Joe Osae-Addo
The Ghana-based architect and founding partner of the A+D Museum in Los Angeles returns for a lecture and reception.

Otis College of Art and Design’s Environmental Design Department will present the 2022-2023 Donghia Designer-in-Residence Lecture featuring architect Joseph Osae-Addo on Thursday, March 16, 2023. A 6:30 p.m. reception will precede the lecture and Q&A, scheduled 7:30–8:45 p.m. 

Registration for the lecture is now open. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in The Forum of Otis College’s Goldsmith campus at 9045 Lincoln Boulevard in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles. The lecture will also be accessible via Zoom.

Born in Ghana, West Africa, and trained at the Architectural Association in London, Osae-Addo worked internationally before establishing a practice in Los Angeles, where he was also a founding partner of the A+D Museum. He moved back to Ghana in 2000, and is currently the CEO of Accra-based Constructs R&D and chairman of ArchiAfrika Foundation. 

Osae-Addo will also direct a one-week master class between March 16 and 22, 2023, at Otis College. The Donghia Master Class is an annual week-long immersive elective during which a small group of Environmental Design juniors, seniors, and alumni spend 30-plus hours with a designer from outside of the United States, working on a project sited in the designer’s home country. The experience is designed to give students an opportunity to learn about new cultures and issues the designer-in-residence brings from abroad. 

The Donghia Designer-in-Residency, including the lecture and master class, is organized by the Environmental Design department at Otis College and is made possible through a generous grant from the Angelo Donghia Foundation, a privately-held, not-for-profit organization created under the will of the late Angelo Donghia. The Foundation provides support for two distinct fields: advancement of education in the field of interior design, and initiatives pertaining to the discovery of the causes of AIDS and its related diseases, and their methods of treatment. 

About Joseph Osae-Addo

Joseph (Joe) Osae-Addo was born in Ghana, West Africa, and trained at the Architectural Association in London. He worked in Finland, the UK, and the United States, setting up his practice in Los Angeles in 1991. He was a founding partner of the A+D Museum, Los Angeles, whose mission is to advance knowledge and to enable people to appreciate and understand architecture and design. Osae-Addo ran his studio in Los Angeles until he moved back to his native country of Ghana after a visit in 2000. At that time Ghana “had just elected a new president, and Addo sensed a ‘democratic fervor’ that had not existed before. There was an atmosphere of optimism and euphoria, and I wanted to be part of it,” he says. 

Osae-Addo is currently the CEO of Constructs R&D, an inno-native™ design firm based in Accra and Chairman of ArchiAfrika Foundation. Osae-Addo’s firm, Constructs, synergizes architecture, urban planning, landscaping, and building technology into a single unit geared towards bringing modern architecture and building techniques to create design solutions to contemporary African architecture. Inno-native™ is a condition where the best design solutions are indigenous.

The work and interest of the practice has been influenced by various investigations of ‘genus-loci’ and how architecture can/should respond to this in creating pieces that are both site specific and meet the needs of the people who will inhabit or interact with it. This has led to interventions in South Los Angeles and Accra’s Jamestown, where several projects aim at establishing a discourse between what is important to communities and how site, climate, materials, and their weathering, with design intent, should shape these interventions.

Osae-Addo can be found most days at ArchiAfrika Design Gallery and the Jamestown Cafe in the old city of Accra.