Given the complexity of designing cities, master planning sometimes appears as the reduction of urbanism to a level of pattern making, programming, land-use planning. Parametric or otherwise. Abstraction itself is useful in giving an overview. Whilst considering the pattern of cities and ‘patter nation’ as visual means to analyse foreign countries, we wondered if the boubou patterns of West Africa as we see so often here in our office based in central East London (down the road from Dalston, across the river from Peckham…) operate as a means to understanding the divergent aesthetic of urban texture: the fabric of a West African city site composed as Boubou. After all, boubou is a wax printed cloth produced in that Euro-nation today upheld as a model of sustainable urbanism: Holland. In the best pattern-nation urban fabric tradition, WHAT_architecture started imagining the Freetown imprint. Modelled by Nde, photographed by Pablo.

Tweet