Images by Julien Lanoo
Images source: Designboom
Originally published by Designboom under the title “DeRoche Projects turns Accra community garden into a productive public landscape,” the story details a groundbreaking approach to urban design in Ghana. Ground has officially been broken on the Backyard Community Garden in Osu, Accra, marking the second phase of the expansive Backyard Urban Campus masterplan by DeRoche Projects.
Instead of constructing a massive, single-destination complex, DeRoche Projects has executed an exclusive architectural transformation. They have decentralized the program, dispersing buildings, landscapes, and public spaces throughout the Osu neighborhood, seamlessly connecting them via short, walkable urban paths. Building on the foundation of the earlier Backyard Community Club, this new phase transforms the local community garden into an active, productive public landscape.
Design Prowess and Inventive Spatial Integration
The core design prowess of DeRoche Projects lies in their refusal to impose traditional, imported Western urban park typologies, such as decorative lawns and manicured, untouchable flora. Instead, their inventive design ability transforms the site into a harmonious hybrid of buildings, productive landscapes, and flexible civic spaces deeply rooted in West African spatial culture.
- Agricultural Grids as Frameworks: Borrowing logic from historical West African agricultural planning systems, the layout uses functional grids to structure planting beds, pathways, and shared spaces. This framework allows the landscape to evolve organically alongside community needs and plant growth.
- A Journey through the Landscape: Visitors enter near an ancillary building, descending into a sunken garden featuring a six-meter canopy water feature. The path leads through shaded areas equipped with cast-in-place seating, traditional game spaces (such as Oware), educational crop patches, children’s play zones, and a café pavilion.
- Architecture that Serves, Not Dominates: The project’s three small structures, the café pavilion, the ancillary building, and a shade-providing water folly, are intentionally scaled down. The café pavilion features a compact enclosed footprint that yields most of its space to a generous veranda. Inspired by regional “outdoor rooms,” this covered threshold serves as a multi-use hub for café dining, workshops, yoga, and community meetings, ensuring the surrounding landscape remains the hero.
Material Innovation: Rammed Earth and Palm Kernel Shells
DeRoche Projects avoids treating local building traditions as mere nostalgic gestures; instead, they push material research forward to create durable, low-carbon, and highly functional infrastructure.
Stabilized Rammed Earth
Extending research from the Backyard Community Club, the firm is developing advanced stabilized rammed earth mixes. By replacing significant amounts of Portland cement with locally available lime and pozzolanic ash, they have refined a traditional West African construction technique into a contemporary, low-carbon building system deeply tied to local labor and resources.
Crushed Palm Kernel Shells
Instead of using imported paving materials or high-maintenance turf, the ground surface is crafted from crushed palm kernel shells, an abundant local agricultural by-product. This creates a permeable, soft-footed surface that prevents waterlogging during Ghana’s heavy rainy seasons while retaining the aesthetic of an earthen terrain. Beneath this layer, an underground pipe system collects rainwater for ongoing crop irrigation, turning the very ground beneath visitors’ feet into a self-sustaining maintenance engine.
Global Takeaways for Local Community Development
The Backyard Community Garden offers valuable insights for community-driven development across the globe:
- Landscape as Working Infrastructure: Shift the perception of public parks from purely aesthetic, passive scenery to active, productive infrastructure that provides food, local medicine, and functional gathering space.
- Resource-Conscious Materiality: Look to local agricultural by-products and regional soil compositions (like palm kernel shells and stabilized earth) to solve climate-specific engineering challenges while keeping construction lower-carbon and locally sourced.
- Decentralized Community Hubs: Rather than building monolithic structures, distribute urban interventions throughout existing neighborhoods to integrate public life directly into the daily movement of residents.
- Flexible Thresholds: Design flexible, semi-outdoor spaces that adapt to shifting community needs rather than locking buildings into single, rigid functions.
By inverting the conventional municipal park, DeRoche Projects demonstrates how public spaces worldwide can move away from passive observation and invite genuine, everyday community participation.
Project Info:
Name: Backyard Community Garden
Architecture and Landscape: DeRoche Projects
Images: Julien Lanoo
location: Accra, Ghana
Editorial Note: At Buildace Magazine, we publish this feature in good faith, with full attribution to Designboom as the primary source for the original project coverage. We celebrate the design prowess and unmatched creativity of DeRoche Projects as they continue to shape the future of global architecture.
Alex Kabiru
Architecture Editor, Buildace Magazine