Thursday 22 May 2025| 1.00 – 2.30 PM Lingotto Room201|Recordings on YouTube
Contacts
4 thoughts on “A+ Lectures 2025|11 African Fabbers Atlas|Paolo Cascone”
Philip Iroagbalachi
The lecture on African Fabbers Atlas was an eye opener to a better understanding of manual of synthetic vernacular architecture. Paolo Cascone is an architect with a huge experience in Africa’s architecture and has made mathematical models of informal settlements and created special organisation and hierarchy. His idea on African off-grid housing and communities explains why design needs to be unlearned and new strategies be deviced to make technology more affordable.
He further explained that Black urbanism is not just a theory of urban inequality, it’s a framework for reimagining cities from the bottom up. It sees value in the overlooked, aesthetics in the improvised, and strategy in the informal. When applied to slums and informal settlements, it asks: What if these spaces weren’t problems to solve, but models of spatial intelligence to learn from?
it can be understood as both a critique of mainstream urban planning and a celebration of grassroots spatial agency in Black communities.
This lecture explores the connection between climate challenges, community resilience, and design as a social and political tool, particularly in the African context. At its core is the African Fabbers Atlas, a platform and travelling school that combines digital and traditional manufacturing to support sustainability and community-driven work, focusing on culture, enhancing survival strategies, and fostering innovation. I was really impressed by what Paolo Cascone described as “emergency as a culture”: in many parts of Africa, crisis is a constant, not a temporary state. But instead of waiting for outside help, younger generations are coming up with smart, local, often digital solutions rooted in everyday knowledge. They’re adapting fab labs to their environments, sometimes even more effectively than in Europe. These labs use local materials, respond to real climate needs, and prioritize working with communities over applying ready-made solutions. Fab labs often become open, shared spaces: places to test, learn, and build together, like in projects involving ceramic making in Marrakesh or solar energy setups in Dakar.
To conclude, it was powerful to listen how design/architecture can genuinely boost autonomy and resilience from the ground up. Also how African practices can offer meaningful answers to global problems.
Paolo Cascone’s African Fabbers Atlas gave me a completely new perspective on what architecture can be. His focus on designing not just for communities but with them stood out to me. He suggests that instead of seeing African architecture through the usual humanitarian lens, look at it as a source of innovation that is deeply rooted in local materials, traditional practices of the region and it’s environmental needs. His projects in Mali, Burkina Faso and Cameroon showcased how local materials, artisans and digital tolls can work together to build spaces that are flexible, economically sustainable and culturally meaningful. Instead of designing spaces with fixed object he focuses on prototypes that adapt to changing needs. His approach challenged to unlearn the conventional design systems and embrace architecture as a living, shared space that is climatically conscious.
The lecture by Paolo Cascone explored his research done through 15 years of experience in sub saharan africa and morocco, a cultural shift on the way of studying and analyzing that region, trying to shift this common place of Africa being an humanitarian aid. It was very interesting to see his approach, really working with the community and experimenting with them, not just architects but multi professional contributions and connecting people that are ot necessarily from the academic community. This allowed him to work in a much more dynamic way. I liked to see him mentioning the question of discussing a collective form of authorship, since it was a group work. Also this mix of conventional and digital tools, bringing the multiparametric approach into the local practices. Making a bridge with a previous lecture by Philip Yuan, Cascone mentions the idea of self malking the tools as a way to understand them better, very similar to this conception of the tool being developed by the architect and allowing a more targeted and specialized result.
The lecture on African Fabbers Atlas was an eye opener to a better understanding of manual of synthetic vernacular architecture. Paolo Cascone is an architect with a huge experience in Africa’s architecture and has made mathematical models of informal settlements and created special organisation and hierarchy. His idea on African off-grid housing and communities explains why design needs to be unlearned and new strategies be deviced to make technology more affordable.
He further explained that Black urbanism is not just a theory of urban inequality, it’s a framework for reimagining cities from the bottom up. It sees value in the overlooked, aesthetics in the improvised, and strategy in the informal. When applied to slums and informal settlements, it asks: What if these spaces weren’t problems to solve, but models of spatial intelligence to learn from?
it can be understood as both a critique of mainstream urban planning and a celebration of grassroots spatial agency in Black communities.
This lecture explores the connection between climate challenges, community resilience, and design as a social and political tool, particularly in the African context. At its core is the African Fabbers Atlas, a platform and travelling school that combines digital and traditional manufacturing to support sustainability and community-driven work, focusing on culture, enhancing survival strategies, and fostering innovation. I was really impressed by what Paolo Cascone described as “emergency as a culture”: in many parts of Africa, crisis is a constant, not a temporary state. But instead of waiting for outside help, younger generations are coming up with smart, local, often digital solutions rooted in everyday knowledge. They’re adapting fab labs to their environments, sometimes even more effectively than in Europe. These labs use local materials, respond to real climate needs, and prioritize working with communities over applying ready-made solutions. Fab labs often become open, shared spaces: places to test, learn, and build together, like in projects involving ceramic making in Marrakesh or solar energy setups in Dakar.
To conclude, it was powerful to listen how design/architecture can genuinely boost autonomy and resilience from the ground up. Also how African practices can offer meaningful answers to global problems.
Paolo Cascone’s African Fabbers Atlas gave me a completely new perspective on what architecture can be. His focus on designing not just for communities but with them stood out to me. He suggests that instead of seeing African architecture through the usual humanitarian lens, look at it as a source of innovation that is deeply rooted in local materials, traditional practices of the region and it’s environmental needs. His projects in Mali, Burkina Faso and Cameroon showcased how local materials, artisans and digital tolls can work together to build spaces that are flexible, economically sustainable and culturally meaningful. Instead of designing spaces with fixed object he focuses on prototypes that adapt to changing needs. His approach challenged to unlearn the conventional design systems and embrace architecture as a living, shared space that is climatically conscious.
The lecture by Paolo Cascone explored his research done through 15 years of experience in sub saharan africa and morocco, a cultural shift on the way of studying and analyzing that region, trying to shift this common place of Africa being an humanitarian aid. It was very interesting to see his approach, really working with the community and experimenting with them, not just architects but multi professional contributions and connecting people that are ot necessarily from the academic community. This allowed him to work in a much more dynamic way. I liked to see him mentioning the question of discussing a collective form of authorship, since it was a group work. Also this mix of conventional and digital tools, bringing the multiparametric approach into the local practices. Making a bridge with a previous lecture by Philip Yuan, Cascone mentions the idea of self malking the tools as a way to understand them better, very similar to this conception of the tool being developed by the architect and allowing a more targeted and specialized result.