After studying classics at Oxford, Olayinka Dosekun-Adjei settled into a life many would envy as a financial analyst at Lehman Brothers. It wasn’t for her. “I was hungering for something tangible,” she says, “for projects that could be seen and found and experienced directly.” Eight years later, after receiving her Master of Architecture from Harvard, practicing at several firms, and moving back to her home country of Nigeria, Dosekun-Adjei, 36, and her partner, Jeffrey Adjei, 36, realized that ambition with the founding of their Lagos-based firm, Studio Contra.

In the six years since, Studio Contra has completed a series of increasingly prominent projects of varying types, culminating in the Institute of Contemporary African Art and Film, in the Nigerian city Ilorin. The building, which will be completed this year, takes the form of low-slung interconnected pavilions that are topped with swooping roofs and arrayed around light-filled courtyards. Its frank symmetry lends it spatial hierarchy and civic presence, but this pomp is undercut, productively, by the playful curves of the roof and gentle interplay of interior and exterior spaces. The partners say they sought to undermine the rarefied connotations of contemporary art, and in this vein the building’s informality seems to reach out to local visitors, inviting them into its galleries, media workshop, and other public spaces.