Press & Publications

A major new prize aimed to discover the best new buildings from around the globe is being unveiled today (8 December) by the RIBA, and proudly partnered with Wallpaper*. The 2016 RIBA International Prize will honour a building which exemplifies design excellence and architectural ambition, and delivers meaningful social impact.
On the prestigious judging panel, chaired by Richard Rogers, is Nigerian-born Kunle Adeyemi, an inspiring young architect, whose firm NLÉ is based in Amsterdam.

A floating school is giving the children of a fishing community in Makoko in Lagos, Nigeria, the chance of a better life. The BBC’s Martin Patience went to speak to some of the pupils about their aspirations.

They are buildings in which to teach and learn – but they can be magnificent too. Jonathan Glancey discusses some of the most stunning seats of learning.

When architect Kunlé Adeyemi designed a floating school in Lagos, Nigeria – which captured global attention – it was a sort of homecoming for him. He began life near water, nearly 800km north of Lagos in Kaduna, which means crocodile in the Hausa language, as the river running through his home city was indeed dotted with lounging reptiles.

Rising sea levels in some of Africa’s largest cities are leaving water slum residents vulnerable to flooding, this is according to Kunle Adeyemi, developer of the Makoko Floating School, an innovative new form of architecture that could revolutionise water communities in Nigeria.

The final lakefront kiosk, titled “Rock” and designed by Nigerian architect Kunle Adeyemi in association with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has unmistakable echoes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fallingwater house. Among them is a platform that will cantilever over protective rock walls at Lincoln Park’s Montrose Beach.

NLÉ is founded in 2010 by Kunlé Adeyemi and based in Lagos and Amsterdam. They are quickly fulfilling their mission to shape the physical, human, cultural and economic architectures of developing cities. With several remarkable projects such as ‘ROCK – Chicago Lakefront Kiosk’ – you can read more about this below, as wel as the corresponding exhibition ‘Rock & The Bean’ – we thought it was time for a spotlight on this notable agency.

With its Lakefront Kiosk competition, the Chicago Architecture Biennial is hoping to leave a long-lasting impact and legacy for its city. The ROCK, a submission from NLÉ Architects in collaboration with School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is giving the public the opportunity to shape that legacy. Throughout the course of the event, which opened on October 3rd, eventgoers are invited to Millennium Park to add value to the 1930s limestone rocks that will create the pavilion through carving, painting, performances and other unimagined processes.

Big limestone blocks currently displayed in Millennium Park near the Bean will be reassembled at Montrose Beach as part of a dramatic concrete-and-stone kiosk called “Rock” that will project out over the lakefront. It’s from the School of the Art Institute and Nigerian-born architect, who is based in Lagos and Amsterdam.

The architects, designers, artists and others represented in 50 Under 50 are innovators of our time. After a world-wide search of 50 top architecture and design firms by the editors, lead author Beverly Russell along with Eva Maddox and Farooq Ameen help bring together a unique body of work; all partners in these firms will be 50 years old or under at the time of publication, and represent a forward-thinking generation of creative people, aware of global issues that urgently need solutions through imaginative design.
The innovators featured in this impressive volume share with us, and the world, their desires for exponential learning; designs are illuminated with full-color photography and detailed illustrations, helping to showcase the innovators individual curiosities, imaginations, and talents. This material shows how they bridge disciplines, respect cultural norms, respond to human needs regardless of costs, and how they adopt team transparency in their passion to create and solve problems with a clear mission. This highly anticipated book showcases honorees located across many different countries, including Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States.

Significantly, a quarter ofthese innovators are women, representing the elevated leadership of women inarchitecture and design.

Chicago (CNN)The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial opened in the Windy City this weekend, claiming the distinction of the largest exhibition of contemporary architecture in North America.120 participating architectural firms from more than 30 countries will present 93 exhibits until 3 January, aiming to show how architecture can “radically transform our lived experience.”

occurring at the inaugural chicago architecture biennial, architecture, design and urbanism practice NLÉ, led by kunlé adeyemi has created ‘rock & the bean’- an installation sited right at the heart of the city’s renowned millennium park. working with the school of the art institute of chicaco (SAIC), the installation is connected to SAIC and NLÉ’s co-creation of the chicago lakefront kiosk ‘ROCK’.

Preview of the First Chicago Architecture Biennial Cutting-edge architecture built by a robot, spiders and even you! That’s just a small part of what you can experience when the Chicago Architecture Biennial opens Saturday at the Chicago Cultural Center and sites around the city. Geoffrey Baer has spent the last two days watching 75 top… Continue reading CHICAGO TONIGHT – OCTOBER 2015

DOWNTOWN — The mayor touted the opening Thursday of the Chicago Architecture Biennial as “the largest international survey of contemporary architecture in North America.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel made the announcement at the Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington Blvd., which will serve as focal point of the exposition, technically running from Saturday through Jan. 3.

Michelle T. Boone, commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, called it a “global exposition of contemporary architecture.” It showcases the work of more than 100 architects from more than 30 countries.

SAIC has teamed up with Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, who joined the school as a visiting faculty member in summer 2015. Adeyemi is a leading researcher of the growth of urban communities in developing countries and owner of urban design firm NLÉ in Amsterdam. He will lecture as part of SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program on October 5.

In Africa, Lagos is not the only coastal city that is vulnerable to rising seas, there are at least 20 cities, including Cairo, Egypt; Cape Town, South Africa; and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. With man’s constant struggle to live with water, Nlé, a collaborative architectural practice with a focus on developing cities, is changing the discourse through The African Water Cities project. The project is a research and documentation project that focuses on adapting coastal cities to the impact of urbanisation, resource shortages and climate change. To date the project has moved away from just research and documentation to also architectural forms. These have been realised in the award winning Makoko Floating School in Lagos, Nigeria and more recently the Chicoco Radio in Port Harcourt, Nigeria and the Chicago Lakefront Kiosk, USA.

From Frank O. Gehry’s shining Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris to Zaha Hadid’s curving Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, take a global tour through the architectural practice emerging today, and defining tomorrow. The best-selling series of Architecture Now! celebrates its tenth edition with more than 70 international projects arranged in a neat new format.

From the 4,600-year-old pyramid of Zoser to the under-construction one kilometre-high Kingdom Tower – via the first London semi, Beijing’s old stock exchange and LA’s stacked freeway interchange – these 50 structures tell unique stories of our urban history

So your city is about to double in size, and it’s happening whether you like it or not. Infrastructure will be strained, sanitation is a concern and children need educating.

What do you do?

For Lagos, this is the question on many experts’ lips; a headache already 17.9 million people large and due to increase twofold by 2050 according to some predictions.

The chicago architecture biennial reveals four lakefront kiosk designs.

In the grand sweep of Chicago’s lakefront, a little kiosk may not seem like much.
But Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the organizers of the upcoming Chicago Architecture Biennial can cite a telling counterexample: the Lincoln Park Chess Pavilion, where chess players match wits on boards beneath a winglike concrete overhang. The 1957 pavilion, which sits east of Lake Shore Drive near North Avenue, is at once a sculptural object, an orienting device and a lively people place.

The 2015 NZIA conference in:situ in February brought together a stellar line-up of international architects and academics who shared their projects and experiences of working in the architectural profession in different parts of the world. Born in Nigeria but working from Amsterdam, Kunlé Adeyemi of NLÉ Works has landed himself in the media spotlight with his design for a floating school in an impoverished area of Lagos, which inspires alternatives to the invasive culture of land reclamation. He spoke with Justine Harvey of Architecture New Zealand during the conference.

This summer’s major exhibition at Louisiana focuses on architecture, art and culture on the African continent. By pinpointing a number of judiciously selected examples from a cultural here and now, the exhibition sheds light on the diversity and complexity of the part of Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Through a number of projects spread… Continue reading Louisiana Exhibition – 2015

As part of our special focus on innovation in Africa, we have developed a list of 40 remarkable African innovators. Actually, it’s more like 47 but we counted teams as one. Our decision to celebrate these idea creators and solution providers stems from our belief that the true wealth of Africa is not buried under its soil, but in the brains of its best minds. This list is a testament to that belief. It comprises Africans from every part of the continent, across diverse fields. We have brought them together because of the impact and potential of their ideas and processes in transforming the continent.

When Jessica Collins and photographer Iwan Baan visited Lagos in 2013 to document a radical new school, the Makoko slum was facing demolition. Now the building’s global recognition is helping to give the community fresh hope.

About 15,000 people live permanently afloat on canals, rivers and coasts in Great Britain alone, but thousands more enjoy holidaying on boats or own them as weekend retreats in the UK and abroad. This book will feature not only static residential boats and floating dwellings but also those used as holiday homes and funky modern businesses – houseboats can range from canal boats, riverboats, narrow and wide beam boats, barges, Dutch barges, static houseboats and even seaworthy cruisers moored in marina. The book will cover stylish boats from the UK, North America, Europe and Australia. The houseboats engage the reader through their history and owners’ stories, which are told in lively text and colourful images. People fall in love with boats and own them for a variety of reasons: out of affordability and necessity; a love of the water; closeness to nature and the environment; or just because they yearn for a different and more relaxed style of living/working space. This book shows how houseboats can offer an attractive, practical and alternative solution, as well as amazing and often idiosyncratic solutions to living successfully in a small space. My cool houseboat covers the following themes: stylish architectural, from San Francisco to Prague; thrifty and eclectic, as an affordable solution to conventional city dwelling; businesses, using houseboats as unusual workspaces, from a book barge to an allotment; modernist, from a Finnish floating office to an Amsterdam watervilla; recycled, ranging from an Ellis Island ferry houseboat to a converted minesweeper; and soulful, covering alternative ways of life, relaxation and recreation, from a New York City houseboat to a stylish Paris home.

A 60-strong list of international studios has named the official participants of the first-ever Chicago Architecture Biennial – the “largest international survey of contemporary architecture in North America.” Chosen by Biennial Co-Artistic Directors Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda – who are supported by an advisory council comprising David Adjaye, Elizabeth Diller, Jeanne Gang, Frank Gehry, Sylvia Lavin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peter Palumbo, and Stanley Tigerman – each participating practice will convene in Chicago to discuss “The State of the Art of Architecture” and showcase their work from October 3 to January 3, 2016.

PIN–UP is a biannual English language architecture and design magazine based in New York. It was founded in 2006 by architect and writer Felix Burrichter.

The temptation to talk about an African architecture is great, but it is, of course, ridiculous. There is no such thing and never was.
Africa’s architecture is infinitely, thrillingly diverse and its variety embraces everything from the modernist ambition of postcolonial visionaries to the invention of the ad hoc informal settlements around some of the world’s most dynamic and fast-growing cities.

The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial announced the list of participants and artists that who will participate in the “largest international survey of contemporary architecture in North America” this fall from October 3 to January 3, 2016.

From March 2015, a major exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum sheds new light on contemporary African design. Showcasing the work of over 120 artists and designers, »Making Africa – A Continent of Contemporary Design« illustrates how design accompanies and fuels economic and political changes on the continent. Africa is presented as a hub of experimentation generating new approaches and solutions of worldwide relevance – and as a driving force for a new discussion of the potential of design in the twenty-first century.

PANAJI: The concept of floating buildings is not a novel one. But what if a 420 sq m structure of 3 floors could be built on water with locally available material and the manpower of only eight individuals?

This new and innovative form of an urban structure was materialised by Nigerian architect, designer and ‘urbanist’, Kunle Adeyemi.

Saturday afternoon saw some massive intellectual stimulation as Adeyemi shared his ground-breaking project on floating structures in his discourse on ‘Great city, terrible place’, at the latest edition of the Z-Axis annual conference being held at the Kala Academy, Panaji. Adeyemi developed the Makoko floating school as a prototype for construction in the coastal region of Makoko, a place which has regular floods due to unpredictable water levels.

‘Why the Chicago Architecture Biennial’s Kiosks Will Be CHI-IL As Heck.’ With the its local scene gaining momentum, the Chicago Architecture Biennial is threatening to steal some of the Venice Biennale’s thunder. (Please don’t give me concrete shoes!) One of the most exciting things in Chicago — and part of what is fueling the momentum of the Biennial — is the schools there. They have a complex history, as the skyscraper was born in Chicago, and Mies and Tigerman famously had a productive back-and-forth for many years at IIT and UIC respectively. Today, Chicago’s schools are thriving under strong leadership that has attracted some of the top design talent in the United States and the world.

‘Chicago Architecture Biennial partners with three Chicago-Based architecture schools and three international architecture firms to design additional kiosks as part of initiative to enhance lakefront’ We are happy to announce that NLÉ will be a part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and in collaboration with School of the Art Institute of Chicago for the Lakefront… Continue reading Chicago Architecture Biennial 2015

As the legacy of the Cold War fades and Western preeminence gradually becomes a thing of the past, population booms in Asia followed by the growth of a vast non-western middle class have seriously challenged the Western perception of the world. The East has become the focal point of the world’s development. If East Asia… Continue reading Archdaily – February 2015

International design firm NLÉ has recently shared its competition-winning design for the financial headquarters of the microfinance bank Credit Direct Limited. Located in Lagos, Nigeria, in the Ikeja district, the bank’s design abandons the forbidding presence of most financial institutions for one that is open and welcoming. This decision not only invites clientele inside, but creates opportunities for adaptation to the tropical weather of Lagos.

Rising Nigeria 2015 is an Investment Guide Report published by Global Group Media giving background and information on the opportunities available to global readers and investors in Africa, starting with Nigeria. The Federal Republic of Nigeria is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and an important investment destination. Due to its oil… Continue reading Rising Africa Series. Rising Nigeria – January 2015

The Chicoco Radio Station designed by Lagos and Amsterdam-based studio NLÉ will empower the nearly 480,000 people living on the waterfront of Port Harcourt in Nigeria with a community media platform. Considered a ‘bridge to transformation’ the steel structure is at one end raised off the ground supported by the towering radio antenna, while at the other end floating on the water’s surface as an aquatic jetty and stage. The linear projection is created with large trusses connected by an expansive floor plate. At the water’s edge, a large movie screen faces both the people sitting on the inclined floor as well as the boats around the exterior.

By the year 2100 there will be 11 billion people on our planet. Architect David Adjaye introduces us to two up-and-coming names building for the future.

Just inside the entrance to the MoMA exhibition, Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, a video shows men yanking wooden frames out of brick walls and hammering materials into place, providing a glimpse into the ‘tool-houses’ of Mumbai’s urban settlements that mix live-work functions. A passing viewer commented to his companion while shaking his head, “Look at that, they have to build everything by hand. Can you imagine how much work that takes?” This visceral response—a mixture of marvel and estrangement—encapsulates the conundrum of an exhibit showcasing tactical urbanism scenarios in six global cities. Who exactly does the work of tactical urbanism? And what can the architect or designer accomplish in these constantly shifting urban milieus?

The fourth cycle of the International Holcim Awards broke a number of records: there were more submissions – over 6,100 projects were entered in the competition. Also, there were more winners – the five regional juries selected 62 regional prize winners. Chicoco Radio was one of them with which NLÉ won an Acknowledgement Prize. More… Continue reading Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction – December 2014