Badabing Badaboom - The Politics of Conditioned Air in a Goldrush Boomtown

National Agendas

The politics of conditioned air drives the architecture. Through a series of leaky programs, the function of the building symbolises the power relations between Chinese immigrants and a rural Ghanaian community. Chinese restaurants and casions leak conditioned air into the Ghanaian Gold Exchange and the Gold Miner’s Union.

The Chronology of Conditioned Air

Concealing Neo-colonialist Intentions

A Mask – Reminiscent of Liberation Architectures of Independence Past

Discrimination Architecture

The air above 1m is then leaked down into a public market before being pressurised through the chimney. The condensers face in towards the shaft of the chimney, creating a negative pressure which exhausts all the air out of the remaining openings.

Revealing the Sequence of Conditioned Air

 

The legitimization of small-scale gold-mining in Ghana is initiated by the Chinese government through a philanthropic gesture of developing the goldrush boomtown of Dunkwa. Though charitable on surface, the initiative attempts to bury the ravages of exploitation, for which the Chinese themselves are currently responsible (after taking up the baton of oppression that the European empires left behind). Sino-African relations in Ghana are seemingly resolved as China ceases to illegally mine gold, and the Chinese commission a Gold House that eliminates corruption and empowers the miners. The building officially functions as a Gold Exchange and a Gold Miners Union, but not without an inevitable touch of illegitimacy by the opportunistic neo-colonials. The Chinese insert hidden spaces within the Gold House that serve their immigrant population. These restaurants and casinos are inefficiently overloaded with air conditioning, which is orchestrated to leak and cascade into the legitimate spaces of the gold exchange and union offices. The conditioned air leaks again into the informal market space and is finally exhausted through the chimney, where the array of condensers that channels their hot air creates a negative pressure which runs the entire system. Rhetorically, the politics of conditioned air serves as a metaphor for China’s presence in Ghana, as well as the rest of Africa.

Erik L’Heureux: By mining mid-century equatorial architecture, this thesis looks back to move forward, repositiong the aspirations of modernism at the end of colonialism in Hot and Wet Africa. The design proposition engages in the contemporary and complex realities of government sanctioned resource extraction, knowledge transfer, economic classifications, and infrastructural ambitions between Ghana and China today.