Making 3-D Models to Recreate Somalia’s Architectural History

In 2013, Yusuf Shegow went back to Somalia for the first time in almost ten years. It was the country where he had been born, a place steeped in family history and stories. At the time, Shegow was an architecture student in Manchester, England, and as he and his father walked around Mogadishu, he was struck by the myriad styles and influences amidst the ruins and war-scarred buildings. “It made me question: What used to be here?”

Shegow, who grew up in Kenya and the U.K. after leaving Somalia as a child, returned to England after the trip with a reinvigorated fascination for his birthplace. He became obsessed with archives—finding and studying old photographs to better understand how things had once been. The layers of history were like the concentric circles inside a tree: evidence of the country’s many chapters of history, from the Islamic influence to the colonial period.