Client - Private

Status - Winner - Design Competition

Services - Architecture

‍

The Tower is envisioned as an iconic yet timeless African high-rise, a building of quiet strength and refined simplicity. Conceived as a new landmark for Lagos, it reimagines the corporate high-rise as an open, breathing vertical campus. Its slender vertical timber rhythms shade deeply recessed, fully operable glazing, reinterpreting the language of the tropical city to merge climate intelligence with civic dignity, creating a new classic for Lagos’s skyline. Rising with quiet confidence, the 20-storey tower embodies transparency, sustainability, and the ambition of a new generation of African institutions.

Organized around a publicly accessible podium, the tower creates generous spaces for exhibition, dialogue, and exchange. Above this, a lush elevated garden terrace forms a green threshold to the office levels, offering panoramic 360-degree views of the city. This open-air landscape serves as an extension of the training rooms and cafeteria, an elevated space for gathering, reflection, and exchange that connects nature and work in a uniquely tropical way.

Drawing inspiration from the Bamileke people of Cameroon, renowned for their decorated column façades, and from the practical elegance of Nigeria’s Tropical Modernism, the design combines slender timber fins with operable glazing to achieve both environmental efficiency and architectural sophistication. The façade’s modular timber system provides passive climate control, shading interior spaces while promoting natural ventilation and reducing solar heat gain. The use of locally sourced, sustainably harvested timber, including repurposed utility pole wood, reinforces the project’s commitment to regional materials and supports local forestry and economic development.

The project is being designed to achieve IFC EDGE certification for environmental sustainability. Its façade’s curtain of timber columns recalls cultural craft while supporting West Africa’s growing forestry industry, where teak is being cultivated. Structurally, Ebi Tower integrates a robust, cost-efficient concrete framework with innovative mass timber elements at the pent-level, ensuring both durability and sustainability. Together, these strategies form a cohesive vision for a building that celebrates African identity, climatic intelligence, and civic dignity, an emblem of Lagos’s evolving urban landscape.

‍