Baerbel Mueller,
I oA Dean and founder and head of [Applied] Foreign Affairs ([A]FA)participates at the 2024 Womxn in Design and Architecture
(WDA) Conference
@ Princeton University
Conference
participants: Lesley Lokko OBE, Baerbel Mueller, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Erandi de Silva, Renée C. Neblett, DK Osseo-Asare, among
others.
Betts Auditorium
2024 Womxn in Design and Architecture (WDA) Conference
Alero
Olympio: Activated Matter
Thursday, February 29, 6PM
Friday, March 1, 10AM - 4PM
Betts Auditorium
Free and open to the public
Organized by Womxn in Design and Architecture (WDA, @princetonwda), a graduate student group formed in 2014 at Princeton
University School of Architecture, this annual conference celebrates the work and memory of a pivotal architect or designer
with contributions from international historians and scholars, in addition to artists, musicians, curators, and practitioners.
The eighth Womxn in Design Conference at the Princeton School of Architecture honors the life and work of the late Alero Olympio.
Alero Olympio was an architect and builder of radical ecologies. Born in Ghana and working extensively between Scotland
and her homeland, Olympio theorized and exercised a rigorous dedication to social and environmental sustainability at all
scales. She envisioned building methods and materials as emergent sites of potential, rejecting industrialized products in
favor of inherited, place-specific knowledge systems. Locally sourced Laterite clay and African hardwood were essential materials
in her new architectural language, as she championed the ongoing protection of West African timber resources and delicate
forest ecosystems. Olympio’s work codified an intimately ecological approach to architecture, one embedded within the specific
material and social conditions of its place, and an innovative and distinctly African mode of practice.
Dynamic and inspired, Olympio challenged the conventional architect archetype. She pursued entrepreneurial endeavors
that pushed far beyond the building realm, from furniture to care products to a children’s book. Her built projects in Ghana
and Scotland–including the Kokrobitey Institute, the visitor trail at Kakum National Park, and many private residential homes–stand
as a testament to the coherence of her methods and the persistence, integrity, and longevity of her vision. These projects,
many of which she constructed of local materials, proposed an affordable, sustainable, and site-specific infrastructure that
acknowledged Ghanaian social mobility within a post-independence context. Flourishing and developing their own networks of
care and mutuality, the cross-continental communities living within her designs embody Olympio’s enduring legacy.
The 2023-24 conference proceedings will call on the discipline with timely topics and inquiries, such as the wide-reaching
sustainable potential of local building materials and place-specific methods, the role of the architect in forging cross-cultural
exchange, and the impact of architecture as a site for community-building and cultural transformation. Olympio’s work exists
at a nexus that continues to be central to contemporary architectural discourse: intertwining biogenic materiality and social
resiliency.
Conference participants include Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Erandi
de Silva, John Ennis, Prof. Lesley Lokko OBE, Kuukuwa Manful, Baerbel Mueller, Renee C. Neblett, DK Osseo-Asare, Juliet Sakyi-Ansah,
and Dr. Ola Uduku, among others.
