Demas Nwoko came to building from painting, sculpture and stage design. A founder member of the Zaria Art Society — the 'Zaria Rebels', who argued in the late 1950s that Nigerian artists should synthesise European training with Nigerian form rather than copy either — he built without a formal architectural qualification, a fact Nigerian architectural historians have held against him and international juries have not. His materials answer the climate and the local ground: a cast sandcrete of his own devising, mixing cement and sand with pebble-filled lateritic soil, which sets the colour of Benin City's red earth into the wall. Deep overhangs, courtyards and top-lit volumes do the work that air conditioning does elsewhere. In 2023 he received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.
