Tosin Oshinowo leads cmDesign Atelier, one of Nigeria's most closely watched practices. Her work brings African modernism into contemporary life: buildings and interiors that know where they are and who they are for. She curated the 2022 Pavilion of Africa at the Venice Architecture Biennale, bringing African spatial practice to the global stage on its own terms.
What distinguishes Oshinowo's work is not style — it is intention. Each project asks a question before it answers one. Who is this space for? What does it remember? What does it refuse to forget? In Lagos, where the built environment is often a negotiation between colonial inheritance and rapid contemporary growth, those questions are not abstract. They are structural.
Her studio operates at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and cultural production. The work spans private residences, institutional buildings, and public space. What connects them is a commitment to designing from the inside of a culture rather than at its surface.
Ile Abimbola features Tosin Oshinowo in Ile Tect because her practice embodies what we believe about the continent: that African design is not a category to be discovered — it is a tradition already fully formed, and one that the world is still catching up to.