Ghana’s post-independence built environment represents one of the most ambitious legacies of modernism in sub-Saharan Africa. Commissioned during the 1950s and 1960s, buildings such as the State House, the Job 600 complex, the Accra Community Centre, the campus of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, and numerous civic, educational, and residential structures embody entangled architectural genealogies—the product of Cold War exchanges between Ghanaian clients, British firms working within the dissolving empire, and socialist-bloc architects from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Designed to perform climatically and symbolically, these buildings were conceived as instruments of nation-building. Yet the question of how they were to be sustained over time, technically, institutionally, and economically was rarely integrated into their original design logic.

This research examines the gap between design intent and material life, asking what it means to operationalize maintenance for this architectural heritage today. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research conducted by Office Southeast in Accra, this research identifies three interlocking dimensions of the maintenance problem: the climatic, concerning the performance of passive cooling systems, natural ventilation strategies, and envelope materials under conditions of intensifying heat and humidity; the institutional, concerning the capacity and mandate of agencies responsible for public buildings; and the epistemic, concerning the production and transmission of knowledge about how these buildings were designed to work.

This research will be presented at the conference accompanying the Pan-African Biennale, Nairobi, Kenya, September 10, 2026.