Achieving Growth
Further Out Field
Notes from HTL Africa
FROM THE STUDIO
The past several months have been a period of learning for HTL Africa.
We began the year working at a scale larger than we would ordinarily encounter in an urban context: a precinct bringing several buildings together within a single environment. The exercise has required us to think beyond individual buildings and towards the relationships that emerge between them.
The buildings themselves are important, but they are not the entirety of the proposition.
Increasingly, our attention is drawn to what happens in and around them. How people arrive. How they move. Where they pause. Where they gather. How one building speaks to another, and how the spaces between them can create opportunities for interaction.
For the studio, this has required a shift in both scale and thinking.
We are learning how to put several buildings together, but more importantly, we are learning to think about the environment those buildings collectively create.
Elsewhere, these questions are beginning to appear at different scales.
At THM in Surulere, construction has progressed from the foundations to the first-floor slab. In Ghana, another THM has reached its third floor, while two seven-storey towers continue to take shape. Ordinarity, completed at the beginning of the year, brings together approximately ten years of research into the African object, the African city and the act of making architecture from the conditions around us.
Across projects, objects, research and construction, a direction is becoming clearer.
Our experiments are moving from a primary focus on the architectural object towards the environments in which those objects exist.
The object remains important.
But so does its field.
We are going “further out field”.
How might people move through the precinct?
Where might they meet?
What relationships can emerge between public and private space?
How can architecture enable interaction without attempting to prescribe it?
These questions are gradually expanding the field within which we work.
We are still designing buildings. But we are increasingly interested in the environments those buildings make possible.
BETWEEN BUILDINGS
Learning The Public Realm
A precinct is more than a collection of buildings. It is also the space between them.
Our work on a larger precinct during the first half of the year has required the studio to consider architecture at an urban scale beyond what we would ordinarily take on.
At this scale, the individual building can no longer be considered in isolation. Questions of movement, gathering, landscape, access and encounter become equally important to the architectural proposition.
The exercise has therefore shifted our attention from simply asking what each building should be to asking what can happen between the buildings.
The buildings are important, but they are not the entirety of the proposition.
BUILDING THE QUESTIONS
THM/Surulere
At THM in Surulere, ideas that have existed through drawings are steadily becoming physical.
So far, construction progressed from the foundations to the first-floor slab.
Following challenges in achieving the necessary alignment with contractors, HTL assumed greater responsibility for the delivery of the project. In doing so, the relationship between design and construction has become considerably more immediate.
THM has given us an opportunity to bring to life several ideas that have occupied the studio for a long time.
Again, these ideas extend beyond the architectural object itself.They concern the public realm, collective life and the ways in which architecture can create opportunities for people to interact with one another.
As the project moves through construction, these ideas are being tested against the realities of structure, material, sequencing, workmanship and site.
The project is therefore doing more than taking shape.
It is allowing us to build the questions we have been asking.
The project is allowing us to build the questions we have been asking.
The way one element meets another.
Individually, these decisions can seem small. Collectively, they determine how a building is ultimately experienced.
Working across borders makes the translation of these details particularly important. It requires clear communication, documentation and coordination between the studio and the site so that architectural intent survives the journey from drawing to construction.
The buildings are getting taller. Our attention remains on the details. As the buildings rise, the smallest decisions become increasingly consequential.
TAKING SHAPE
Building In Ghana
In Ghana, the work continues vertically. One of our THM projects has reached its third floor, while two seven-storey towers are steadily taking shape.
As these projects move from drawings into construction, another question becomes increasingly important: how do we ensure that the small details that contribute significantly to the final architectural experience are carried through to execution as effortlessly as possible?
Architecture is often determined by decisions that appear minor on paper.
A junction.
An edge.
A material transition.
A proportion.
Architecture not only as something that is made, but as something we do.
A LINE THROUGH WORK
Ordinarity
At the beginning of 2026, James Inedu-George completed his book Ordinarity, bringing together approximately ten years of research, observation and architectural practice.
Printed in China, the book examines African phenomena that have not always been connected to conventional architectural discourse and considers what becomes possible when they are read through architecture.
At its centre is an interest in the African object, the African city and the act of making.
Ordinarity looks at architecture not only through completed buildings, but through the actions that continually produce the city and the environments around us.
Making.
Trading.
Gathering.
Adapting.
Occupying.
Extending.
Repairing.
These actions allow architecture to be considered not simply as an object, but as something continuously being done.
Architecture as a verb.
The book connects these observations to the work of HTL Africa and to a decade-long investigation into what it means to make architecture from the conditions, objects, systems and behaviours that already exist within African cities. In this sense, Ordinarity operates simultaneously as an archive and a threshold. It gathers approximately ten years of work, research and connections into one body while drawing a line from which another layer of the practice can emerge.
As HTL Africa increasingly turns its attention towards the public realm and urban-facing work, Ordinarity establishes the body of thinking from which that movement continues.
Following the 2026 FIFA World Cup, James will begin an international tour around the book, extending its ideas into conversations with new audiences, institutions and cities. Architecture not only as something that is made, but as something we do.
TESTING THE FIELD
Competitions and New Work
Competitions provide another space in which the studio can test its developing ideas against different sites, programmes and scales.
During the first half of the year, we participated in a number of competitions, with successful outcomes including Steps at Achimota, Accra, Ghana and Sterling Stone, Lagos.
Each proposition creates an opportunity to explore possibilities beyond the immediate demands of commissioned work and to examine how ideas developed within the studio respond when placed within another context.
Alongside these explorations, VGC House has progressed through the approval process.
The project has been submitted for approval and the required assessment completed. We are currently awaiting the issuance of approvals ahead of the commencement of construction.
Some ideas are being built.
Others are being tested.
Others are waiting for their moment to begin.
Together, they form the wider field of the practice.
An architectural practice produces more than buildings.
Over time, it accumulates drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, material studies, competition entries, construction records, unfinished propositions and fragments of thinking.
Individually, these materials document particular moments.
Together, they begin to tell the story of a practice.
HTL Africa has begun working with Co Design Collective on the archival process of the studio's work. The exercise goes beyond organising and preserving material.
An archive makes it possible to place work produced at different moments alongside one another and begin to see relationships that may not have been apparent when each project was being made.
Questions recur.
Ideas evolve.
Experiments return in different forms.
Projects that may initially appear unrelated begin to reveal common concerns.
For a practice whose work moves between architecture, furniture, research, exhibitions, construction and the city, the archive provides a way of understanding these outputs not as isolated projects, but as parts of a continuing narrative.
It allows us to look backwards without becoming nostalgic.
To understand where ideas began.
To trace where they travelled.
And, in doing so, to better understand where the practice might go next.
We are organising the record of where we have been in order to see more clearly where we are going.
An archive does not simply preserve the work. It reveals the relationships between it.
THE MEMORY OF A PRACTICE
Building the HTL Africa Archive
Our work for the Presbyterian Church in Kyebi has extended beyond the architecture of the building itself.
Having worked on the restoration of the church, our attention has also turned towards the objects through which the building is occupied and experienced.
HTL Africa has designed seating for the church, with the pieces currently awaiting execution.
At this scale, the concerns of architecture become immediate.
A chair meets the body.
It determines how someone sits, gathers, waits, listens and participates within a space.
The intervention may be smaller than a building, but the design question remains connected to the larger architectural idea.
The building creates the space.
The objects within it shape how that space is lived.
For us, architecture does not necessarily end at the building.
Sometimes, it continues through the things inside it.
Architecture does not necessarily end at the building.
AFTER THE BUILDING
Presbyterian Church, Kyebi
THE OFFICE AS PROTOTYPE
The Family Table
Sometimes the studio itself becomes the site of an experiment.
Designed by HTL Africa and produced by FOLM Manufacturing, the Family Table was conceived as a self-sustaining workspace capable of adapting to the rhythms of a creative office. Its modular structure integrates storage, seating, presentation areas and meeting space into one continuous form.
It functions as more than a table.
It is a workstation.
A meeting place.
A presentation surface.
A place to gather.
Crafted in Board 8431 Oak as a single solid composition, the Family Table deliberately blurs the line between furniture and architecture.
Both sculptural and practical, it responds to the different ways a studio works throughout the day. Individuals can work independently around it. Conversations can happen across it. Drawings and materials can be spread over it. The team can gather around it.
Rather than simply occupying the office, the table begins to organise the life around it. In that sense, it is connected to the larger questions currently occupying the practice.
How can design create conditions for interaction?
How can an object support collective life?
How can architecture respond to the changing ways in which people occupy space?
The scale has changed.
The inquiry has not.
The scale has changed. The inquiry has not.
A precinct.
A construction site in Surulere, Lagos
Structures rising in Ghana.
A book bringing together ten years of research.
Competitions testing ideas in new contexts.
An archive beginning to tell the story of a practice.
Seating designed for a restored church.
A table around which a studio gathers.
Different scales.
Different places.
Different forms of making.
Yet each points towards a similar movement.
The field of the practice is widening.
Not simply through larger projects or new geographies, but through an expanding understanding of where architecture begins and where it ends.
The object remains important.
But so does the space around it.
The street beyond it.
The objects within it.
The histories behind it.
The people who occupy it.
And the relationships it makes possible.
The first half of 2026 has given us an opportunity to look beyond the singular object and towards this wider field.
There is still much to learn.
Much to test.
Much to make.
For now, this is where we are.
Further Out Field.