LIMBO ACCRA

IT’S A TROPE that architects are always looking up: at the built environments that surround us, or at the yet-to-befilled space above our heads. For the co-founder of architectural design studio and cultural platform Limbo Accra, Dominique Petit-Frère, it’s the unfinished buildings that catch her attention.

While completing her master’s degree in international development at Lund University in Sweden, Petit-Frère, who is Haitian- Ghanaian, was struck by the difference between what she was learning in school and the ways that Ghanaians were pushing for development in their home country. This resourceful approach stuck with the 29-yearold designer, and was part of her impetus for founding Limbo alongside artist, educator, and activist Emil Grip. Through a series of exhibitions set in Accra’s unfinished construction sites, the architect asked herself, How can we express ideas within traditional architecture in a way that feels more accessible and tangible than imagining the nished entity? She realized that, as she now puts it, “At the end of the day, it’s all about world-building.” The studio’s first exhibition in November 2018 invited artists to respond to a single-family home site in East Legon. It had been left unfinished for 25 years, prompting each participant to question the realities of development in the city and create a vibrant space out of one hitherto left empty.

Last year, Petit-Frère completed Limbo’s first built project in Accra, the city’s Freedom Skate Park, which was a collaboration between Surf Ghana Collective, a surf and skate nonprofit; Wonders Around the World; SAF Ghana; and Space Accra. “It was a beautiful transition, as we were operating within incomplete spaces to amplify the need for public space in Accra,” the architect says. “It was a perfect evolution into more traditional architecture. We’re building public space for us, and for generations to come.”

In the coming months, the studio will have the opportunity to interpret other cities through a “Limbo” lens at the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the Something Curated Palm Heights residency. Through a grant from Denmark’s Obel Foundation, the studio will also extend its world-building practice to the World Wide Web, scanning incomplete structures across Ghana to create a digital data-base and space of engagement. For Petit-Frère, Limbo Accra shines a light on the reality of incomplete spaces in West Africa, yes—but it’s also poised to seize opportunities in cities across the world. Much of the studio’s resonance lies in this intention, at once local and universal.

FOR JEREMY SCHIPPER, 30, a designer from Toronto who now juggles projects between New York and Northern California, architecture is a social practice—between collaborators and clients, and across design disciplines.

“I’m thinking about design in a way that doesn’t just privilege architecture, but uses it to bring other kinds of design to a project,” he explains. “Textiles, ceramics, and plants are not just objects that come and go, but rather are elements integral to the space. I consider the spaces that I design to be naked until those pieces are included.”

This holistic approach has long informed Schipper’s work. In 2019, while working at Morocco-based Studio KO, he was accepted to a residency at Salmon Creek Farm. The Mendocino, California, commune was founded in 1971, and has been stewarded by the artist Fritz Haeg since 2014 as a queer-friendly nonprofit and long-term art project. After his two weeks at the farm expired, Schipper extended his stay so many times that he eventually became a permanent partner of the project. To this day, he collaborates on cabin designs for Salmon Creek Farm, and his overarching environmental approach to architecture references the construction, renovation, and gardening projects he first conceived while on the property.

After starting his own practice in January 2021, the architect has expanded his domain, taking on projects from Hawaii to Ontario, Canada. Currently, Schipper is working with Haeg and the architect, landscape artist, and floral designer Krystal Chang on a family home in Los Angeles that embodies the “inbetweenness” in which he thrives: a site quite literally “at the intersection of mountains, California wilderness, and the insane sprawl that is Los Angeles,” he says. “The home will be an inter-generational project that redefines what it means for a family to share a home—it’s a queer couple with a young kid. They often host friends, and are going to have additional family members come to live with them, too.” The project offers an intriguing resolution to questions the architect has long grappled with: What is it about an environment—like Salmon Creek Farm, for example—that people are so drawn to? And how can that feeling be translated beyond aesthetics and outside of its unique landscape? Such are the through-lines of the architect’s practice. Though Schipper often finds himself building domestic spaces, his homes are not defined by any one aesthetic, location, or discipline—they’re designed to invite the outside world in.