In this conversation, architect, researcher, and educator Paolo Cascone, and contributor Maddalena Laddaga reflects on the ideas and practices developed in his book African Fabbers Atlas: Manual of Synthetic Vernacular Architecture (Actar Publishers, 2025).
They argue that African contexts are sources of architectural knowledge with global relevance. Their response emphasizes bottom-up construction cultures, distributed forms of production, climatic adaptability, and strong links between fabrication, training, and local communities—conditions that they see not as peripheral, but as highly instructive for societies confronting ecological and educational crisis elsewhere.
The discussion explores how African models of small-scale industry, material transformation, informal knowledge, and community-based fabrication can help redefine architecture in Europe and beyond. At the same time, they argue that this shift also requires a deeper cultural and institutional change: one that recognizes precolonial and vernacular knowledge, expands educational frameworks, and creates new platforms for exchange between African and Western contexts.
