Tropical mission: new offices for the British Council in Lagos both respond to and challenge local conditions.

Enduring and impressively global, the British Council is that rare thing, a reassuring constant in a changing world. From its modest beginnings in 1934, it now takes its evangelical mission of cultural relations and education to 110 countries. In estate management terms, this is a considerable proposition, and the periodic need for new premises in an extraordinarily diverse range of locales makes the Council an energetic and visionary patron of architecture.

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Four years ago, the Council decided to relocate and rationalise its Nigerian headquarters in Lagos to the eastern district of Ikoyi. The site is a large leafy compound, which, in its physical insularity and lack of engagement with the public realm, is typical of the hermetic character of the neighbourhood, and, indeed, of Lagos generally. Following an initial feasibility study by the Council's in-house architects, London-based Allies and Morrison were appointed to refurbish the existing staff houses on the site and design a new learning and information centre that would act as a flagship for the Council's activities in Nigeria.

At the heart of the project was the dilemma of how to engender a sense of physical openness and accessibility against the intrinsic insularity of the surroundings, security concerns and the intensely hot and humid equatorial environment. Allies and Morrison's response is eminently practical, yet also subtle and considered, as the building gradually reveals itself through a sequence of permeable layers of metal, timber and glass.

Placed along the north-west edge of the garden compound, the new building is a plain, two-storey volume enclosed by crisply rendered white walls. Set back from the street, overlooking a small, semi-formal garden, its short north-west end forms its main public face. Instead of the more usual protective wall, however, the building is delicately veiled behind an open metal screen giving it a dignified and comprehensible street presence, albeit necessarily at arm's length.

The metal screen marks the compound boundary, and its vertical bars are reprised in an intermediate colonnade of ribbed iroko that extends across the width of the building, framing and defining the main entrance. Resembling a giant garden trellis, the colonnade, an obvious archetype for hot climates, shades and protects, moderating between inside and out. Though essentially free-standing, the timber structure is lightly connected to the building's concrete walls for lateral support. Behind the colonnade is an inner membrane of clear glass held in anodised bronze mullions that encloses a double-height information centre.

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The sequence of arrival tactfully guides the visitor from a gatehouse, around the edge of the garden, to the colonnade, where the building finally reveals itself. The ground floor is more or less public, with an information centre, cafe and audio-visual room. Council offices, a mixture of open plan and cellular rooms, are placed on the first floor, where they overlook the double-height information centre, reinforcing the prevailing spirit of openness. Materials are chosen with an appropriate regard for local sources and aptitudes. The iroko of the colonnade is immaculately jointed and worked, but the concrete, which proved more of a technical challenge, is largely rendered, in the vernacular way, or simply left raw and boardmarked, its roughness a foil to the creamy Ancaster limestone of the floor. The hot, wet Lagos climate meant that some air conditioning was necessary to cool the interior and protect computers and books, but it is a much less demanding environmental control strategy than the local, aggressively airconditioned norm.

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Throughout the project, there is a sense that, while intelligently acknowledging place and tradition, the design team was determined not to let the more unforgiving local conditions compromise what has turned out to be a very decent piece of modern tropical architecture.

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