Lagos is the largest city in Nigeria, a fast-growing metropolis that has already spilled over onto adjacent waters but needs to grow up as well as as out.

Artist and architect Olalekan Jeyifous works in Brooklyn but grew up in Lagos, a place where patchwork urbanism and ramshackle architecture evolve out of necessity, invention and available materials.

In this series of imaginative photo collages, Jeyifous combines original photographs and three-dimensional models, envisioning a vertical expression of the same approaches.

In part, the imagery is a tribute to ground-up innovation and improvisation, which results in a vernacular often ignored by “serious” architects in favor of conventional design styles.

“The project examines the ways in which the nature of impoverished spaces,” says Jeyifous, “which are not only highly self-organized but also deploy sustainability practices as a matter of necessity, can be applied to cities undergoing massive population growth.”

Where some see horizontal slums currently (or vertical ones in this futuristic vision), others can find inspiration to create architecture that reflects all of the demographics and history of a given place.

256 plastic barrels support this multistory marvel, which stands up and out even amid a sea of buoyant and stilted architecture in this fishing village alongside Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city.

Nominated for a Designs of the Year 2014 award, the structure accommodates up to 100 students and serves as a community space when school is out. Children, parents and other guests arrive and depart this offshore center exclusively by boat.

In visiting the structure, surrounding residents get to experience relief from the dense adjacent stilt-supported sprawl, as well as higher views than most of the single-level homes in the area can afford.

A collaborative pilot project spearheaded by NLE, a group focused on the architecture of developing cities, the Makoko Floating School is a working prototype designed to address local needs “in view of the impact of climate change and a rapidly urbanizing African context.” 

A simple wooden stick-frame approach made it possible to construct the building inexpensively, using largely local building techniques and upcycled materials. The project’s “main aim is to generate a sustainable, ecological, alternative building system and urban water culture for the teeming population of Africa’s coastal regions.”