Allyn Gaestel is a writer based in Lagos, Nigeria. Design updated in He wore a tailored tunic and pantsโclassic Nigerian menswearโcut from glossy brown fabric. The staid crowd that had gathered to witness his coronation applauded politely as he beckoned his team to join him on stage. The year-old Nigerian was given his prize for designing a school in Makoko, one of the largest slums in Lagos. What made it singular was its location: The school floated on the water that envelops much of the coastal megacity.
The structure suggested an alternative to tearing down slums to make way for development, a new approach for elevating instead of erasing the poor. Built specifically for the Biennale, the structure included a buoyant platform, on top of which blond wood beams crisscrossed into triangles that formed a classic A-frame. MFS II projected a sharply modern geometry onto the still surface of the ancient canal. Inside the replica, Adeyemi hung maps of coastlines from around the world.
With the floating school, Adeyemi wanted to spark a conversation about how cities like Lagos can adapt to their shifting environments and set examples for sustainable design.
It was a beautiful pitch, and Adeyemi is a gifted orator. When he spoke to reporters, he was articulate and self-assured. Congratulatory notes littered the comments of both photos. Then, suddenly, the praise evaporated. Shock and censure took its place. One week after Adeyemi claimed his statuette, the Makoko Floating School collapsed. All that remained of the structure heralded as a bellwether of change for a slum and its inhabitants was a flattened pile of planks adrift in the waters of a polluted lagoon.
Though it deals with the question of who is to blame for what happened, it is ultimately a parable of complicity. It is about the myths that people want to believe about the world, noble intentions sullied by ego or derailed by the mundane, the intractability of parochial politics, and the ethics of social experimentation. It is about gossip and spin, the spectrum between honesty and deceit, and the dilemma of who can speak for whom. It is also about the moral of the empty barrelโthe emptier it is, the louder the echoโand bad belle, a Nigerian term for jealousy.
