Earthen Angularity: A Stepped Tower in Accra That Grows a Garden Through Its Core

Most towers treat nature as a finish: a planter on a terrace, a green wall applied after the structure is settled. Earthen Angularity reverses the order of operations. Its most memorable space is a slot of sky framed by two walls of leaves, and the building around it reads as a frame built to hold that slot open.

Earthen Angularity is designed by Clinton Boles for a corner site in Accra, Ghana. The project was Shortlisted at Earth Made 2020. In its own words, the project is focused on bringing together a rare relationship between the natural and the artificial, the modern and the vernacular, and human beings and mother nature. Those three pairings are a lot to ask of one building, so the useful question is where, spatially, each pairing actually lands.

A Chevron Folded Onto a Street Corner

The project begins at the scale of the city, set against the sprawl and glow of an urban field, before narrowing to a single intersection. The site plan shows the move that defines everything after it: a chevron-shaped footprint that folds back on itself, its open arms facing away from the crossing while its pointed back meets the corner. The plan reads like nested brackets, an outer wing wrapping an inner one, with a void held between them.

That fold matters because it creates an interior that the street cannot see directly. The surrounding fabric in the plan is low and loose: detached buildings, scattered trees, parked cars. Against it, the chevron is a dense, deliberate gesture, and a row of trees along the street edge softens the point where the mass meets the pavement.

Floor Plates That Lean Out Over a Lattice of Struts

In elevation, the building abandons the flat curtain-wall face that tends to define commercial towers. Each floor plate is deep and tapering, its thin edge projecting outward so that the facade becomes a stack of horizontal blades. Below them, a lattice of angled struts lifts the mass and leaves the ground level open, so that pedestrians, cars and a row of trees occupy the space beneath the structure rather than abutting a solid wall.

The angularity of the title lives here, in the diagonal bracing that is exposed rather than hidden. The earthen colouring of the plates gives the tower a warmth that glass and steel would not, and it is the clearest place where the modern and the vernacular meet: a contemporary structural logic, rendered in tones that read as ground rather than sky.

Bridges Crossing a Light-Filled Void

Inside, the chevron's void becomes a vertical room. Walkways bridge between floor plates across the opening, and figures cross in shafts of sunlight that fall from openings above. The diagonal truss wall from the exterior reappears here as an interior surface, so the structure is legible from both sides, and movement through the building becomes a series of crossings over open space rather than a corridor sealed behind doors.

The rendering is spare and almost monochrome, which puts the emphasis on light and section. The bridges are thin, offset from one another, and staggered in height, so a person on one level is always visible to people on others. It is a social diagram expressed in structure: circulation as a shared, overlooked space.

An Atrium Lined Entirely in Leaves

The atrium view is where the project's claim about human beings and mother nature becomes literal. Looking down the narrow passage, both walls are covered in dense, ivy-like foliage, and the only relief is a strip of cloudy sky overhead. There is no visible structure, no railing, no material other than leaves. The building that was so emphatically angular outside disappears behind a living surface.

This is the most persuasive image in the set because it commits fully. A narrow, tall, planted void is a hard space to make comfortable, yet it offers something an air-conditioned lobby cannot: shade, the sound and texture of plants, and a sense of being enclosed by growth rather than by building. The open question, worth pressing in further development, is how this greenery is sustained and how people actually occupy the passage day to day.

Why This Project Matters

Earthen Angularity makes its argument through section rather than surface. The chevron footprint creates a protected interior, the angled struts open the ground plane to the street, the bridges turn circulation into shared space, and the planted atrium places nature at the centre of the building instead of on its edges. Each move connects to the next, which is what gives the project coherence beyond its striking silhouette.

For a growing city like Accra, the project points toward towers that do not simply import a generic glass type but carry warmer material tones, expose their structure honestly and give over real volume to greenery. Its shortlisting at Earth Made 2020 recognises an ambition that is worth pursuing: a building whose most memorable room is not built of walls at all, but of leaves and sky.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Clinton Boles

Competition and award

Shortlisted, Earth Made 2020

Location

Accra, Ghana

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