and their families, resulting in a $10 million, out-of-court settlement in 1974. On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal Presidential Apology [over the study.] UNQUOTE In Ghana, the fake news that the anti-Covid vaccine would make people “vote for the NPP” has already begun to cause disagreements in some households. A family known to me has had to dismiss its house-help because she obstinately refused to take the jab. To illustrate the way the way the political message contained in the fake news has been camouflaged, I offer a version of the last conversation between the head of the household and the house-help: BOSS: Hey, “A”, you are very lucky! Instead of you going around to look for the vaccinators, they are coming to our estate! HOUSE-HELP: They are coming here? B: Yes! H: But Boss, I told you that my brother took the jab and had to be admitted into hospital. B: It doesn't mean that you too will become ill if you get the jab. It affects different people in different ways. Look, as you know, I have had all my own jabs and I have never been ill – as you know! H: But Boss, if you have taken all your jabs, then you are PROTECTED, are you not? B: Yes, I am. H: In that case, even if I become infected because I have not taken the jab, I cannot transmit the disease to you and YOU will be all right? B: I can't say that! Because, as I have explained to you, the pandemic can affect different people in different ways. H: Then the jab is useless? B: Listen, I can't take any risks with such a dangerous disease. Either you take it or you leave, I am sorry. I cannot allow you to expose me and my family to the risk of catching Covid. As I reported earlier, the House-help chose to leave. Both her Boss and I are convinced that it wasn't mere logicthat made her decide not to take the jab. She was probably under the influence of a church/cult. Or political propaganda! • Omicron cases at Kotoka International Airport are amongst the unvaccinated](https://ghanaiantimes.com.gh/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/GT-8.pdf-Adobe-Acrobat-Pro-DC-4-220x150.jpg)
He was employed at the Ghana National Construction Corporation, where Adegbite served as chief architect after training that took him from Howard University to Colombia. This is not the familiar story of “foreign experts” shaping a passive periphery. It is, instead, a story of professional itineraries converging in Accra, an encounter in which Ghanaian actors set agendas, weighed options, and demanded that imported models submit to local tests.
Adaptation as method
“Adaptation” can sound like a mild technical term, the sort of thing architects invoke when discussing sun angles. The research framing behind Intersections insists on something more consequential: adaptation as a field of argument that is contested, political, and inseparable from competing visions of development.
The curatorial team makes this explicit. Polónyi brought experience from socialist Hungary and, crucially, from debates circulating among the Team 10 architects. They were suspicious of one-size-fits-all modernism and attentive to lived patterns of dwelling.
Adegbite’s training and practice, meanwhile, positioned him to evaluate multiple “centres” of expertise rather than defer to any single one. Together, their work challenged the authority of British, Soviet, or American precedent as default templates, and rethought what it meant to translate housing typologies into Ghanaian realities, such as climate, materials, construction technologies, economies, and customary social practices.
Yet, all these terms were contested. For example, architects in 1960s Accra agreed that housing needed to be economical, they disagreed on what “economy” meant: mass prefabrication and economies of scale within a planned system, or a strategic embrace of self-help traditions and incremental building. In other words, design decisions were intertwined with far-reaching political decisions about the future of the country.
The right to tell stories
One of the most quietly radical aspects of Intersections is its archival method. The exhibition is built by juxtaposing family archives preserved by the architects’ daughters—one set in the United States, the other in Hungary, in this way, the show does not only reenact an encounter from 60 years ago; it also stages a new one, between the archives and people who took care for them through decades, often against the odds.
That curatorial choice has implications beyond the two protagonists. It suggests that the history of modern architecture—too often written as a parade of lone geniuses and iconic photographs—depends on acts of custody and care. Somebody needs to preserve drawings, label folders, save letters, and decide that a life’s work is worth carrying across borders and decades.
For Ghanaian audiences, this should land as an invitation and a provocation. If modernism in Accra was produced through intersections of training routes, diplomatic programmes, construction regimes, and household practices then is a history which cannot be told from a single archive, or a single national canon, or a single Cold War script. It requires patient, plural sources, and the humility to accept that the city’s built environment is an argument we inherit, not a settled verdict.
Why this exhibition matters now
To revisit Adegbite and Polónyi today is not to indulge nostalgia for a mid-century moment when states seemed capable of grand housing promises. It is to ask pertinent questions about the present: What counts as “appropriate” housing, and who gets to define appropriateness?
When we talk about “local materials” or “climate-responsive design,” are we naming technical realities or masking political choices about labour, finance, and land? And how do we judge the legacies of post-independence modernism: by its aspirations, by its uneven access, or by the improvisations through which residents have made it workable?
Intersections insists that Ghana’s architectural history is neither derivative nor isolated. It is a history of negotiation between imported typologies and local life, between state capacity and household ingenuity, between international networks and national ambitions.
It also serves as a reminder of Ghana’s cosmopolitanism, which was not limited to the relationship to Britain as the colonial metropole, but expanded towards other geographies, notably Eastern Europe.
And it reminds us that housing, in the end, is one of the most demanding measures of independence: a daily, material test of whether a public future can be built and sustained without sacrificing the dignity of those meant to live inside it.
The writers: Michael Dziwornu is with the CSIR-Institute for Scientific and Technological Information while Lukasz Stanek is with the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
BY MICHAEL DZIWORNU AND LUKASZ STANEK
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