Credit African Expertise

What can African building traditions teach Europe about climate adaptation?

In this lecture, architect and researcher Aziza Chaouni (SONOLAB, EPFL Lausanne / Aziza Chaouni Projects) offers a decolonial perspective on architectural knowledge, drawing on her work across Morocco and the Sahara. She explores how self-building, local materials and community-driven design can reshape architecture’s value chain toward more equitable environmental futures. Join us to discover what global architecture can learn from African expertise.

What can African approaches to building, inhabiting and repairing teach Europe about climate adaptation and low carbon construction? This lecture proposes a decolonial perspective on architectural knowledge, recognising African communities, craftspeople and designers as producers of expertise whose practices can inform global responses to environmental change.

Across the continent’s diverse contexts, rapid urbanisation, rural transformation and the erosion of vernacular building traditions intersect with intensifying climate pressures. Construction frequently unfolds through self building, incremental adaptation and collective resourcefulness. Within these conditions, architectural innovation emerges through local materials, passive environmental strategies, construction techniques and forms of cooperation grounded in everyday experience.

Without romanticising scarcity or overlooking structural inequalities, Aziza Chaouni examines how such practices invite a reconsideration of architecture’s value chain: from material sourcing and building systems to shared decision making, use, maintenance and reuse. Drawing on her practice and research, she explores participatory design, the informal occupation of heritage buildings and experimentation with communities as pathways towards more equitable environmental futures.

Aziza was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1977. She studied at Columbia University in New York and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her travels through the Sahara (Mauritania, Mali, Libya, Sudan and Egypt) to study ecotourism have reinforced her belief that a project is not limited to a building, but encompasses a living ecosystem. Aziza Chaouni heads the South-North Lab for Sustainable Construction and Conservation at EPF Lausanne (SONOLAB) and runs her own multidisciplinary design practice, Aziza Chaouni Projects (ACP).

AUDITORIUM 26/27

Lecture series about architecture and urban planning.

NEW! – the idea that true innovation often stems from rediscovering old knowledge, forgotten materials and overlooked
perspectives.

What do we really mean by ‘new’? Maybe we have experienced it before? Perhaps genuine innovation lies not in the unprecedented, but in rethinking what we have left behind. Not as nostalgia, but as a fresh understanding of knowledge, materials and practices — and how they can reshape what we build, make and think.