What if Lagos’s informal settlements became vertical innovation hubs? What if Brooklyn evolved into a network of self-sustaining climate ecosystems? These are the kinds of provocative questions that drive Olalekan Jeyifous, a Brooklyn-based Nigerian-American architect and artist whose speculative designs use utopia as a tool for critique and possibility, refusing the dystopian resignation common to speculative works. Working across installation, illustration, and public art, Jeyifous constructs imagined cities that are simultaneously fantastical and architecturally rigorous—dense collages where salvaged materials meet solar systems and community resilience meets futuristic infrastructure. His work centers cities like Lagos not as problems to be fixed, but as laboratories of possibility. In doing so, he challenges who gets to imagine the future—and insists that the future must emerge from cultural specificity rather than imported, glass-and-steel universalism.
Designboom
