The African Collaborative Institute of Design (ACID), Livin Spaces and other collaborators are proud to announce Francois Aramide Akinosho as the 2018 ACID Fellow. As the fellow of the maiden edition of the program, she will be charting a new confluence platform through which the academia can meet the industrial professional world in a symbiotic relationship. The Director of the Institute, Stephen Ajadi, explains that the notion of the fellowship is to bring highly motivated and outstanding professionals in the full time practice realm into the experience of advanced cutting edge academic research. He added,
“This enables professionals who seek more answers than they currently have, to venture into newer stranger domains of thought in pushing the limits of their fields and in turn, their profession. They also get to do it with thought leaders who have overlapping interests. This is why ACID started the fellowship program.”
Aramide was selected out of a small shortlist who fit into the nature and direction of the fellowship. Domains proposed ranged from history to engineering. Aramide however is an architect. She runs the innovative office of architecture called François Akinosho Architecture (Paris/Nigeria). She graduated as an architect in 2004 having studied architecture at Ecole d’architecture de marne la vallée (Paris), Accademia di architettura mendrisio (Switzerland). She has worked and led projects at Archi-tectonics (New York), Bonetti-Kozerski (New York), Bernard Tschumi Architects (New York), Ateliers Lion (Paris), including Total E&P and Design group (Nigeria).
Aramide’s work will focus on the requalification of the notion of beauty in African architecture through the avenues of style, shape and space. She holds the position that beauty might dwell in the balance of non-physical or ‘non-palpable’ parameters. Using the term ‘esthetics’ instead of ‘aesthetics’ she attempts to distinguish her approach from the naive, ubiquitous views of physical beauty via form and space.
Through History, Aramide senses a disconnect in the proliferation of architecture in the chronological and cultural context of the discourse, and therefore sees her proposed research also as a means of seeking a continuation and reconnection with the past.
“We can call this a new modern approach that wants to be in rupture with what is being done today by seeking a continuity with the past through its transformation… It is clearly an exercise to resist the international magnetism of recurrent models”
– François Aramide
Aramide takes the stand that the research work of her fellowship will also serve as an exercise in putting up a counter-front to the westernization of style, shape and space, in the context of architecture in Nigeria and in turn, sub-Saharan Africa. Her 7-month long fellowship will include exhibitions, lectures, short residencies around the country and close academic collaboration with the Nigerian architectural historian and theorist; Joseph Igwe.
For more information on ACID and the Fellowship program, get the Fellowship’s Overview.
For further questions, please send enquiries to contact@acidgroup.org
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