Built to Last: Memory, imagination, and the architecture of Mariam Issoufou

Mariam Issoufou’s architecture is distinct. Perhaps because it looks so familiar yet so unusual at the same time. 

A wall might be made of compressed earth but curve like concrete. A window might be shaped like an arch you once saw in a medieval city, or a village courtyard or both.

Her buildings carry the weight of memory and the clarity of invention. 

They seem to belong as much to the past as they do to a future — not yet fully realised, straddling the realm between imagination, antiquity and reality.

There is a kind of silence to her structures. The kind that settles over a space when it has been designed with care and patience. 

In Dandaji — a village on the arid western plains of her home country, Niger — a library stands beside a mosque and both are built of earth pulled from the ground just metres away. It doesn’t feel symbolic. It feels natural. As if the village decided to rise taller and Issoufou simply gave it form.

In Niamey, a housing block built for the city’s growing middle class doesn’t mimic Western suburbia. Instead, it offers courtyards for gathering, thick walls that cool the air without machines, passages that bend and open like market alleys. 

The lines are sharp but the logic is organic. The geometry never feels forced. You could run your hand along the walls and feel stories pressed into them.

In her hands, architecture doesn’t just shelter. It speaks. It honours. It reflects. Her buildings don’t shout but they sure don’t whisper either. They have the presence of something that knows where it came from and is confidently deciding where to go.

“I think the biggest trap we’ve fallen into is conflating modernity and Westernity,” she told Justin McGuirk, director of the Design Museum’s Future Observatory, during a live interview at the recent Abu Dhabi Culture Summit in the United Arab Emirates. 

“This idea that somehow modernity has a style has been, to me, the most bewildering realisation, because there is no such thing. 

“There is modernism, which is something that came out of the West.

“Modernity itself is a principle; it’s something that can be quite universal and that we can all claim. And it absolutely does not have an aesthetic to me, it’s a mindset. It’s a way of thinking of yourself in the present, and of projecting yourself into the future.”

“And, for me, it’s straightforward to go from an architecture that is rooted to learn from what came before, but then make a new interpretation of it that can exist in the present, and can then evolve into something new for the future.”

To explore Issoufou’s work and ideas is to discover how much they challenge conventional wisdom about modern architecture and what form that should take in the Global South. Yet somehow her work has been embraced in Africa and beyond.

Established in 2014, her architecture and research firm Mariam Issoufou Architects has offices in Niamey, New York and Zurich. One of its crowning achievements was the Hikma Community Complex in Dandaji, which won two Global LafargeHolcim Awards for sustainable architecture.

Further afield, in the Kaolack region of Senegal, Issoufou is building the Bët-bi Museum of Contemporary Art and Culture. 

In Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, she’s developing the Hayyan Housing Project and Lifestyle Centre. And in Monrovia, Liberia, she’s leading the design of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Centre for Women and Development in collaboration with fellow architects Sumayya Vally and Karen Richards Barnes.

In preparing to speak to Issoufou, I framed many of my questions around the use of “traditional African architecture” but, the more I reflected, the more I realised how much even that choice of words is loaded with assumptions.

I grew up in Gaborone, Botswana, during a boom time when it was among the fastest-growing cities on the continent and, in large part, that meant importing the structures of skyscrapers, imposingly tall buildings made of glass and concrete, from Europe and North America. This was progress. This was development.

Meanwhile, the kind of architecture that naturally grew out of the Botswana environment, the rondavels and the thatch roofs, rarely featured into the new vision of how Gaborone would grow to become a world-class city. Because that was traditional. That was outdated. 

Reflecting on this led me to ask Issoufou if she had faced pushback in her efforts to institute her perspective into her architectural practice.

“Yes, of course,” she says. “But, at the end of the day, what I ended up realising is that you really have to empathise with where people are coming from. 

“So, it’s not really about wanting to institute anything. 

“I think, for me, I was more focused on having the conversation and then really challenging those views.

“Like, when I first started talking about earth architecture, people literally laughed in my face. 

“They’d say, ‘You’re trying to set us back 200 years. Like, what do you think this is? We’re not trying to live in the past.’” 

“And we had to have this conversation about the fact that it has nothing to do with the past. And again, that’s why I like to give wood as an example, or stone. These are materials that we’ve used forever. And in places where they grow and they’re abundant.”

One thing that has helped Issoufou’s cause is the undeniable benefits that come with using earth in terms of both practicality and sustainability. For the Hikma Community Complex in Dandaji, most of the project materials were sourced within a less than 5km radius from the site, while concrete was limited to structural elements such as columns and lintels. 

The project introduced compressed-earth bricks made with laterite soil found on site. 

The thermal mass of these bricks made natural ventilation possible, keeping indoor temperatures comfortable and removing the need for air conditioning.

“We tend to think of certain types of materials as being non-modern and feel somehow we have to explain them in contemporary terms or have to justify their use,” Issoufou says. 

“And I think that’s the first trap we fall in, because there is nothing inherently traditional about any materials versus others.

“When we build with wood, we don’t think of wood as being a traditional material. So, there’s certain stigmas that we associate with certain materials and earth is definitely one of them. 

“But I don’t think of materials in terms of modern or not. I think of them in terms of practicality, in terms of what makes sense to me. 

“It’s not an aesthetic response at all. It’s just a logical response to the local conditions. And the climate is just one of the dimensions of those conditions.”

The Hikma Community Complex combines the restoration of old buildings with the addition of new structures. An existing mosque has been renovated and adapted as a library, with study spaces, classrooms and workshop areas in the gardens, and a larger new mosque building has been added.

“Earth is the exact same in its usefulness as wood or stone but somehow the only material that has that stigma is earth. And why is that? 

“What we have all internalised in a profound manner is our inferiority. We have an ingrained inferiority complex. So, we accept things as being valuable if they are valuable in the West or if the West has decided that they’re valuable.”

Mariam Issoufou’s journey to becoming an internationally lauded architect wasn’t straightforward. She began her working life pursuing a career as a computer engineer, earning a bachelor’s degree in technical computing from Purdue University in Indiana in the US in 2001, and then a master’s degree in computer science from New York University in 2004.

“I wanted to be an architect very early on, but it kind of didn’t make sense to me, because I didn’t really know anybody who was an architect,” she reflects. 

“I was privileged enough to be sent to the US to study and it felt a bit obscene to study something like architecture because it takes a lot of effort and money. 

“For this education I was receiving, I felt like I needed to study something that would have a good return on investment.

“How I grew up, it was either you have to become a doctor or lawyer. And this is very typical, I think, of most immigrant families. 

“And at the time, it was the late Nineties, so I just looked around and tried to see what seemed like a solid career. That’s why I studied computer science — because it was around the time of the internet boom. It was a good decision. I believe I don’t regret doing that first before coming to architecture.”

She worked in the computing field for seven years before deciding to become an architect to fulfil her childhood aspirations. 

In 2013, Issoufou earned her master’s degree in architecture from the University of Washington. The following year she founded Mariam Issoufou Architects. 

Her career took off swiftly. In addition to leading an architecture firm with a presence on three continents, Issoufou is also a professor of architecture heritage and sustainability at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, one of the most prestigious architecture schools in the world.

She’s a 2019 laureate of the Prince Claus Award and was named as one of 15 Creative Women of Our Time by The New York Times in 2020.

At the heart of Issoufou’s practice is a deep belief in collaboration and continuity. For her, architecture is not just about building structures, it’s about building systems of knowledge and opportunity that can outlast the project itself.

When renovating the old mosque as part of the Hikma Community Complex, she brought in the original masons who constructed the building decades earlier. Rather than simply restoring the space to its former state, the team taught these masons how to work with adobe-enhancing additives and erosion-protection techniques, updating their traditional craft with new layers of resilience.

The approach was not about preservation for its own sake but about growth: “We don’t look for artisans because they already know how to make what we want,” Issoufou explains. “We study what they can do and then we design something new that pushes that skill forward.”

She recalls a metalworker who had never bent thick iron pipes into curved structural forms before. When faced with the design for a market structure, he laughed at the model and asked if she had pulled the concept from the internet. 

But, after testing a prototype together, he travelled to Benin to purchase a machine. Now, he’s one of only two people in Niger with that capacity and his business has grown as a result.

It’s a ripple effect. “Even if we stop a project, the skills don’t stop,” Issoufou says. 

Her masons have since been contracted for work in Senegal and Mali. Her brick-makers are being called in for international jobs. 

The process is just as important as the product, and the people who shape the project — brick by brick, weld by weld — are not treated as footnotes. They’re credited in publications, in images, in the very narrative of the work.

“We make sure that their names are known,” Issoufou says. “That a photographer from Tahoua, or a contractor from Niamey, can be found and called and offered more work. That matters to us.” 

For her, architecture is never just about what is built. It’s about who builds it, and what they’re able to build next.

The past few years in Niger have been marked by political instability. In July 2023, a military coup ousted the democratically elected president, one of several power shifts to shake the Sahel region. Borders closed, international aid froze and sweeping sanctions followed. For many, it felt like the future had been put on hold.

Among the stalled projects was a major cultural work in Niamey led by Issoufou’s firm — an elegant composition of elliptical towers built of  compressed earth, designed as both a civic landmark and a communal heart. 

“It was an extinction event for the firm, honestly,” Issoufou admits. “We were about to break ground. And then everything stopped.”

Yet despite the upheaval, her practice did not collapse: “What saved us was that we were already working in so many different countries nearby,” she explains. “Most of the projects were already outside Niger.” 

While the Niamey project remains on pause, the firm has pushed forward with work in Senegal, Ghana, Benin and Liberia, including the Bët-bi Museum and the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Centre, which are breaking ground this year.

This regional spread is no accident. Issoufou has designed her practice to be flexible and cross-continental. 

“Over the past decade and more, we’ve built an incredibly robust remote working system,” she says. 

“That’s a legacy from my computer science background. It means I can draw, review and collaborate, regardless of where I am.”

Still, her commitment to Niger remains unwavering. 

“The headquarters of the firm being there is incredibly important to me,” she says firmly. “There’s no scenario where that’s not the case.” 

Rather than despair, she sees the crisis through a lens shaped by lived experience: “We come from a part of the world where the ground is always unstable to some extent. So, you build systems of resilience, both professionally and personally.”

For Issoufou, that isn’t about resistance alone; it’s about readiness. 

“You can’t run out of patience when things flip,” she says. “You have to understand that the chaos will end and you have to be ready to pick up the pieces afterward. This is temporary. It will pass.”

Issoufou’s architecture defies categorisation and reframes the conversation entirely. Rooted in the soil of her home country, yet expansive in its reach, it proposes an alternative vision of modernity, one that honours the past not by preserving it in amber, but by folding it into new futures.

In a world quick to flatten tradition into stereotype or discard it altogether in the pursuit of progress, Issoufou’s buildings whisper a different kind of intelligence, one born of listening closely to place, to people and to materials often overlooked.

Maybe that’s the quiet radicalism at the heart of her practice. From Dandaji to Monrovia, from earth bricks to elliptical towers, her crafting goes beyond architecture and encompasses a methodology of care, a politics of presence.

In uncertain times, her work reminds us true modernity doesn’t come from erasure or mimicry but from the courage to imagine continuity. It’s not about where you build, but how, and with whom. And it’s in that grounded imagination that Issoufou’s vision finds its most enduring form.