New Architectural Guide to Sub-Saharan Africa – Culture

An architectural guide to Africa – this must be a joke or a presumptuous colonial project from the mid-19th century. Pressing the building culture of this unmissable, bubbling continent between book covers, how is that supposed to work? Then the doorbell rings, an eight-kilo package arrives, and when you open it, the dimensions of the “Architectural Guide Sub-Saharan Africa” ​​gradually become clear. This work has seven volumes, 3400 pages, it contains over 5000 illustrations, and 350 authors have written about it – about no fewer than 850 buildings from 49 African countries. These articles are supplemented by 200 essays on all aspects of architecture and building in Africa. All doubts about the legitimacy and seriousness of this work have vanished.

And yet the editors Philipp Meusser and Adil Dalbai and their many authors wrestle throughout the introductory volume with the question of what they are actually doing. The restriction to sub-Saharan Africa is largely undisputed. North Africa’s architecture is part of such a diverse culture that it would make little sense to negotiate it along with the great south of Africa.

For the first time, Africa even has an international architecture star in David Adjaye

But they have their doubts about everything else: is it even possible to speak of “Africa” ​​without adopting the derogatory, belittling view of the Europeans? When you think of the term “architecture”, don’t you inevitably think in terms of western ideas about building, living, and cities? Conversely, could the search for a theory of African architecture, on which many of the authors are here, turn out to be less an empowerment than an “identity trap”, like “essentialism”, as Felwine Sarr asks?

On the one hand, important and exemplary buildings from the individual countries are presented, as one is used to from architectural guides, on the other hand the authors, who by no means always agree, debate the categories, criteria and reference systems of these representations in parallel. The monumental work not only documents what was built, but also discusses what could and should be built. Most of the time this is extremely stimulating, but sometimes it also gets very confusing. A bit clearer directing wouldn’t have hurt.

The company comes at just the right time. At no time since the 1960s, when one African state after another gained independence, has cultural self-confidence in Africa been as great as it is now. And interest in Africa has never been so great in the West: the wave of refugees, the colonialism and restitution debates, Black Lives Matter, the discussions about participation and diversity, the Marvel blockbuster “Black Panther”, but also the feeling of stagnation and insecurity, that has gripped the West makes many look to Africa more closely than ever. For the first time, Africa even has an international architecture star in David Adjaye. But, as the posts here show, there are many others to discover.

According to forecasts, 4.3 billion people will live in Africa in 2100, three times as many as today

The scarcely imaginable growth in population also makes construction in Africa an issue of global urgency: While the population figures on most other continents will hardly continue to increase, according to forecasts, 4.3 billion people will live in Africa by the year 2100, almost three times as many as today. And while Africa’s population used to be much more evenly distributed across the country than in Europe, America or Asia, it is becoming increasingly concentrated in the cities. All 15 of the world’s fastest growing cities are in Africa. Lagos alone is said to have an unbelievable 88 million inhabitants in the year 2100.

So this architecture guide is not only a stocktaking for those interested in architecture and companions for tourists, actual and those on “imaginary journeys”, as the publisher’s advertisement cheerfully puts it. It is also a crisis report and it points to a deficit that is becoming more evident every day: in order to solve its problems, Africa needs new, unique ideas for building that do justice to its specific conditions and the needs of its inhabitants.

Open detailed view

Africa once had this building culture and it is also clearly shown here, but since the colonial era it has been increasingly suppressed. Partly through colonialism itself, which imposed its own imported architecture on the countries, then, in the period before and after independence, through the buildings of “tropical modernism”, mostly designed by European architects. And beyond the big public buildings, people in Africa copied a lot from the West, often just the bad things: concrete, plastic, air conditioning.

Most recently, the wave of spectacular to grotesque airports, train stations, stadiums and museums followed, which were placed in the landscape primarily by Chinese state-owned companies, often in exchange for mining rights. Traditions or local contexts play no role in this, African architects are not involved. Not infrequently, China even flies in its own construction workers. For the Africans, there are neither jobs nor know-how, and the buildings are often unusable in the end. “Since the modern era, African architecture has not reflected us as Africans,” writes one of the authors.

Open detailed view

What contemporary African architecture might look like is the big question that runs through all seven volumes. First of all, one has to get off the defensive and overcome the fact that serious building in Africa is only ever questioned by the West to what extent it helps to overcome poverty and crises. But even the superficial celebration of Africa as the “continent of the future” doesn’t help. You have to go deeper, understand building differently than in the West. People are the most important infrastructure, the performative, ritual, spiritual and social must be understood as part of the built space. Africa’s animistic, non-Cartesian notions of man’s relationship to the world need to be revived. That would not only benefit Africa. As the post-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon said as early as 1961: “If we want to take humanity a step beyond what Europe has shown us, we have to invent and make discoveries.”