Evaluating the Public Building Relevance on the Community’s Heritages in Nigeria

Abstract

The importance of relating design product with the identity of the residing community, being responsible for the conservation of collective memories of cultural potentials cannot be overemphasised. This paper evaluate the relevance of some selected innovative public buildings to the culture and lifestyle of the inhabitants of sited communities with the view of understanding the existential reality which the people experience through the emergence of these design products. Through a quantitative methodology, a case of twelve public building in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria was studied and analysed. A total of 480 copies of questionnaire returned were examined using descriptive statistics for the participants’ socio-economic characteristics while inferential statistics were used to establish the relationship between community lifestyles and the buildings under study. The result shows that the majority of the public buildings in Nigeria lack cultural and lifestyle representation of the sited communities, thereby fails in its expectation of social and cultural relevance. The implication is that it lacks the uniqueness of local architecture and cultural potentials that is sellable for an economic boost.