BE INSPIRED | FEATURE 13 Tireni Adeniji
We're excited to share our latest feature - this time spotlighting Architectural Designer and Content Creator Tireni Adeniji.
Tireni’s journey moves across architecture, painting, poetry, writing and community organising, shaped by heritage, collective creation and a refusal to wait for permission. In this conversation, she reflects on the knowledge systems missing from architectural education, moving from critique to building tools, and how African and Indigenous ways of knowing can be translated into design education without being reduced to aesthetics.
Through The A.K.A.N.I Toolkit, her workshops, board game and material monologue poetry, Tireni demonstrates how widening whose knowledge counts can reshape not just how architecture is taught, but who it belongs to.
WHO IS TIRENI?
Tell us about yourself, who you are, your ethnic background and what you do.
I'm Tireni Adeniji, a British Nigerian multidisciplinary designer and researcher working at the intersection of fine art, architecture and social justice. My practice moves across architecture, writing, painting, poetry and community organising, using collective creation and conversation to get people thinking differently about the spaces they inhabit. At the centre of it is The A.K.A.N.I. Toolkit, an African-centred design education practice I founded, drawing on ancestral and Indigenous knowledge systems to reimagine how design is taught. Whatever medium I'm working in, I'm asking the same question: whose knowledge gets to shape the built environment, and what happens when we widen that circle?
REFUSING TO WAIT FOR PERMISSION
How have you navigated the profession as an underrepresented Black woman?
Largely by refusing to wait for permission. Early on, I noticed how much of what I brought through culture and heritage had no vocabulary in the studio. My education gave me technical rigour, but rarely a mirror. Instead of treating that as a personal failing, I treated it as an institutional problem, writing my way through it, then building tools and workshops to hold what the curriculum couldn't. That shift, from fitting into existing frameworks to building parallel ones, is my most important navigation strategy. Community has carried me through it too; other Black and Global Majority practitioners have given me the validation and knowledge exchange formal institutions often withhold.
A DIFFERENT WAY OF KNOWING
What kinds of knowledge or perspectives do you feel were absent from the way architecture was being taught for you?
African and Indigenous knowledge systems, not as case studies but as legitimate ways of knowing space. Architectural education treats the Western canon as neutral and everything else as a footnote. What I felt missing most was serious engagement with oral tradition, cosmology and embodied practice as design methodologies in their own right, not cultural decoration on a Western frame. Yoruba spatial thinking, for example, understands the compound and courtyard through kinship, ancestry and ritual, not just plan and section: a different epistemology, not an aesthetic variation. I also missed the material knowledge that lives in the body and in community, passed down through making and through our connection to the earth.
BEYOND THE MASTER’S HOUSE
Was there a particular moment, project or experience during your architectural education when you realised that the absence of representation was something that needed to be actively challenged?
It crystallised while writing my dissertation, Beyond the Master's House, which became the foundation for The A.K.A.N.I. Toolkit. I kept circling back to knowledge systems my education had never asked me to consider, and realised the gap wasn't incidental; it was structural. I could critique that absence, but critique alone left the gap exactly where it was. I remember thinking that if I only diagnosed the problem, I'd be handing the change to others when I had the capacity to build it myself, alongside them. That's what pushed me from argument to tools, tools other than “the ‘Master’s tools’, as Audre Lorde put it”.
MAKING DECOLONIAL THINKING USABLE
What is The A.K.A.N.I. Toolkit, and what is its purpose?
The A.K.A.N.I Toolkit (Ancestral Knowledge + Arts Narratives Integration) is an interdisciplinary artistic and educational practice exploring how architecture and design can become spaces for questioning, reclaiming and sharing knowledge. It grew out of my research into decolonising architectural education and lives through critical writing, participatory workshops, material research and accessible educational tools. It's structured around three pillars: Practising Ongoing Reflection, Reclaiming Ways of Knowing, and Embodied Materiality, a framework for examining how architectural knowledge is produced and whose knowledge counts. Its purpose isn't a fixed alternative canon, but to make decolonial thinking usable: workshops using art and craft as research, a card and board game called A Game of Spatial Dialogues that opens conversations about identity and materiality through play, and articles and resources people can actually sit down with.
IDEAS DON’T SUSTAIN THEMSELVES
What have you learned from creating the A.K.A.N.I. Toolkit about the process of building alternatives when existing institutions aren't yet providing the change you want to see?
That building an alternative is as much an organisational and financial challenge as a creative one. I've spent nearly as much time on sponsorship routes, funding eligibility and formalisation as I have on the pillars and workshops themselves. Ideas don't sustain themselves; infrastructure does. I've learned to build in public and in relationships rather than alone; every real step forward has come through collaboration. And patience without passivity has been essential: formal recognition moves slowly, but the work doesn't have to wait for it. Delivering workshops, developing the board game, writing, all of it has continued regardless of institutional pace. I've also learned sustainability matters as much as impact; I'm thinking about how the toolkit can be held by others so it doesn't depend entirely on me.
FROM CONSUMPTION TO PRACTICE
Who do you hope encounters the A.K.A.N.I. Toolkit, and what would you like them to do differently after engaging with it, whether they're a student, educator or practising designer?
I hope it reaches students, educators, practising designers, and people with no architectural background at all, because each holds a different kind of power to shift things. For students who feel their own knowledge systems have no place in the studio, I want the toolkit to offer permission and a method to bring their full selves into their thinking. For educators, I hope it's a provocation and a practical resource in equal measure, something they can build into a curriculum rather than treat as a diversity add-on. For practising designers, I want it to unsettle the assumption that Western frameworks are the neutral default. And for people outside the profession entirely, I want the toolkit to make clear that this work was never meant to stay inside institutions. Architecture is something everyone lives inside and is shaped by, whether or not they ever call themselves an architect, so the questions the toolkit asks belong to them too. Across all of them, what I want most is a shift from consumption to practice: people who use it, adapt it, argue with it, and let it change how they actually work. That's where the real impact sits, not in how many people encounter the toolkit, but in what ripples out from each of them: a student who brings their full self into a crit, an educator who rewrites a brief, a designer who starts asking harder questions of a client, someone with no design background who starts noticing the politics of the room they're standing in. Multiply that across enough people and it stops being one practice and becomes a shift in the culture of the discipline, and beyond it.
TRANSLATION, NOT EXTRACTION
How do you translate African and Indigenous knowledge systems into a design education context without reducing them to references, aesthetics or something to simply draw inspiration from?
I start from method, not motif. Instead of asking what a Yoruba compound looks like and lifting its visual features, I ask what values shaped it: kinship, communal ownership, ancestral continuity. Those values become the design brief, not the surface pattern. The toolkit's three pillars are built to resist aesthetic extraction, and the board game carries this further: it doesn't hand people facts to absorb, it puts them inside a communal, reflective process with no individual winner and a shared archive as the outcome. I'm also careful with attribution; Yoruba, Akan and other traditions are named and held distinctly rather than folded into a vague pan-African aesthetic. If a knowledge system can be lifted out and still make sense divorced from its people and cosmology, I haven't translated it, I've extracted it.
ONE INQUIRY, MANY ANGLES
Your practice sits across architecture, fine art, social justice and community engagement. How do these different disciplines inform one another?
They function as one inquiry approached from different angles rather than separate strands. Architecture gives me spatial and structural rigour; painting and poetry give me an emotional and symbolic register; social justice and community engagement keep it grounded in lived experience rather than theory. The mind I use for painting is the same one I use to think architecturally. My material monologue poetry series is the clearest example: first-person poems written from the perspective of traditional building materials, paired with architectural drawings of buildings across the continent. It needs both the architectural precision to understand how a material behaves and the poetic voice to carry its memory. Community workshops feed this directly too; facilitating is not separate from my design research, it is design research. A workshop can generate material for a poem, a poem can clarify a design question, and that question can send me back into the community.
PRACTISING A DIFFERENT EDUCATION
If you could change one fundamental thing about the way architecture and design are currently taught, what would you change?
What counts as legitimate knowledge in the first place? Architectural education still treats the Western canon as neutral and other ways of knowing as supplementary or decorative. That hierarchy shapes everything downstream: reading lists, studio briefs, what's valued in a critique. I want reflection, ancestral knowledge, lived experience and embodied materiality to be understood as rigorous architectural knowledge from the start, not things students have to discover independently and smuggle into the studio. This isn't about adding a token module on "non-Western architecture." It's about changing the epistemology of design education so multiple knowledge systems can exist as starting points for thinking and making. And I believe this change has to happen beyond the university too, which is exactly why I built A.K.A.N.I. - not just to argue for a different education, but to practise one.
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