What follows is an account of the school’s stunning rise and fall. Though it deals with the question of who is to blame for what happened, it is ultimately a parable of complicity. It is about the myths that people want to believe about the world, noble intentions sullied by ego or derailed by the mundane, the intractability of parochial politics, and the ethics of social experimentation. It is about gossip and spin, the spectrum between honesty and deceit, and the dilemma of who can speak for whom. It is also about the moral of the empty barrel—the emptier it is, the louder the echo—and bad belle, a Nigerian term for jealousy.

MFS II projected a sharply modern geometry onto the still surface of the ancient canal. To rapt Biennale participants, it also reflected the far-reaching potential of Adeyemi’s design. Built in ten days by four Italian woodworkers, MFS II had been “adapted for easy prefabrication, rapid assembly, and a wide range of uses,” according to the architect and his team. Inside the replica, Adeyemi hung maps of coastlines from around the world. Pushpins designated construction projects in “water cities,” the coastal metropolises likely to bear some of the most drastic impacts of climate change and rising sea levels. With the floating school, Adeyemi wanted to spark a conversation about how cities like Lagos can adapt to their shifting environments and set examples for sustainable design.

In his acceptance speech, Adeyemi compared his project’s setting to the Biennale’s. “It’s said that the early settlers of Venice were fishermen in the marshy lagoons, not very different from the people of Makoko,” he said. “It’s a great honor to be standing here representing the intelligence of the people of Makoko as well as countless waterfront communities all over the world.” The crowd standing before him could see the Makoko Floating School for themselves: A replica, called MFS II, sat between brick arches and white Istrian columns in the Gaggiandre, a 16th-century Venetian dockyard. Built specifically for the Biennale, the structure included a buoyant platform, on top of which blond wood beams crisscrossed into triangles that formed a classic A-frame.

Adeyemi, at whom Aravena beamed with pride during the award ceremony, was one of the Biennale’s darlings. The 40-year-old Nigerian was given his prize for designing a school in Makoko, one of the largest slums in Lagos. Described by the Silver Lion jury as “at once iconic and pragmatic,” the school was meant to serve poor children whose neighborhood the government wanted to demolish. What made it singular was its location: The school floated on the water that envelops much of the coastal megacity. The structure suggested an alternative to tearing down slums to make way for development, a new approach for elevating instead of erasing the poor. Thanks to Adeyemi’s innovative design, the children of Makoko had a space in which to expand their minds and horizons.

One

Lagos is shaped by water. Its name comes from the Portuguese word for “lakes,” and the city is situated on the western and southwestern shorelines of a 2,500-square-mile lagoon. The water abuts a swathe of mainland before splitting into serpentine channels that flow between several small islands and empty into the Gulf of Guinea. The islands house Lagos’s business districts and elite neighborhoods, while the mainland is where government offices and the airport are located. It’s also where most of the population lives. No one is sure how many people are in Lagos; official estimates range from 14 million to 21 million. Thousands more arrive each day seeking economic opportunity. Many wind up in the city’s slums.

Kunlé Adeyemi didn’t live in Lagos until he was a young man. He grew up in Kaduna, an industrial city in northern Nigeria. His father was an architect who constantly amended his family’s house. Adeyemi followed in his father’s footsteps, studying architecture at the University of Lagos (Unilag) in the late 1990s. In the design world, it was an era of grandiose projects and personalities, of “starchitects” like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Structures were celebrated for their hyper-visibility. A loud, iconic statement was as valued as functionality. Buildings weren’t just buildings; they were triumphant displays of vision.

During Adeyemi’s studies, Rem Koolhaas, one of the period’s most famous architects, came to Lagos for a research project. Koolhaas was known for his global media presence, conspicuous constructions, and sweeping philosophical missives on urbanism and space. While scholars and policymakers tended to frame Lagos in apocalyptic terms—too big, too dirty, too frenetic—Koolhaas saw purpose in the city’s chaos. “In terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilized an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency,” he later told The Guardian. From his research, which involved design students at Unilag, Koolhaas produced a documentary that showed Lagosians moving through their rapidly growing city, utilizing its spaces and navigating its economies.

After graduating, Adeyemi got a job at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Koolhaas’s renowned design firm in the Netherlands. For several years, he worked within an organization known for long hours, radical dreamscapes, and savvy publicity. He participated in projects in Doha and Seoul. When he set out on his own, launching the firm NLÉ in 2010, its main office was in Amsterdam. He later opened a second, smaller branch in Lagos.

Adeyemi wanted his firm to shape the future of developing cities, particularly in Africa, through projects that created affordable housing and common-use spaces. This philosophy was captured in his firm’s name: Nlé means “at home” in Yoruba, the dominant language in southwestern Nigeria. “‘Home’ is much more than walls, floors and ceilings,” the company’s Facebook page reads. “It refers to the fundamental building blocks of the city, to everyday life and the uses of public space in the emerging and endlessly complex urbanisms of developing regions.”

In Lagos, one place drew Adeyemi like a magnet. For years he’d seen it from a distance. Like many Lagosians, he glimpsed it to the west every time he crossed the citys’s lofted, curving Third Mainland Bridge. That place was Makoko.

The slum looks now as it did then: distinctive and arresting. Many of its shanties jut out from the mainland, transforming the appearance of the shoreline. Resting on stilts sunk into the lagoon’s muddy bed, they form jagged rows that seem to hang over the water’s surface. This ad hoc characteristic predates colonialism and forms part of Lagos’s architectural heritage. It is also vulnerable to the elements and the pressures of a swelling population: Makoko is home to an estimated 100,000 people and counting.

The structures wooden walls are waxy with wear. Denizens move between them in canoes. So do hawkers; unlike their land-dwelling counterparts, who tote wares in round bins balanced on their heads, the vendors of Makoko array hair accessories, tomatoes, sodas, and fried snacks in their laps as they ply the neighborhood’s channels. In other parts of Lagos, there are honking horns, rumbling exhaust pipes, and roaring engines, but in the slum you hear only the hum of human voices and the occasional quaking of a generator. Water imbues the scene with a preternatural serenity.

The government has long thought of Makoko as a festering eyesore. “It’s shameful, it’s embarrassing, you don’t see this in Europe, in the U.S.,” a state press liaison told me, his voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. But journalists, photographers, and urbanists come to the slum with the zeal of explorers. There is a messy mystique to the place: It is at once inspiring and upsetting, intriguing and shocking. The permanent haze that hovers overhead, a mix of smoke, dust, and fumes, imbues Makoko with a beguiling light. The bright colors of patterned clothing pop in photos, and the visual drama is deepened by the blackness of the lagoon.

When Adeyemi latched onto Makoko as a potential project site, friends in Lagos’s design community suggested that he talk to Isi Etomi. A young architect with an ebullient laugh, Etomi is a native Lagosian who values pragmatism and restraint. While studying architecture at Canterbury University in Great Britain, she wanted her senior project to be “a realistic proposal that someone could take to the government and say, ‘This is how you solve a problem’”—not one of the “fantasy projects, up in the sky, in the clouds” that many young architects prefer. She scoured her memory for a candidate in her home city and recalled Makoko. She’d never visited, but she’d smelled its scent, which wafts up to the Third Mainland Bridge: smoked fish, fresh sap, diesel fumes, and unprocessed sewage. “It’s not particularly off-putting, but it is memorable,” Etomi told me. Her two-volume thesis, which drew on Koolhaas’s research and comparative examples like Brazil’s favelas, proposed a new market and a gradual upgrading of the slum, one row of shanties at a time.

When she moved back to Lagos, Etomi began a year with the National Youth Service Corps—compulsory for university graduates—and requested placement in Makoko. She taught at one of the neighborhood’s only Anglophone schools, called Whanyinna (Love). Adept at navigating their unusual neighborhood, students scurried along beams suspended over the lagoon to get to their classes, which were held in derelict rooms spruced up with red flowers hand-painted on the walls. The school was a charity project of the Lagos Yacht Club, but the funders hadn’t allotted money for teachers’ salaries or even toilets. The building’s foundation was submerged underwater and rested on sand fill. Sometimes when it rained, the interior flooded. Whanyinna was also overcrowded, with a waiting list for admission. “The project failed practically and socially,” Etomi noted in a report she wrote about the school. “Unsupported capital investments simply add management burdens to already under-resourced communities/governments and end up wasting the capital investments.”

In a serendipitous twist, actor Ben Stiller visited Makoko and met with Noah Shemede, the school’s director and a native of the slum. When Shemede mentioned that Makoko’s children needed more classroom space, Stiller offered to fund construction through his philanthropic foundation. Etomi began working on a feasibility study for an extension of Whanyinna’s original structure. At the same time, she drafted and completed a smaller-scale project: a shelter for people awaiting canoe taxis at one of Makoko’s watery intersections. “It’s something that makes life a little easier in a discreet kind of way,” she told me. It took two days to build.

Whanyinna’s extension was still in an early drafting phase when Etomi and Adeyemi met. They discussed their shared interest in Makoko and brainstormed designs for the school. In Etomi’s mind, this was “charity work, a community project,” and she was “not thinking of anything further than that.” Adeyemi started on the same page. His early ideas were straightforward: a two-story, open-plan structure, with a playground downstairs and a classroom upstairs.

Around the third draft, though, Adeyemi hit on a new idea: What if the school floated in the lagoon? That would make it resistant to flooding, he hypothesized, and speak to the growing threat of climate change. It could be shaped like a triangle, with sloping walls that enabled drainage into the lagoon. It would be a beacon of invention among Makoko’s dilapidated stilt structures and a “reusable modular building prototype.” In an early rendering, Adeyemi labeled the structure with the words “indigenous, ecological, local materials, self sustaining, economical, adaptable, movable, safe.”

In a 2012 budget prepared for the Stiller Foundation, Adeyemi estimated the outlay for his project at about $130,000, including what amounted to $13,000 for him to fly business class between his home in Amsterdam and Lagos. Etomi balked at the price tag, which was roughly seven times the cost of Whanyinna’s original structure, and at the idea that the building would be replicable. “It cannot work, because they cannot afford it,” she told me, referring to the slum’s residents.

Etomi and Adeyemi debated the matter in text messages, which were obtained for this story from a third party. “You can provide a higher standard of building but it need not be so… elaborate,” Etomi wrote in one exchange. “The simplest solutions are often the best.” Adeyemi replied, “I’m surprised u don’t see the simplicity in the new proposal.” Etomi also worried that the structure wouldn’t be able to withstand storms. “I keep thinking about driving rain,” she texted. “Driving rain is a detailing issue,” Adeyemi responded.

There was also the matter of the project’s visibility, which Adeyemi wanted to maximize. Makoko residents live under constant threat of eviction, which has a long, brutal history in Lagos. Many of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods sit where slums once did. In 1990, a single mass eviction affected some 300,000 people. The area was covered with sand and, later, McMansions. Eko Atlantic, a luxury district built on land “reclaimed” from coastal erosion through dredging and specialized infrastructure, displaced a poor community on the fringes of Bar Beach. Evictions are often violent affairs; bulldozers and armed police plow into communities with little or no prior notice. Etomi feared that a high-profile project intended to help and celebrate Makoko’s residents risked making them targets.

Adeyemi told Etomi that she was behaving like a “side critic” who wasn’t “actually properly engaging with the work.” She decided to back out of the project. “I just didn’t have any confidence in it,” she told me. Stiller’s foundation stepped away as well. (It didn’t reply to a request for comment.)

Adeyemi looked for other funding and secured it from the United Nations Development Program and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which funds environmentally friendly projects worldwide. Noah Shemede, the school’s director, wondered what had happened to the other collaborators, but the project was gaining momentum. “All I needed was a school to put the students in, so I said no wahala,” Shemede recalled, using Nigerian slang for “no problem.”

He showed Adeyemi around the neighborhood and welcomed the architect into his home. The men traveled together to neighboring Benin to observe other water-based architecture. The future looked bright. Then came a searing reminder that, in Makoko, daily life is a precarious balancing act.