adjaye proposes rammed earth children's cancer centre for ghana

An Architecture of Healing in ghana

The design for an International Children’s Cancer Research Centre, recently unveiled by Adjaye Associates, begins with the land. Set to perch along the eastern slopes of the Atewa Range in Kyebi, Ghana, the proposed ICCRC is grounded in its setting before it rises in form. From the approach, the landscape of dense forests and filtered sunlight sets the tone. It is this atmosphere of continuity that guides the healthcare facility‘s masterplan, which holds the promise of both care and research for West Africa’s youngest cancer patients.

The center is designed as a holistic campus for the Wish4Life Foundation. Adjaye Associates organizes the 225,000-square-meter site into a network of buildings that hold more than function. Each structure — hospital, research lab, training institute, family residence, and chapel — participates in a larger rhythm of movement and repose. The spaces are open to the air and shaded from the sun, responding to the region’s climate as well as its cultural logics. The unimposing architecture settles into the terrain with a clarity that seeks to invite trust.

visualizations © Adjaye Associates

adjaye associates draws from Akan Traditions

With the International Children’s Cancer Research Centre, the architects at Adjaye Associates draw from the Akan worldview. This proposes that illness results from a disturbance of personal, communal, and environmental harmony. Courtyards shaped like the Fihankra, or traditional compound, organize the campus into nested zones of rest and interaction. These enclosures hold the cadence of daily life, offering open-air rooms for conversation, reflection, and retreat. In Adjaye Associates’ design, care is inseparable from architecture.

The complex will be built from earth — rammed, pressed, and baked into slabs and bricks. Timber and clay, shaped by local hands, bring continuity between building and community. The Welcome Centre greets patients and families with the soft tactility of earth walls, while concrete screens in clinical zones reference Kente cloth, a gesture to ancestral pattern and meaning. Each material carries its own history into the future.

Adjaye Associates unveils a cancer research center as a new model for pediatric care in Ghana

A new precedent for a Cancer Research Centre

Adjaye Associates follows a low-energy design ethos with its International Children’s Cancer Research Centre. The team employs passive cooling techniques, photovoltaic systems, and orientation strategies specific to the site. These decisions are embedded in the architecture, not appended to it, forming an infrastructure of resilience. The goal is to create a self-sustaining facility that can adapt to environmental change while maintaining a high standard of care.

Here, a different model for pediatric healthcare is proposed. It refuses the imported template of compartmentalized buildings and anonymous corridors. Instead, it cultivates a campus in which care, learning, worship, and research support one another in spatial continuity. This vision expands the definition of a hospital, suggesting that architecture itself can foster dignity, belonging, and healing.

A presentation of the proposal is currently exhibited at the Time Space Existence show during the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. It will be housed in Palazzo Bembo through November, and places Ghana on an international stage.

the ICCRC is sited on the forested slopes of the Atewa Range in Kyebi