Limbo Engawa is an architectural pavilion conceived across two sites, as a co-commission between Limbo Museum in Accra, Ghana, and Art Omi in the Hudson Valley, New York. First constructed within Limbo Museum’s unfinished concrete structure, the pavilion was disassembled, transported across the Atlantic, and reassembled within the landscape at Art Omi.
The term engawa refers to a transitional space between interior and exterior, building and landscape, private and communal life. In Accra, Limbo Engawa occupied the threshold between an unfinished concrete structure and surrounding cultivated land. An oversized daybed created a place for farmers and museum visitors to sit, lie down, and gather, while elevated planes provided filtered shade and framed views. Inspired by woven beds commonly found on construction sites and within unfinished buildings in West Africa, the project translated an everyday object associated with temporary occupation into a civic-scale structure.
The pavilion is designed as a modular system of lightweight frames that can each be carried by a single person and assembled on site. Steel profiles and construction techniques familiar from roadside kiosks and billboard structures are combined with salvaged billboard tarpaulin, cut into strips and woven by hand across the frames. Aggregated into larger planes, these slender elements acquire a civic monumentality through their arrangement.
This capacity for disassembly and reconfiguration allowed the pavilion to move from Accra to Art Omi in New York’s Hudson Valley. The original vertical arrangement was rotated into a horizontal configuration, adapting the same architectural system to a radically different landscape. Hugging the slope of a hill, its horizontal planes augment existing landscape features with a light touch on the ground. They introduce new lines of movement, frame the horizon, and create places to pause and observe under filtered shade.
Across both sites, Limbo Engawa explores architecture through movement and adaptation. Elements remain constant while their relationships to ground, landscape, and occupation change, allowing the same structure to acquire new spatial meanings through relocation.
Architect: TAELON7
Commission: Limbo Museum (Accra, Ghana) and Art Omi (Ghent, NY, USA)
Curators: Dominique Petit-Frère (Limbo Museum) and Julia van den Hout (Art Omi)
Locations: Accra, Ghana and Ghent, NY, USA
Year: 2026–2028
Steel Fabrication: Joseph Awumee
Weaving: Briena Montana (lead), Eugenia Dormenyo, Nana Ama Safo, Wonder Fiatsi
Installation Lead, Art Omi: Conor Klein
Consulting Engineer, Art Omi: Matthew Melnyk, NOUS Engineering
Photography: Edem Tamakloe, Juergen Benson-Strohmayer, Nadia Boyea
Supported by: Art Omi, Limbo Museum, Austrian Cultural Forum Accra
