Limbo Museum
by Limbo Accra
Accra, Ghana
Project details
Year
2025
Project year
2024
Building area
720 m²
Project website
Location
Team credits
architects
- Limbo Accra -
Dominique Petit-Frère,
Emil Grip,
Hakeem Mustapha.
project team
Lennart Wolff,
Diallo Simon-Ponte.
contributing partners
Architectural Association School of Architecture,
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology,
Gallery 1957,
The Schüco Group.
The Limbo Museum radically challenges the conventions that have historically defined the museum as a Western, institutional model. Situated in an abandoned Brutalist complex in Labone, a lively neighbourhood in Accra, the project reclaims incompletion as potential. It transforms a half-finished, neglected concrete shell into a vibrant public platform where art, performance, design and community converge.
Rather than replicating the climate-controlled, enclosed typology of the conventional museum, Limbo is open to the elements – porous, adaptive and in constant dialogue with its surroundings. It has no permanent collection, no façade and no hierarchy between artist, visitor or builder. The building itself becomes both exhibit and experiment, shifting the museum’s focus from preservation to participation.
The context is crucial: more than 20% of Ghana’s built environment consists of unfinished or abandoned structures. Limbo positions this condition not as failure but as opportunity, showing how incomplete architecture can foster civic imagination and collective agency. By occupying an unfinished site, the museum activates a typology found throughout West African cities – turning concrete ruins into frameworks for cultural and social exchange.
The design process is collaborative and ongoing. Artists, craftspeople, architects and local builders work together to develop material and spatial interventions rooted in the specificities of Accra’s climate, culture and economy. The existing concrete frame remains visible, with its rough texture, weathering and traces of time forming part of the aesthetic. Rather than concealing imperfection, the design celebrates it – an architecture of repair that acknowledges history while embracing transformation.
This approach intertwines social engagement and environmental responsibility. By repurposing an existing structure, the project minimizes material waste, preserves embodied energy and demonstrates how regeneration can begin with what already exists. Adaptation is the ecological strategy: each addition is incremental, low-tech and locally sourced. Timber, metal and reclaimed materials are used to build platforms, partitions and installations that evolve with the programme.
The museum’s unfinished state is not a lack but a principle. Its openness invites change, welcoming both human and non-human actors – wind, rain, sound and vegetation – to shape its atmosphere. Through events, workshops and exhibitions, Limbo has become a civic stage for interdisciplinary collaboration, connecting local creative communities with global networks of artists, researchers and educators.
Limbo Museum stands as both a physical and conceptual framework: a space of becoming that redefines what cultural infrastructure can mean in contemporary Africa. It offers an alternative model of institution-building – one that values process over permanence, inclusion over authority and presence over perfection.
Limbo Accra is a collaborative research and spatial design practice founded in 2018 in Ghana. Positioned at the intersection of architecture, cultural production and pedagogy, the studio works within contexts of incompletion and transformation to challenge conventional design narratives. Its approach emphasizes experimentation, collective authorship and open-endedness. The team brings together practitioners from diverse fields – architecture, design, education and curatorial work – to explore new ways of making that are rooted in care, repair and radical accessibility. Limbo Accra treats the unfinished not as a limitation but as an active condition: a framework for collaboration, speculation and material experimentation. Their projects range from architectural interventions to conceptual installations and educational programmes, each grounded in a belief that architecture should be responsive to context and inclusive of community. By using participatory design, site-responsive practice and adaptive reuse, the studio cultivates environments that are constantly evolving.
Limbo’s work extends beyond Accra through partnerships with universities, cultural organizations, and local communities across West Africa. Their practice has become a catalyst for rethinking the built environment – not as a static product, but as a shared process of negotiation, knowledge exchange and ecological awareness.
The prize money will be used to support the Limbo Architecture Lab, a series of collaborative design-build workshops based in the unfinished John Kufuor Presidential Library on the campus of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana. The initiative aims to transform the abandoned structure into a civic hub for learning, experimentation and collective gathering. Through built prototypes, exhibitions and public forums, the project will demonstrate how incomplete buildings across Ghana and West Africa can be reactivated as spaces of cultural memory and civic potential. Activities will include community engagement, material research, skills training and the development of open-access manuals documenting adaptive reuse techniques. The work will expand Limbo’s mission to reclaim architectural limbo as a site of imagination, resilience and shared future-making.
- Information for the project text was provided by Limbo Accra -
Image gallery
Advisory Committee Statement
‘Limbo Museum’ receives the award for Social Engagement for its bold reimagining of what a museum can be, both spatially and socially. The team embraced an abandoned, unfinished structure and reactivated it through art, culture and community. It brings art beyond institutional walls and places it directly in the hands of the people. The project redefines architecture by rewriting the existing – working with what is already there, rather than erasing or replacing it. The absence of a façade becomes a powerful statement. Without climate control or formal boundaries, the building invites continuous dialogue between art, environment and everyday life. It stands as a living platform for exchange: young, flexible and determined. Connecting local creativity with a wider African and global context, it reflects on change while reclaiming unused spaces and buildings with purpose and beauty.