Strange Compounds: A Projective Examination of Nollywood and its Architectural Typologies

Strange compound(s) is an attempt to reconcile the values of film and Nigerian society, culminating in a film school to foster social interaction and interrogate the diverse ways in which film is produced while upholding the spirit of existing regional architectural typologies. The site strategy is defined by a dialectic between sterotomics and tectonics. The rigid programming of the school is composed of a raised series of fractured concrete volumes with “loose fit” programming below.

 

Surrounding this raised mass is a series of courtyards for filming and screening, utilizing the walls of the compound as projection screens. Figural bamboo elements mediate the temporality of the courtyards and the stereotomy of the school, pushing, pulling, breaking, and twisting each other in a symbiotic relationship. This bamboo system is then carried out into the community as an urban tactic through a system of bamboo tripods, able to collapse to fit in film vans to be used as enclosure at filming locations. In doing so, the film vans carry this strange compound into the urban environment, documenting, creating, and ultimately changing the spatial and social landscape of Calabar as a network of new, “strange ” compounds.