Kuukuwa Manful, ASA Doctoral Researcher, is presenting her research at the 16th International Docomomo Conference – Tokyo, Japan 2020+1. The conference theme is “Inheritable Resilience: Sharing Values of Global Modernities” and features research from around the world concerned with the “preservation, conservation, renovation or transformation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement”.
Kuukuwa is also attending the conference in her capacity as the president of the Docomomo Accra Chapter, which “works towards the documentation and preservation of Modern(ist) Architectural Heritage in Accra, Ghana”. As president of the Accra Chapter, Kuukuwa will participate in the Docomomo Council Meeting. Among other activities, new chapters and the organisation’s agenda for the next year will be reviewed for approval.
Kuukuwa’s paper, which has been accepted for publication in the Docomomo Conference Proceedings, is titled “The Modern Architecture of State Education: Tropical Modernist Discourses of West African School Design (1945 to 1965)”. Based on her field research in the Volta Region of Ghana on the African State Architecture project, the paper analyses historical records of interactions between modernist architects and the architectures and peoples of colonised regions through a study of school buildings designed and constructed in West Africa in the late colonial to early independence period (1945 to 1965). Kuukuwa explores what she terms as silences (that which is not included or is downplayed) in the historical records, together with archival research and historical document analysis to make new conceptual and analytical contributions to the study of architectural Modernism and modernities in Africa.