[A]FA Tamale Old Airfield | Urban Furnishing

[A]FA has been transforming the Tamale Old Airfield in Tamale, Ghana, into a public landscape through a series of projected and realized spatial interventions, commissioned by the local municipality. Since 2020, [A]FA has committed to a long-term engagement with what it has termed Tamale’s inner-urban peripheries—areas at once central and peripheral—using research and design as tools to mediate between urban development and urban ecologies. With a dual focus—on the research-driven Tamale Inner Urban Ecologies (TIUE) AfricaUniNet project and the design-and-implementation-focused Tamale Old Airfield (TOA) commission—the lab has developed layered spatial strategies in close collaboration with municipal authorities, traditional leaders, and partnering institutions and individuals. The aim is a sensitive yet remarkable transformation of the vast former airfield into a shared urban landscape—a place for cultural, recreational, and economic activity.

This upcoming project phase continues—but also shifts—the work initiated by the Tamale Territories Matter team (2023–2024), which explored the interface between material innovation and landscape transformation. That phase defined a palette and strategy for topographical interventions—responding to infrastructural and environmental conditions, but also to the colonial legacy of the site: a former runway constructed by the British regime—while giving form to a situated architectural imagination. On urban scale, through the definition of five programmatic zones and the incorporation of vegetation, shade, and surface interventions, the project began to reimagine public space as an open, multi-species ecology—where wildness is not excluded but invited back into the urban fabric.

Following the first phase of tree transplantation in May 2025, this next (projective) stage turns to the design of seating and meeting devices—urban furnishings shaped by a topographical approach and principles of human and non-human cohabitation. Merging material research with landscape design, and body-space investigations with the urban scale, this lab operates across multiple realms—from the tactile to the territorial. Now, with shifting parameters and the momentum of earlier interventions, a new and responsive design direction is unfolding—led by a fresh team within the lab.

Baerbel Mueller, with Abdul-Rauf Issahaque and Daniil Zhiltsov

Applications are accepted only via email and should include your portfolio and bio.

Participation is based on a selection process, followed by a personal conversation/interview.

Applicants from related disciplines are warmly welcomed.