Dominican Chapel, Ibadan

Demas Nwoko designed and built the Dominican house and chapel at Ibadan between 1970 and 1975; the community was installed in March 1975. It is the building on which his reputation rests, and it argues a position: that a Nigerian modern architecture had to be made from Nigerian ground and Nigerian craft rather than imported as a style. The walls are cast in a sandcrete he devised himself, cement and sand loaded with pebble-filled lateritic soil, which sets the ochre of the local earth permanently into the surface and needs no paint. Outside, a line of columns is handled as sculpture — Nwoko trained as an artist, not an architect — and the tower reads as a standing figure. Inside, light is brought down from above onto a hall shaped for a congregation rather than a nave.