Unfinished buildings in Ghana are "sites of potential" says Dominique Petit-Frère at SCADStyle

Transforming "contemporary ruins" into public activations can offer healing for local communities, says Limbo Accra founder Dominique Petit-Frère at a Dezeen talk filmed in partnership with SCAD in Savannah, Georgia.

Titled Driving Social Change Through Material Practice, the talk brought together Petit-Frère and Dezeen's US editor Ben Dreith to discuss how transforming unfinished building sites can revitalise neighbourhoods and spark wider conversations about adaptive reuse.

The discussion took place as part of the SCADStyle 2025 Symposium.

Ghanaian studio Limbo Accra is a spatial design practice founded in 2018 by Petit-Frère alongside partner Emil Grip.

The practice intervenes with the "contemporary ruins" of unfinished buildings in West Africa and beyond, to create site-specific spatial design activations that are open to the public.

"The country of Ghana is made up of 20 per cent of uncompleted building projects," explained Petit-Frère.

"As much as it's a design practice, it's an education practice, that there are these spaces that can be revitalised, regenerated and transformed," she continued.

"Some folks, when they see an incomplete building project, they see it as a point of failure and for us we see it as… sites of potential."

Since 2022, Petit-Frère has been building Africa's "first digital archive" that accounts for unfinished building sites through the practice of photogrammetry and 3D-technology.

In 2024, she opened the Limbo Museum in Accra in a private, unfinished concrete residence to house all of the research her practice is working on.

"[There is] this juxtaposition between what the image of African architecture looks like where its usually positioned as either traditional or vernacular forms of architecture or super-modern projects designed and built by David Adjaye or Francis Kéré," she explained.

"In between are the reality of these concrete structures, these contemporary ruins."

Petit-Frère aims to create a global platform to respond to ruins across the world, and is currently working with Danish design studio Natural Material Studio to create new bio-textile materials that can be applied to unfinished buildings.

"The goal is to empower anyone and everyone to take up this practice," she said.

"We're interested in urban acupuncture… how you can intervene in specific sites and how that then triggers and impacts neighbourhoods and has more of an organic regeneration in that format," she continued.

"Each site holds its own story, and within that, you design from the condition."

Speaking to a room full of students at SCAD, the designer encouraged pupils to trust their intuition when it comes to enacting positive change in the design and architecture fields.

"Follow your gut, trust yourself….I would encourage you to never feel intimidated by anyone or anything," she said.

"That's what we need in this world if we're going to create real change."

After the talk, both Petit-Frère and Dreith had a chance to meet with students to discuss their individual thesis projects and feedback on their work.

Hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), SCADStyle is the university's annual signature event and includes a talk symposium which brings together innovators and designers from across the world.

The photography is by SCAD.

Partnership content

This video was produced by Dezeen as part of a partnership with SCAD. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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