John Owusu Addo

Painting a picturesque image, he reminisces about his childhood, recalling how his father would leave home early in the mornings to go to his cocoa farms, while the children ran off to the village school which was held in the Methodist missionary church. Life in the village as a child was fun; playing with friends with makeshift footballs made of gum in the wider alleys between the houses; little girls getting their hair braided by their mothers and the older girls, playing ‘Ampe’ and ‘Oware’. In a chat with him, he remarks how in those days, most children had active fingers for the crafts, as most toys and play objects were hand and self-made.

Young Owusu Addo’s first encounter with public British colonial era architecture outside Akwadum was at the age of eight, when he had to be taken to the Koforidua Hospital for a foot injury that had become infected. After several weeks of orthodox treatment, when his foot was not healing, a friend of his father’s introduced him to a local healer. With the herbal treatment used by the local healer, he was on his feet within a week. He highlights that it was during the time of recuperation and the moments of idleness, when he could not be out playing with his friends, that he discovered his love for model-making. He developed a knack for building toy cars out of empty tins, wood, and his mother’s kitchen knife. Years later, this love for building toys would come in handy in architecture school.

John Owusu Addo, started school at the late age of nine, going through the British colonial education system. Following the sad passing of his father when he was in standard five, the teenage Owusu Addo moved to Koforidua, the capital of the Eastern province of then Gold Coast, to live with his older sister and brother-n-law.

Koforidua in the 1940s was a thriving and bustling town of brisk commercial activity with iconic  buildings, some of which still house the original companies: SCOA, UAC, UTC (Basel Mission), G B Ollivant and the British Bank of West Africa (now Standard Chartered Bank). The train station was a high traffic area, being the primary means of transport to Accra or Kumasi. Bungalows for British expatriate workers were set in a very quiet, serene area with a golf course. He later learned that the early British colonial era building designs were responses to the tropical climate. Roofs were steep, hip, or Dutch gable with ventilation copulas and wide eaves for sun-shading They also exhibited classical features that included symmetrical façades with colonnaded verandas or wraparound shaded walkways.

Following his completion of standard seven in Koforidua, Owusu Addo was admitted to the Kumasi Wesley College Teacher Training College in 1944. Kumasi was a much bigger city than Koforidua. It had the residences of the great Ashanti king, the Asantehene, and was the administrative capital of the Ashanti region. While in Wesley College, he was drawn to a very peculiar bungalow with distinct architecture. He would later learn that it was designed and built by famous British architects, Maxwell Fry and his wife Jane Drew, who also designed Wesley Girls High School and Prempeh College, both in Ghana.

After four years at Wesley College, he gained admission into the highly reputed Achimota Specialist Training College in Accra, where he studied arts. There, he came across a book by Sir Bannister Fletcher on architecture, which talked about Egyptian and Roman architecture, and instantly became interested in the subject.

Art students of Achimota often took field trips into the city center to sketch the city. John was drawn to the imposing Accra Supreme Court building with its classical Greek ionic columns. As trainee students, touring the buildings of early colonial Accra included the Indo-Mughal styled Accra Post office, the classical Bank of British West Africa, the Romanesque Accra Railway Station and the ecclesiastical English Anglican and Methodist cathedrals with their red brick exteriors, gothic windows doors and tower clocks that stood as testaments to British imperial presence. The old city of Jamestown and its iconic lighthouse and harbor cast shadows on old Accra’s slave trading past with the presence of three 17th century stone slave forts: the British James fort (1673), Dutch Ussher Fort (1649)—now a prison— and the Danish Christiansborg Castle (1662), which was the seat of the British government and residence of the governor of the Gold Coast. These spiked Addo's interest in historical buildings.

Training as an art teacher at Achimota School was not only a privilege, but also had a purpose. The prestigious institution was set up in 1928 to train teachers to teach children of the African elite both the British and African ways of life as compliments to each other. Here, John studied the broad range of traditional arts and crafts which included painting and carving in addition to literature and other classical studies. His hopes of studying architecture were met with disappointment, as the university college did not offer architecture as a course. As a result, he decided to pursue history at the University College.

In 1952, he transferred to the College of Art in the new University of Science and Technology as an art teacher. As fate would have it, it was here that, while visiting with a friend who worked in the main library, he came across the Gold Coast Gazette newspaper. He encountered an advertisement for interested applicants in the study of architecture in London, U.K.  After applying, he was called for an interview and subsequently awarded a scholarship to study in England.

The trip from Takoradi to Liverpool took 12 days by an Elder Dempster vessel. For the next five years, he attended the Regent Street Polytechnic, now the University of Westminster. Here, his early model-making skills kicked in. He recalls the highlights of his experience here were the field trips to Paris, Rome and Vienna. While in London, Ghana gained independence in 1957. In 1958, he interned with Kenneth Scott in London and obtained his RIBA certification in November that year. In February 1959, he returned to Ghana with his love, Doris Owusu Addo (née Sarkodee-Addo), a lawyer, who became one of the country's judges.

In the early years following independence, Accra was bursting with new buildings, signaling the modern age and forming the golden years of architecture in Ghana. A new airport, the Independence Arch, the Accra Museum, and the new state hotels were all built during this period. The new government chose the international style, aptly renamed Tropical Architecture by its proponents, Fry and Drew, and other British architects who worked in Ghana at the time.

In 1960, he found work with Kenneth Scott in Accra building the police headquarters on Ring Road, part of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital and some residences, including Scott’s own home, a famous piece of modern architecture of the time to date. At the time, the big names in architecture were Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, James Cubitt, Kenneth Scott, and Nickson and Boris, who built the Accra Library. There were a few pioneering Ghanaian architects who decided to form their own institute, separate from the predominantly European and American-comprised Ghana Society of Architects. The Ghana Institute of Architects was formed in 1959, with its first members being T. S. Clerk, P.N.K. Turkson, Victor Adegbite, O.T. Agyeman, J.S.K. Frimpong, Professor.John Owusu-Addo and others being W.S. Asamoah, E.K. Asuako, A.K. Amartey, Adu Donkor, K.G. Kyei, C. Togobo, and E. Kingsley Osei.

Back at the University of Science and Technology (UST), now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the campus was being transformed into a site for experimental building, with housing in the international style. In 1961, John Owusu Addo was convinced by the Vice Chancellor of UST to leave active practice to assist in building the new school of architecture, however, he opted to work at the University Development Office led by Yugoslavian architects, Miro Marasovic, and Nikso Ciko, who were part of a foreign relations program by the Nkrumah regime to source non-Western expertise to help convert Ghana into a socialist state.  

With Marasovic, they designed two iconic buildings on the campus: Unity Hall in 1963 and the Senior Staff Club House in 1964. Unity Hall's design was inspired by the Unité d’habitation by Le Corbusier, one of the founding fathers of the international style. Towering above the trees, it consisted of two nine-story blocks of 448 rooms with a courtyard between them and a modernistic dining and kitchen overlooking the courtyard, making it the largest residential hall and the first of its kind. It was built two years before the massive 12-story Job 600 project built for the Organization of African Unity (OAU) conference of 1965. It was also exemplary of the modern international style with its façade of long concrete horizontal bands and ventilation grills.

Exuding modernism, Unity Hall stood on massive columns, elevating it and liberating the ground floor for communal spaces. It utilized multiple staircases and lifts that led up to the open terrace on the roof. Unlike the other halls of residence designed by British architects, the rooms were double banked with naturally ventilated corridors between them. Upon entering the foyer at the ground level, one was led, via a covered walkway, into the spacious entrance courtyard that continues to function as an area for socializing and interaction throughout today. The dining hall, the Junior Common Room (JCR), game room and senior common room were on the first floor, while the kitchen was in the basement. With its international hotel-like appeal, it became—and still is— a symbol of aspiration of the new age of technical education in independent Ghana and has earned its place in West African history of modern architecture, with John Owusu Addo famed as its co-designer.

The unique Senior Staff Club house, another collaboration by Marasovic, Ciko, and Owusu Addo, sits in a serene part of the campus, functioning as a respite for the lecturers. Designed as a lightweight square box that obeys all the characteristics of modern tropical architecture, it sits on pilotis that welcome the breeze and frees the ground floor below to create space for the kitchen, outdoors sitting and entertainment areas, as well as a reflective pool. The recreational spaces are located on the second level, with high ceilings accentuating the feeling of spaciousness. Clear glass doors open onto a wraparound veranda, enclosed by mosquito screens and wooden egg-crate brise-soleil. From this level, one has 360-degree views of the surrounding arboreal environment. It is complete with a bar, several lounge areas, dining, small conference rooms, and a recreational hall.

Comparing working with the British versus Eastern Europeans, Owusu Addo describes the British as followers of principles and rules, as majority of the top architects were in fact high ranking ex-British World War II veterans. This was evident in their straightforward, rigid approach to modern design. In contrast, the Eastern Europeans were state civil servants and tended to be more exploratory and interactive, seeking new ideas from the locals in a collaborative spirit rather than a hierarchical imposition and application of theories and principles. Hence, their designs featured a more futuristic feel for their time.  

The university campus soon gained its reputation as an experimental yard for tropical modernism in the early 1960s. This was most evident in the prototypes Owusu Addo and the development office designed for staff housing, some of which were so successful that the designs were requested for by several companies and individuals across the country. The University Type, or UT homes, were most popular for their modern look, clean lines, open plan interiors and kitchens, which took into account the sociological factors of tropical African contemporary living. The three-bedroom, two-story UT homes (1961) for senior lecturers could be described as the ‘tropical Bauhaus’- a cubic form with recessed upper balconies, wide fenestrations for ventilation and a mono-pitched floating roof. Attached to it was a garage and two-bedroom outhouse separated by an outdoor cooking area enclosed with a concrete masonry brise-soleil wall.

In 1963, Owusu Addo finally joined the faculty of the School of Architecture under the headship of John Loyd. The following year, he accompanied a group of students on an exchange program to the Architectural Association school of Architecture in London to complete a six-month course in tropical architecture, later returning to propagate the new gospel of architecture.

The ‘3SA’ house type on the university campus was another successful model for growing families, featuring a compact three-bedroom home with a study, garage, kitchen yard, and outhouse. The entrance porch is covered with part of the roof open to let in sunlight in the otherwise darker interiors of the dwelling.

During the mid 1960’s, Owusu Addo’s career began to rise and he became associate professor in 1964 and the chief architect at the development office after Marasovic. He became one of the most respected and revered personalities on campus and around Kumasi and Accra. In Kumasi, an off-campus project he is most known for is the Asuoyeboah SSNIT flats, three-story multi-family dwellings of rectangular and square forms ingeniously attached by shared corridors and walkways while still achieving privacy for each unit. Balconies and elevated yards provide a sense of privacy yet enable interaction with neighbors.

Owusu Addo bemoans the fact that, from the early 1970’s, the new trajectory of architecture was toward high-maintenance designs, or designs that were not responsive to the climate, with facades of glass and artificially controlled interior climates. Projects built in the name of modernity began to assume less tropical attributes.

In 1972, he put his signature on Accra with the Cedi House project– a 13-story office block in central Accra by the Agricultural Development Bank which housed the bank, the Ghana Stock Exchange and some departments of the Bank of Ghana. Cedi House as a post -modern building was a symbol of technology’s increasing control of building facades from the narrative of modernist design as a response to climate. It was the first building in Ghana to have an underground car park with two levels underground. Unlike its modernist predecessors, which had low horizontal orientation, it rose like a stout tower sitting on a broad raised rectangular base as the ground floor. Its facades were characterized by horizontal bands of glazing between concrete strips protected by motorized vertical sun shading devices on the east and west and horizontal shading devices on the north and south.