Tosin Oshinowo trained in London, worked briefly at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and at OMA in Rotterdam, and returned to Lagos in 2009, joining James Cubitt Architects before founding her own practice, cmDesign Atelier, in 2012. Her Lagos work is commercial and residential, and her wider reputation rests on an argument as much as on buildings: that African design should be read as a discipline of adaptation and reuse rather than of scarcity. She also runs the furniture line Ile Ila, which builds on Yoruba seating types. In 2023 she was curator of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, whose theme, The Beauty of Impermanence, set out that argument at scale. She is among the very small number of West African women architects with attributed built work in open sources.
