Housing

Lagos, Nigeria, Nigeria

Housing

The houses built in the so-called “Brazilian style” spread across the Iorubá region throughout the 19th century (encompassing Nigeria and Benin). It corresponds in several existing examples, studied in the 1980s, to the characteristic Portuguese origin house, which in Brazil is applied sobrado. In another possible name, to the so-called “town house”, modernized here: two-storey buildings with stone masonry walls, quadrangle-shaped, regular plans with rows of bays (four to five on the front) along classical lines, with a curved lintel and central door with an upper border imitating a pediment – but with an overall vernacular style. The buildings in the town of Abeokutá, north of Lagos, for example and those on Odunga Street in Lagos, which are slightly more recent (one of them from 1913), are surmounted by attic windows for ventilation.

• José Manuel Fernandes