Kwamena Beecham

The +twothreethree founder picks three buildings that define a time and place: cool sixties Berlin, utopian seventies Barcelona, and booming nineties Accra

The National Theatre of Ghana in Accra is a building that’s really close to my heart. It’s become a real linchpin of Ghanaian culture. I remember being quite surprised when I found out the architects were Chinese – it’s so in tune with the city and its lifestyle that it never feels like an implant. Accra is an old fishing town, and the way the building curves and billows is almost like a sail itself.

The expressive use of brick and concrete clearly relates to the city’s postcolonial heritage, but it also pointstowards something new – it’s like the middle of a Venn diagram of modern Ghanaian architecture. As with much of Africa, independence (in 1957) coincided with brutalism, and for the next 30 years the new national identity was entwined with this very expressive type of modernism. Then in the 1990s, foreign investment started to come in, and you began to see more international influences. There is also a renaissance in traditional design influences being respected, revisited and celebrated.

Ricardo Bofill’s Walden 7 outside Barcelona is a very different type of urban landmark. This is architecture that comes out of nowhere, like an alien ship, and I love it. It’s funny how the city has grown around it – there’s a McDonald’s, a school, a car dealership, and then this big red housing block sitting in the middle of it all. It reminds me of an MC Escher painting. You look at one door and you think, where does that lead? How does it connect with those balconies? It’s organised around different configurations of 30m2 units, and I find that modular way of thinking fascinating.

You could almost move in as a young couple, buy the flat next door and knock through to make a family home. Bofill envisaged it as a self-contained city, and you can imagine it evolving with its residents. The other side of that is that it feels very closed off, which is definitely not how you would approach social housing design today. The only time I’ve glimpsed inside is when someone opened the front door.

My final choice is almost the anti-Walden 7. There is nothing shouty about Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. I love how everything about it is so precise: just enough steel, just enough glass, just enough concrete, and no more. Its entrance pavilion is so pristine and poised. The Neue Nationalgalerie is often thought of as Mies’ hymn to glass and steel, but you cannot have the delicacy of that pavilion without the heft and strength of the concrete base. It’s beautifully engineered, and somehow very German.

Kwamena Beecham is founder of architectural practice +TwoThreeThree

Photos Martin Barlow / Art Directors / Agencja Fotograficzna Caro / Alamy Stock Photo, Viennaslide