A Day in Ann Arbor with Taubman College's Assistant Professor of Architecture Kuukuwa Manful

Kuukuwa Manful is a trained architect and researcher who creates, studies, teaches, and documents the history, theories, and politics of architecture in Africa. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. She runs Accra Archive, which preserves endangered architectural archives; curates adansisɛm — a Ghanaian architecture documentation collective; runs sociarchi — an architecture non-profit; and is president of the Accra chapter of Docomomo. Her day involves teaching two history classes, writing her book, and video games.

8:00am: I’m usually in my office by 8:00 am, especially on my teaching days. I prefer this early 8:30 am teaching slot as it leaves me feeling like I have the whole day ahead of me after class. I spend this time ahead of class reading emails and plotting out the rest of my day.

Special Collections. Courtesy of Kuukuwa Manful.

8:30am: My first class of the day is “History of Architecture II”, the second part of our college’s two-semester-long core Architectural History course offering. My section this past Winter 25 semester is subtitled “Modernisms, Antecedents, and Malcontents”. It’s my fun take on teaching the history of architectural modernism, specifically providing an understanding of the global contexts in which architectural modernists operated. We look at acknowledged and unacknowledged precedents, what modernist designers were responding to and discarding, who embraced the philosophy, who rejected it, and why.

Today’s class is held inside the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library’s Special Collections Space with Subject Librarian Rebecca Mary Price. In this class, we look at a collection of published material concerning the Western residential design trajectory, beginning with the 17th to 18th century with “Les Édifices Antiques de Rome” and “The Four Books of Andrea Palladio's Architecture”. We go through the centuries to Le Corbusier’s “Vers une Architecture”, and end with an amazing collection of 20th century American house design catalogues.

10:00am: Following my first class I have a meeting with Sarah Cheema, my excellent assistant in instruction for this class. She’s a doctoral student here at Taubman College studying the architectural history of post-colonial Pakistan. We discuss the past week of teaching and plan for the next one.

10:30am: I meet up with a student from the Urban and Regional Planning Program who wants my advice about their proposed urban political history research project. Meeting with students outside my courses and department is something I like to make time for as they’re doing such cool, ambitious things.

Cedi House, Accra Ghana designed by John Owusu Addo. Courtesy of Kuukuwa Manful.

11:00am: I’m trying to do a little bit of work on my book each day, even if it’s reading over something I’ve already written or looking at a relevant source to keep me focused and moving forward. The book I’m writing is an account of my investigation into how the physical and sociopolitical architectures of schools have come to mediate belonging in local and global hierarchies of nationality and class in Ghana.

Today, while eating my lunch, I read Fanti National Constitution, a book published in 1906 by John Mensah Sarbah, one of the most prominent lawyers and nationalist activists in Ghana when it was under British colonial rule. It’s a book primarily about law but as an architectural historian of a place with very limited documentary archival records, I’ve become very creative about finding sources. Reading contemporaneous accounts of the places and events I study can be revelatory.

11:30am: I attend my next meeting, which is for a committee I’m part of working on assessing improving aspects of teaching and learning at the college. It finishes just under ten minutes before my class, so I move quickly to make it in time.

1:00pm: My second class for the day is a three-hour-long seminar titled “Architecture in the Arts and Popular Culture” which explores architecture in and though games, novels, film, plays, art and other media forms. We start the class with a discussion of what architecture or architects we’ve encountered in the news, media, movies, music, etc. Today, the conversation revolves around The Brutalist film and the 1990’s American sitcom set of Doechii’s music video for “Denial is a River.” We examine and discuss set design, spaces for performance, and architecture as performance with examples from around the world including ancient Rome, post-independence Ghana, and the U.S. For their final assignments, students will be creating a piece or media or art using the themes, techniques, or concepts we discuss in class.

4:00pm: I usually spend the last hour of my workday either checking emails, meeting with students, or reading.

5:00pm: I’m very strict about sticking to my closing time of 5:00pm, after which I do not do any more work. I’ve found from experience that there will always be more to do, and if I’m not careful I could be sitting at my desk until 9:00pm. I did that while finishing my dissertation and it’s an experience I do not want to revisit.

7:00pm: After getting home at about 5:30pm I catch up with friends, have dinner, and then settle down to watch a show or play a video game. Today my game of choice is Timberborn, a type of city-building game with beavers. It has a lot of my favorite things in video games: terraforming, physics, and building things. I play until about 9:00 and get to bed not too long after that, reading ‘How to Say Babylon: A Memoir’ by Safiya Sinclair until it’s time to sleep. Thursday is going to be a full day of writing my book, so every hour of sleep counts.

This piece has been edited and condensed for clarity.