The West Has Long Ignored the Wider World of Design. It's Time for That to Change

The West Has Long Ignored the Wider World of Design. It’s Time for That to Change
Mariam Kamara
© James Wang
Architect Mariam Kamara, the Niger-born founder of Atelier Masomi, says the work of non-Western designers and architects has been overlooked for far too long.
While I was in college studying computer science, before I decided to become an architect, I picked up a book by Patrick Nuttgens that confounds me to this day. It was called
The Story of Architecture. Naturally, I expected it to be filled with awe-inspiring structures from all around the world, but most of it was focused on works from Western Europe and the United States. The rest of the world’s output became little more than a bonus track on a pop album. I was enraged. For a non-Westerner like me, it was profoundly humiliating. How could architecture from other continents, dating back thousands of years, be reduced to so few buildings, while Baroque churches got an entire chapter?

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