It is now more than 60 years since the AA helped set up the architecture course at the then University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. Aside from the Architecture school, the Kumasi campus and its key buildings were planned and designed to modernist tropical design principles. This talk revisits and reappraises the  KNUST campus plan and its buildings. Often called the AA’s tropical laboratory in Africa in the 1960s, this talk appraises this legacy in its built form and also in architectural education in Africa.

Ola Uduku, took up a Chair in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture in September 2017. Prior to this she was Reader in Architecture, and Dean International for Africa, at Edinburgh University. Her research specialisms are in modern architecture in West Africa,  the history of educational architecture in Africa, and the contemporary issues related to social infrastructure provision for minority communities in cities in the ‘West’ and ‘South’​.