In South African architecture, women build on social justice

When Ngillan Faal was growing up in Gambia, in West Africa, it was clear to her that her family’s colonial bungalow had not been designed by or for people like them.  

It had a kitchen with a stove, but since the family preferred to prepare most meals over a fire, they had to do that outside. The rooms in the house, meanwhile, turned stuffy and hot in the tropical sun, and so the family spent most of their time socializing outdoors, in the shade of the trees.

“I remember being intrigued by how everything that happened in that house happened in opposition to the building itself,” she says. “That was when I first realized that