Lagos: City of Water Architecture Competition

When it comes to architecture competitions that have African contexts, we believe there are not enough competitions that engage the architectural potential and urban fabric of African cities. We as a foundation wanted to create an architecture competition that brings attention to our home city, Lagos, while also bringing attention to the issues low-income communities face. The purpose of this competition is to engage the creativity of young architects with Lagos (Nigeria) being the context.

For the design competition, you are asked to use your creativity to design a building, structure or masterplan that helps envision a future for Lagos on water. Your project should make significant use of water space, whether floating, submerged and/or built over water. You can focus on one architectural topic such as affordable housing, sustainable cities or others to act as a starting point for your project. We encourage projects of different scales as we want a large variety of ideas and concepts realized.

Whether your submission is a single building that can be expanded using a modular method or your submission is a self-sustaining community, your project has the opportunity to win. The scale of your project is not a factor that contributes to winning the competition. Instead, the level of detail, development and innovation of your submission will contribute to your project winning. Your project can remain at the concept level, but still present a detailed and developed solution to a problem. The competition is also relatively open in terms of its context. Your project can be based in any part of Lagos, Nigeria whether Mainland Lagos, Lagos Island, Snake Island or Lekki.

We encourage participants to keep the low-income communities of Lagos in mind when starting your project. Their demographic tends to be overlooked when decisions are made on the government level. This is an opportunity to show the leaders of Nigeria the possibilities for these communities.

The competition is open to students, recent graduates and young architects around the world.
For more information visit the competition web page.