This research focuses on collective and individual housing projects designed by Ghanaian Victor Adegbite (1925-2014) and Hungarian Charles Polónyi (1928-2002) in independent Ghana during the 1960s. In the context of Cold War competition, Polónyi travelled within state-socialist technical assistance for Ghana, where he was employed by Ghana National Construction Corporation, headed by Adegbite. However, their work hardly fits into the Cold War narrative of a bipolar confrontation. Polónyi brought to Ghana an experience from socialist Hungary, but also extensive exchanges around housing within the Team 10 network. In turn, Adegbite was trained at Howard University in Washington DC, and in Colombia. Based on their peripatetic experience, Adegbite and Polónyi challenged the authority of any single foreign precedent—whether British, Soviet, or American—and rethought the criteria according to which foreign housing typologies were adapted to Ghana’s conditions.

By focusing on the cosmopolitan context of 1960s Ghana, this research shows a broad professional consensus across Cold War divides that foreign housing typologies needed to be adapted to local climate, materials, technologies, economies, and customary social practices. However, the interpretation of these criteria and the practices of adaptation that followed differed according to economic, social, and political frameworks and imaginations of the professionals involved. For example, while architects in 1960s Ghana agreed that housing typologies needed to be economical, they disagreed whether that meant “economies of scale” allowed by state-planned mass prefabrication, or a recourse to older tradition of self-help housing. Similar differences pertained to social and technological criteria, and to ideas about environmental control shaped by distinct professional traditions. By discussing housing designs for Ghana, this research shows how the practice of adaptation became an opportunity for Adegbite and Polónyi to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Africa’s economic and social development.

This research was presented at the Society of Architectural Historians conference in Atlanta, USA (2025) and at the Intersections exhibition at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles (2025).