Project Overview
This series of renders captures Dakar after dark — a city that transforms under artificial light into something altogether different from its daytime self. The project is less a conventional architectural commission and more a speculative urban study: an investigation of how brand identity, commercial signage, and contemporary architectural facades combine to produce a distinctly West African urban aesthetic. The Dakar brandscape is energetic, layered, and deeply human in scale.
Design Philosophy
The project takes its conceptual cue from the theory of the brandscape — the idea that the built environment of a commercial city is inseparable from the visual language of the brands that inhabit it. In Dakar, this manifests in a particular way: international luxury brands and local artisan identities coexist on the same streetscape, their signage competing and collaborating in equal measure. At night, the hierarchy of the daytime city dissolves, and what remains is a field of light, colour, and text.
Architecturally, the project explores how building facades in this context function as media surfaces — not merely as shelter, but as carriers of identity, aspiration, and civic meaning. The renders show buildings whose facades are simultaneously structural and communicative, their material texture amplified by artificial lighting to produce depth, shadow, and warmth that disappears in flat daylight photography.
Technical Specifications
Urban Scale: The renders depict street-level urban blocks with building heights ranging from 2 to 6 storeys, consistent with the mixed-use commercial fabric of central Dakar. Ground floors are activated with retail frontages, open arcades, and informal market stalls.
Facade Materials: A mix of painted concrete, ceramic tile cladding, and metal panel systems are depicted. Many surfaces are treated with light-reflective coatings or finished in high-gloss paint to maximize the luminosity of uplighting and signage glow.
Lighting Strategy: Three tiers of artificial lighting are at work: ambient street lighting (high-pressure sodium and LED column fixtures), commercial signage (backlit acrylic panels, LED channel lettering, neon tube lighting), and architectural accent lighting (recessed ground-level uplights and concealed linear LED strips on cornices and canopies).
Signage: Brand identities shown include a mix of local Senegalese commercial brands and global luxury references, printed on fabric banners, applied as vinyl lettering, and formed as three-dimensional metal fabrications mounted to facade supports.
Blueprint & Urban Plan Notes
The urban plan underlying these renders follows a modified grid characteristic of Dakar’s colonial-era street network, overlaid with informal densification. Street widths range from 6 m (pedestrian lanes) to 20 m (primary commercial boulevards). Building setbacks are minimal to zero, creating a continuous street wall that is essential to the nighttime enclosure effect.
Ground-floor plans show open-front retail bays of approximately 4–6 m width and 8–10 m depth. Upper floors are planned as flexible live-work units accessible from shared stair cores at the rear of each building plot. Rooftop terraces serve as informal community spaces, visible in the renders as illuminated silhouettes against the night sky.
SPANTONE 