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.
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 Ukasz Stanek is with the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
BY MICHAEL DZIWORNU AND UKASZ STANEK
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