When Mabel O. Wilson surveys the architecture of Ghana, she sees the complex history of the former British colony. From hulking slave forts of the past to today’s cell phone kiosks and teeming markets, the story is there, waiting to be told.

A chicken strolls in front of a beauty parlor, an example of modern-day architecture in Ghana, and the focus of an exhibition in Manhattan.

This fall, Wilson, an associate professor of architecture at Columbia, tells part of that story in an exhibition at Studio X, a research space in lower Manhattan run by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Wilson traveled to Ghana with former Columbia classmate Peter Tolkin to explore the mid-century architecture, as well as other buildings in the country. Tolkin, who received an M.A. from Columbia in 1991, is the principal of Peter Tolkin Architecture in Pasadena and a lecturer at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Tolkin’s revealing color photographs, which he has dubbed “deliberate snapshots,” are part of the exhibition titled “Listening There: Scenes from Ghana,” which runs through Dec. 16. The show also contains several videos by Wilson.

Wilson’s focus was the public buildings that in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s marked the end of colonial rule and the beginning of African independence, but have largely been forgotten by historians of 20th-century design.

As Wilson explained it, when she first learned of the Ghanaian buildings, she wondered why they weren’t better known and realized that “with their absence we’ve failed to understand how critical the African continent was to the discourse of modernism.” She added: “Our trip was motivated by a desire to see how these buildings had fared in the half-century since their construction, and to explore how they functioned in today’s increasingly urban and global contexts.”

Wilson, who directs the school’s program for Advanced Architectural Research and is the principal of a New York firm called Studio 6Ten, found herself interested in the ways in which modernist architecture—the so-called international style—helped bring newly independent African nations “into the fold” while at the same time erasing many signs of indigenous culture. The architects, she says, were optimists who believed modernist forms could “solve the problems of living in tropical regions.”

Among them was Harry Weese, the Chicago architect who later designed the Metro system in Washington, D.C. Weese was responsible for the U.S. Embassy in Accra, completed in 1956. The open, inviting building, with a large public plaza under an attractive wooden roof, has long since been turned into offices for Ghana’s Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs, while the U.S. has built a new embassy that resembles a fortress.

Also looming over present-day Ghana are buildings by Chinese architects, a sign of China’s increasingly strong ties to resource-rich African nations. The impressive new structures—including a national theater built by the Chinese government—contrast sharply with the “metal-roofed slums housing the millions who’ve journeyed from country to city seeking work,” Wilson says. Adding to the mix, and also documented in the exhibition, are the imposing slave forts of the former British colony known as the Gold Coast before independence in 1957. The cavernous buildings have been preserved as sobering tourist attractions.

At a panel discussion on Oct. 23, Ikem Stanley Okoye, director of the African Studies program at the University of Delaware, said that the mid-century buildings, mostly by British architects, “represented a period in which young architects got to play with modernism in the colonies.” He asked: “Can we claim them as African, if they were produced by foreign architects mostly with foreign funding?”

Felicity Scott, an assistant professor of architecture at the school, said, “We need to pay attention to the manner in which the buildings remain haunted by the hierarchies of the British colonial past.” That association, she said, leads to the question: “Is modernism necessarily progressive?”

Wilson is currently working on a cultural history book that examines the participation of black Americans in world’s fairs and museums.