Photograph by Carmen Colombo / Connected Archives

Across the Global South, a new generation of designers is reimagining architectural failure as a tool for adaptation and survival in a warming world.

Picture a concrete palace of domes and colonnades, ornate, skeletal, and suspended in time. Located in the heart of Senegal, the Ndiouga Kébé Palace was once intended as a private residence, but its construction was never completed. Today, it’s neither abandoned nor fully alive, and yet locals speak of it with reverence, even awe, as a symbol of endurance in the face of erasure. 

Kébé is no anomaly. Across West Africa and much of the Global South, countless half-built or deserted buildings dot the landscape—projects paused by economic downturns, political shifts, climate catastrophes, or simply changing priorities. But these spaces offer more than a record of stalled promise. In an increasingly unstable and unpredictable world, they also hold possibility: What if the future of climate-resilient architecture isn’t in new builds, but in adapting what’s already here?

It’s a question that drives the work of Limbo Accra, a design collective reshaping how we think about cities. One of its main initiatives is a digital repository, known as The Liminal Archive, that documents unfinished or decaying structures across West Africa and beyond. Through photography, mapping, and fieldwork, the team catalogs these ruins—many of which are excluded from official planning records—and redesigns them as usable buildings fit for a warming world. 

A mapping of an abandoned building in Accra, Ghana. Courtesy of The Liminal Archive

But the problem of abandoned buildings extends far beyond a specific region. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a number set to rise dramatically by 2050. And in many of these locations, incomplete and deteriorating structures mark the fallout of short-term development cycles that prioritize profit over people and place. From Dakar to Detroit, Lagos to Lisbon, the same story repeats: land is commodified, foreign investment is prioritized, and urban policies are repeatedly designed for mass construction without long-term accountability.  Development data modelshave  proven that property abandonment is now a global pattern.

Nowhere is this pattern more stark than in Sub-Saharan Africa, where colonial land policies and weak planning oversight converge to fuel urban sprawl and incomplete projects. But as one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world, surviving the climate crisis will require a different status quo. And that’s precisely what The Liminal Archive is determined to deliver. Property developers often begin with a single question: “Has the land been cleared?” But that’s just a euphemism for the erasure of local biodiversity, said Dominique Petit-Frère, who co-founded Limbo Accra with partner Emil Grip in 2018. “You’re starting to create environments that are basically suffocated and buried under concrete,” she added. That’s especially cruel considering the thousands of already-built structures ripe for repurposing. 

“We’re always looking at how we can utilize these sites as incubators—as a form of lab—to test out new ways of approaching the climate breakdown we’re witnessing in Ghana,” said Petit-Frère. “I always knew I wanted to come back to my country and contribute to the socio-economic development of Ghana. Because even though many buildings are unfinished, the land is still rightfully owned by Ghanaians.” The Liminal Archive estimates that as much as 20% of all built landscapes in Ghana are unfinished.

“What if the future of climate-resilient architecture isn’t in new builds, but in adapting what’s already here?”

Asha Dirshe, writer

Rejecting the Western binary of complete versus incomplete, the studio instead embraces what Petit-Frère calls “a state of abundance”—a mindset that finds value in materials, in process, and most of all, in imagination. “We don’t operate from a space of prescribing what these buildings should become,” Petit-Frère said. “The real work is about collaboration, co-authorship, and care.”

To ensure all redesigns are culturally resonant with local communities, The Liminal Archive recruits architects, designers, artists, and researchers across Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, and the Caribbean to conduct site studies, document architectural and cultural histories, and design context-specific interventions that align with a site’s physical and social fabric. Petit-Frère describes these interventions as “urban acupuncture,” and they often also include architectural installations, civic design workshops, or cultural events within the ruins themselves. “You don’t need a master plan,” she said. “You just need to activate the points that already exist. At the end of the day, it’s about giving agency to as many people as possible. Public space is our shared commons even if it began as private.”

For architect and The Liminal Archive collaborator Lennart Wolff, unfinished buildings are familiar territory. Raised in post-reunification Berlin among concrete shells and half-built towers, he describes living alongside these buildings as a formative experience that has since shaped his practice and seeded a natural affinity with The Liminal Archive’s mission. In Ghana, Wolff helped steer the Archive’s pedagogical turn, from architectural advocacy to direct action. One example lies in Kumasi, where an abandoned concrete shell—originally planned as the John Kufuor Presidential Library—now serves as a living classroom with students from KNUST, UCLA, and elsewhere gathering on-site. “We’re not finishing [the construction of these half-built buildings] in a traditional sense,” Wolff said. “But we are moving them closer to usability; to allow for multiple forms of adaptation.”

A mapping of an abandoned building in Lagos, Nigeria. Courtesy of The Liminal Archive

Building a new home can emit anywhere from 15 to 100 tons of carbon dioxide, depending on its size, materials, and how those materials are sourced. For inefficient homes or bigger buildings, that number is much higher. But by retaining and retrofitting existing building materials, The Liminal Archive renovation and adaptive reuse projects typically produce between 50% and 75% less embodied carbon, particularly when the existing foundations and structural elements are preserved. It’s a strategy that minimizes material waste and sidesteps the heavy environmental toll of manufacturing and transporting new building materials. “It’s a realist approach,” Wolff said. “You’re working from a plateau of existing emissions; the steel, the concrete, it’s already there. Rather than adding more, we focus on reframing what already exists and understanding its value.”

This is especially necessary in contexts where resources are scarce. In such spaces, forced reuse becomes a response to precarity, one that will only become more relevant as temperatures continue to rise, raw materials become harder to come by, and more people are forced to leave their homes because of climate change. In such a world, the Archive’s ethos may well be one of the few viable architectural paths forward. “Already, people are making changes to spaces because they must,” said Valentina De Luigi, a sociologist, interior designer, and deputy head of the Interior Architecture Department at HEAD, Genève. “This necessity arises from crises, whether economic, political, or otherwise.” 

Last November,  Limbo Accra celebrated the opening of the Limbo Museum, an exhibition space dedicated to art and architecture with a three-day summit that brought together artists, architects, and thinkers to reflect on why Western notions of architectural perfection are often environmentally and culturally misaligned in African contexts. “We have to stop trying to be perfect,” said Lagos-based architect and panelist Tosin Oshinowo. “There is a need to look inward, to be reflective, and to consider solutions that are tailored to our own contexts.” That means designing with impermanence in mind, using locally sourced materials, and embracing construction methods that allow for adaptation: to drought, to flooding, to coastal erosion and sea level rise. Porous facades that encourage airflow, structures that can be easily dismantled or repurposed, modular layouts that hold different household sizes and needs.

“It’s a realist approach. You’re working from a plateau of existing emissions; the steel, the concrete, it’s already there. Rather than adding more, we focus on reframing what already exists and understanding its value.”

Lennart Wolff
architect and The Liminal Archive collaborator

Crucially, many of these so-called “innovations” are not new. They are rooted in Indigenous and vernacular traditions that have long responded to environmental conditions with nuance and care and pioneered bioregional strategies that disrupt the build-complete-demolish-repeat model of much modern architecture. To build for the future, the summit’s speakers concluded, we must first return to the knowledge of our ancestors.

Oshinowo’s argument is not an aesthetic one. It’s political. Designing from within scarcity means rejecting extractive systems altogether. That refusal to conform to dominant design narratives is embodied in sites like the cracked rotunda of Ndiouga Kébé Palace.

The buildings in The Liminal Archive were never just unfinished. They are structures that urge architectural humility and a realignment so that human and nonhuman life can thrive. It is from their remnants that a new architecture can emerge; one that is flexible, grounded, and attuned to what the present—and the future—demands. “The unfinished isn’t the end of the story,” said Petit-Frère. “It’s the start of another.” Ruin, then, is not just what’s left behind. It’s what we build from.

A mapping of an abandoned building in Touba, Senegal. Courtesy of The Liminal Archive

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