People remember that their grandmother’s mud house in the village was always the coolest, says architect Nzinga Mboup, co-founder of Worofila, a design firm based in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, which promotes architecture that uses local materials such as raw earth and a reed called typha.

But in the 20th century, people turned to concrete in the cities, thinking it was the modern solution, even though concrete buildings became furnaces in the West African heat and required air conditioning. Mud-brick construction came to be associated with poverty and concrete buildings with modern state-building, says a fascinating article in Atlantic.