Ghana Institute of Architects


The Ghana Institute of Architects is a professional society for architects and built environment affiliates located in Accra, Ghana. The first professional body in independent Ghana, it was registered in 1962 and inaugurated in December 1964 as a self-governing and fully indigenous institution to advance the architectural practice, education and accreditation in the country. The Institute is the successor to the pre-independence Gold Coast Society of Architects, a colonial social club for Gold Coast-based architects founded in August 1954. The first president of the Ghana Institute of Architects was Theodore Shealtiel Clerk, the first formally trained, professionally certified Ghanaian architect and an award-winning urban planner who designed, planned and developed the harbour city of Tema.

Institutional history

In 1963, approximately fifteen pioneer Ghanaian architects who had trained in the United Kingdom and the United States met to officially plan and formalise the architectural practice, education and accreditation through a professional institution, the Ghana Institute of Architects as the successor to Gold Coast Society of Architects, a social club for Gold Coast-based architects founded between July and August 1954 during the British colonial era. These architects included T. S. Clerk, D. K. Dawson, J. S. K. Frimpong, P. N. K., Turkson, J. Owusu-Addo, O. T. Agyeman, A. K. Amartey, E. K. Asuako, W. S. Asamoah, M. Adu-Donkor, K. G. Kyei, C. Togobo, V. Adegbite, M. Adu Bedu and E. Kingsley Osei. T. S. Clerk was appointed the sole architect at that meeting to draft the first constitution of the Institute. He subsequently submitted his proposals and the constitutional draft and its by-laws he authored were discussed, approved and adopted.
The founding members of the erstwhile GCSA were mostly British expatriate architects who were employees of the colonial civil service and attached to the Public Works Department. This group consisted of G. S. Knight, Arthur Lindsay, B. A. W Trevallion,, Kenneth M. Scott, E.W Williamson, A. Williamson, Max Garlach, G. C. Harris, A.K Sulton, M. R. Griffiths, K. Wood, H. J. Pine, G.P Smith and L.P Williams. The GCSA meetings were held at the International Club located on the Knutsford Avenue in Accra. Concurrently, a pre-independence indigenous architectural association, the Space Club was set up by other Western-trained Ghanaian professionals. This crop of early Ghanaian architects also doubled as external examiners and guest lecturers at the Department of Architecture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. In modern times, in addition to KNUST, GIA professionals are also involved with professional development programmes at the architecture school at Central University.

Inauguration

The Institute's official inaugural ceremony was on Friday 11 December 1964 at 20:30 GMT at the Commonwealth Hall of the University of Ghana, Legon. The first executives were inducted during the event with Theodore S. Clerk being elected the first president of the Ghana Institute of Architects, after which he gave his acceptance speech. Earlier, T. S. Clerk had been the president of the Gold Coast Society of Architects. Other first officers of the Institute elected include P.N.K. Turkson,, Victor Adegbite, O.T. Agyeman, J.S.K Frimpong, John Owusu-Addo, W.S. Asamoah, E.K. Asuako, A.K. Amartey and M. Adu-Donkor as Members. E.K. Bensah, the then Minister of Works and Housing was the Chairman of the inaugural event, assisted by Nana Kobina Nketia IV, Director, Institute of Art and Culture, R.P. Baffour, Vice-Chancellor, KNUST and G.Y. Odoi, Managing Director, Ghana National Construction Corporation. The first Fellowships of the GIA were conferred on E.K. Bensah, R.P Baffour, L. K. Apaloo and G.Y. Odoi. The Ghana Police Band provided music for the occasion.

Governance and charter

The GIA has the backing of the Government of Ghana, through the edict, Architects Decree, NLCD 357, of 1969. The Ghana Institute of Architects is a member of the African Union of Architects, Commonwealth Association of Architects and the International Union of Architects. The Institute holds Annual General Meetings to elect its executives who form the Institute's Council. The members of the Council also belong to the Ghana Chamber of Construction Industry, the to regulator of Ghanaian construction industry in Ghana. The Ghana Institute of Architects Membership Charter states:
No person shall practice in Ghana as an architect unless he is properly registered with the Ghana Institute of Architects to practice as such.
  • Membership of the Institute shall be opened to all qualified Architects practicing in Ghana as individuals, or within unincorporated groups and corporate bodies.
  • Membership shall comprise the following classes:
CORPORATE
  1. Fellows
  2. Associates
  3. Firms
NON – CORPORATE
  1. Honorary Fellow
  2. Honorary Associates
  3. Probationers
  4. Students
  5. Retired Members

Qualification of Members:
Fellows:
  1. Shall be elected from the Association class and shall have practiced Architecture for a minimum of ten years, at least five of which must have been in Ghana
  2. Whose standard of work and contribution to Architecture is considered by the Council worthy of commendation.
  • Every Fellow shall be entitled to use after his or her name the initials
  • F.G.I.A i.e, Fellow of the Ghana Institute of Architects.
Associates:
  1. Shall be persons who have either: passed the qualifying examinations of the courses prescribed or
  2. approved by the Council and have completed practical training of such description and for such period as the Council may prescribe or
  3. have passed the qualifying examination of any society or institute of Architects by whatever name called, approved by the Ghana Institute of Architects and who have passed or have been exempted from the professional practice Examinations of the Institute, after the prescribed period of practical training;
  4. no persons shall be entitled to use an Associate unless he has attained the age of twenty-one and is or has become a resident in Ghana.
  • Every Associate shall be entitled to use after his or her name the initials
  • A.G.I.A i.e, Associate of the Ghana Institute Architects and shall be provided with a stamp.
Firms:
  • shall be corporate bodies duly registered with the Institute and subject to the regulations and bye-laws in paragraph 1.02 and 2.03 of regulations
Honorary Fellow:
The Council may, subject to the approve of the Institute, elect from time to time as Hon. Fellows persons eminent in public life of this Country or elsewhere, not professionally engaged in the Practice of Architecture, who have shown exceptional interest matters relating to Architecture and Planning. The number of honorary fellows shall not at any one time exceed 5% of the corporate members of this class.
Every Honorary Fellow shall be entitled to use after his or her name the initials Hon. F.G.I.A. i.e. Honorary Fellow of the Ghana Institute of Architects.'
Honorary Associates:
The Council may, subject to the approval of the Institute, elect from time to time as Honorary Associates persons who have not professionally engaged in the practice of Architecture but have distinguished themselves in other professions or other fields of learning or have shown exceptional interest in matters relating to Architecture and Town Planning or have rendered commendable service to the Institute.
The number of Honorary Associates shall not at any time exceed 5% of the number of the corporate members of this class.
Every Honorary Associate shall be entitled to use after his or her name the initials Hon. A.G.I.A i.e. Honorary Associate of the Institute of Architects.
Probationers: '
Probationers shall be persons who have passed the appropriate qualifying examinations but who have not completed their practical training or passed the Professional Practice Examination of the Institute.
Students:
  • Students shall be bona fide students engaged in the study of Architecture with the aim of becoming Architects and have passed the BSc degree in design or similar qualification approved by the Institute.
Retired Members:
  1. Shall be Fellows or Associate who have retired from practice in Ghana.
  2. They shall be entitled to use the letters F.G.I.A or A.G.I.A after their names.
Diploma of Membership
Every Fellow and Associate shall upon registration be entitled to obtain
  1. Diploma of Membership subject to such conditions and on payment of such subscriptions or other sums as the Regulations may from time to time prescribe, and any such person ceasing to be a Member, shall on demand, return to the Council his diploma or Certificate of Membership;
  • Non-transferability of rights and privileges of a member.
  • The rights and privileges of a member of this Institute shall be personal to himself, and shall not be transferable or transmissible by his own act or by operation of law.

Development context

Colonial period

The founding of the colonial architectural society, the Gold Coast Society of Architects had ties to the establishment of the School of Architecture, Building Technology and Planning at the KNUST in 1952 when a feasibility team made up of British, German and American architects and academics arrived in the country. The committee included Britons, Charles Hobbis, Tafi Evans and Miles Danby; German professor, Lutz Christians who lived and lectured at the KNUST until 1970s, and American Labelle Prussin who wrote the first book on architecture in Ghana “Architecture of Northern Ghana” and was among a group that designed the housing units for displaced communities arising from the construction of the Akosombo Dam project on the Volta Lake. Prussin then worked with the Housing and Planning Department of the Faculty of Architecture at KNUST and later became a professor of architecture at an American university.
Under British rule, public building projects in the Gold Coast colony were designed by British architects. These projects include the design of the University of Ghana's classical Mediterranean buildings led by a Cyprus-based British architectural firm; Supreme Court of Ghana buildings, the Old Parliament House and the General Post Office in Accra. The now demolished Ambassador Hotel, present site of the Movenpick Hotel in Accra and the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi were both designed by Paton, a licentiate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. During the colonial period, Gold-Coast-based British architectural firms included Kenneth Scott and Partners; Nickson and Boris as well as James Cubitt, Scott and Partners that designed the Mechanical Engineering Workshop building of the KNUST. Other British architects who were practitioners of the then nascent academic field of “tropical architecture” were Jane Drew and Max Fry who designed the buildings of Bechem Teacher Training College in the Tano South District of the Brong Ahafo Region in addition to those at the Prempeh College and the Opoku Ware School, both in Kumasi.

Post-independent Ghana

During the Kwame Nkrumah administration in the 1950s, several architectural engineers were sent to the newly independent Ghana by Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito as a sign of friendship between the two nations. These architects from the former Eastern Bloc designed buildings using an international modernist approach which was considered globally trendy in that period. Such building designs included the Vice Chancellor's Lodge and the Senior Staff Club at the KNUST as well as various halls of residence at the KNUST such as Unity Hall, the eight-storey annex blocks of the Independence, Republic, Queen's and University Halls.
In 1960, Kwame Nkrumah appointed Theodore Clerk, the GIA’s first president as the Chief Architect of the then newly created Tema Development Corporation to develop the satellite city of Tema. When Clerk was elevated to the position of the chief executive officer of the corporation, another Ghanaian pioneer architect and GIA co-founder, Victor Adegbite became the chief architect of the TDC. The American architect, Max Bond who returned to his homeland after the 1966 coup d’état, designed Bolgatanga Regional Library. Bond later taught and worked in architecture schools in New York and was instrumental in the design of the Martin Luther King Centre in Atlanta, Georgia and the new African-American Museum in Washington, D.C. John Owusu Addo, a professor at the Department of Architecture at the KNUST and also the first Ghanaian native to head the department. For about twenty years, Anthony D. C. Hyland and William “Bill” Hill also taught in the same department. The German architect, Hannah Schreckenback worked at the Public Works Department and the AESC before joining the faculty at the Department of Architecture at the KNUST in the 1970s. Schreckenback wrote a construction design textbook still used by students of architecture. In 1977, the GIA took part in the general strike and withdrawal of services by the Professional Bodies Association of Ghana, of which the GIA was a member.
Yaw Asante, the only non-architect to become architecture department chair at the KNUST supervised the expansion of department's infrastructure using the then novel idea of “internally generated funds”. The building designed under his tenure is currently used as the sixth-year architectural design studio for the M. Arch II programme which has replaced the former postgraduate diploma. In 2012, under the auspices of the KNUST, ArchiAfrika, a network connecting architectural scholars and professionals in the built environment, launched the ArchiAfrika Educational Network, a partnership of architecture schools across the African continent.
The development of Accra was spearheaded by an early Ghanaian architect of the Ghana Institute of Architects, David Wilberforce Kwame Dawson. Born on 6 February 2009. he was one of four architects at independence in 1957. Initially trained as a sanitary health inspector, he joined the Sekondi-Takoradi Municipal Council. Gifted in technical drawing, his superiors transferred him to the Drawing Office of the Railway and Harbour Administration as a draughtsman. He studied by correspondence at Bennet College in England before winning a colonial scholarship in 1944 to Leeds University where he graduated in architecture in 1946. He became an Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects later that year. He returned to Accra in 1948 and became an Assistant Town Planning Officer at the Public Works Department, where he designed the Roof Loan Scheme. Dawson became the Director of Rural Housing in 1956 and working in tandem with Ghana's first leader, Kwame Nkrumah, R. P. Baffour, the first Vice Chancellor of the KNUST, engineer, J. S. Annan and others he contributed to rural development, architecture and town planning.

Presidents

The following individuals have served as President of the Ghana Institute of Architects :
PresidentTenure of office
T. S. Clerk1962–65
Victor Adegbite1965–70
Kenneth Scott1970–71
O. T. Agyeman1971–74
Martin Adu-Badu1974–76
John Owusu-Addo1976–77
Courage Togobo1977–78
K. G. Kyei1978–79
D. S. Kpodo-Tay1979–80
E. L. Akita1980–82
J. N. A. Attoh / Oko Adjetey1982–88
M. K Boohene1988–90
O. T. Agyeman1990–93
H. D. L Yartey1993–95
Theo Akofio-Sowah1995–98
Kenneth Ampratum1998–02
Steve Akuffo2003–07
Nii Osah Odamtten2007–10
Adotei Brown2010–14
Joseph E. Hayford2014–18
Richard Nii Dadey2018–