Worofila

Typha is a cattail that has choked the Senegal River valley for decades, a green tide farmers pay to clear. Worofila weaves it into wall panels, lays it into ceiling mats and mixes it into adobe, because the stem is honeycombed with air and insulates better than most of what gets imported. The Dakar practice, founded in 2019 by Nzinga B. Mboup and Nicolas Rondet and named for the Fann-Hock street where its office sits, builds in compressed earth blocks in a city that wears a concrete skin. Facades step out in fine horizontal ridges so each course throws a blade of shade onto the one below it: the building cools itself with geometry and nothing else. The portfolio is not boutique. Houses at Sendou and Ngor, sixteen stations on Dakar's regional rail line, an eco-pavilion for the environment ministry, and the earth work on Kéré's Goethe-Institut Dakar, which opened April 18. Mboup trained in Pretoria, passed through Adjaye Associates, and co-authored two studies of how Dakar actually houses itself. Next comes a gallery in Benin City raised in the Benin Kingdom's cob technique and a training center at Sebikotane, so the method leaves the studio. That ordering matters.