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Abstracts – Legacies of African Modernism
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, March 26th and 27th 2015
In alphabetical order:
Adeyemi, Kunlé (Lagos/Amsterdam):
Water & the City
NLÉ (www.nleworks.com) aims to critically examine two of the most significant challenges of our
time: rapid urbanization and climate change, in the continent with some of the world’s greatest
opportunities, Africa. The impact of rapid urbanization and economic growth of African cities is now
common knowledge, yet it cannot be overemphasized. At the same time the impact of climate
change through water has now become day-to-day reality, with sea level rise, increasing rainfall and
frequent flooding. The relationships of ‘water and the city’ on the African continent, have therefore
become critical points of intersection for understanding the future of development in Africa.
It is an established fact that about seventy percent (70%) of the world is covered by water. A less
established finding is that nearly seventy percent (70%) of the world capital cities are also situated
by water. And more specifically, again nearly seventy percent (70%) of African capital cities are also
by water. According to U.N. estimates, the population of Africa will double by 2050, growing at a
rate that will quickly surpass the population of China and rival Asia as the world’s most populous
continent by 2100. With this explosive growth, African communities and cities are expanding rapidly
and aggressively into unchartered territories. Africa’s population surge coupled with the impacts of
climate change - sea level rise, heavy rainfall, and flooding - frames one of the most significant and
urgent contemporary global challenges.
In a twist of fate, it is said that although Africa is said to be the least responsible for climate change,
it is the most likely impacted by it. With a large number of these rapidly urbanizing cities and
communities by the water within the high to the extreme high-risk zones. This clear and present
danger, calls for an immediate response through adaptation and resiliency measures in
development on the continent.
Anfinsen, Erik (Oslo)
Re-imagining past futures through abandoned oil wells
When the British government in 1895 received reports about oil seepages in the southwestern
corner of the Gold Coast, it did not take long before the West African Oil Syndicate (WAOS) sunk
four appraisal wells near the Domunli Lagoon in Nzemaland. The drilling tests made and crude
samples collected in 1896 and 1897 provided disappointing results, however, and no further
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exploration was undertaken by WAOS. While the wells was abandoned and appeared to be of little
use, nearby communities, politicians, geologists and corporations have throughout the 20th century
inscribed their traces with shifting meanings.
This paper will, in light of recent anthropological writings on memory, time and materiality (e.g.
Dawdy 2010; Nielsen 2014; Bear 2014), argue that the traces of the oil wells brings unrealized, past
futures into the present, reviving the hope and potentiality once embodied by the wells when they
were first sunk. To do so, I will explore how the oil seepages and the abandoned appraisal wells near
Bonyere, Ghana, have, through various temporary outbursts of hope, been used in order to reimagine a future of oil production in the Domunli Lagoon: from the initial corporate attempts to
become part of the developing petroleum industry, via post-colonial dreams of self-reliance and
modernity, to the contemporary, risk-driven search for new sources of oil.
Anyamba, Tom (Nairobi)
Nordic Influences on Post-Colonial Kenyan Architecture
At the dawn of Kenya’s independence in 1963, there was a desire to create a new beginning for the
new nation. At the same time there was also rapid population influx from the rural areas to urban
centres, as the colonial restriction of the movement of Africans had been relaxed.
In creating this new nation, architecture as a symbol of society was seen as the effective vehicle for
driving this new status of the Kenyan society. In this regard, the leaders of Kenya’s first republic
sought to express this newness by building the monumental Kenya African National Union (KANU)
headquarters building (now Kenyatta International Conference Centre-KICC) in Nairobi. The
Norwegian Architect Karl Henrik Nostvik was commissioned by President Kenyatta to design this
headquarters building.
During this early period of independence there was also an influx of experts from Europe who came
in as part of the West’s technical assistance to the new nation. The demand for housing these
experts led to the design and construction of modern housing areas. One such housing area is the
Muguga Green Estate, situated in Westlands Nairobi, and also designed Karl Henrik Nostvik. This
estate is discussed to some detail in this paper. In addition this paper also discusses the design of the
KICC and its impact on contemporary Kenyan architecture.
The paper further argues that Nordic influences can be seen in many post-colonial buildings in
Kenya. In fact KICC has become the iconic symbol of the city of Nairobi, and many contemporary
architects draw their design inspiration from this building.
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Boek, Filip de (Leuven)
Modernist propositions and their afterlives: urban acupunctures from
Kinshasa (DR Congo)
By means of three 'urban acupunctures' on Kinshasa's landscape (a late colonial modernist building,
a new city extension and a homegrown version of the skyscraper) I will discuss the closures and
promises of the modernist proposition in today's Kinshasa.
Ellefsen, Karl Otto (Oslo)
Urban policies in post colonial Africa – the Ujamaa experience
Nations that emerged from colonialism in the first two decades after the Second World War were
established in rural, mostly pastoral and not industrialised territories. A common denominator was
also governements based on parties with a resistance background and leading towards left-wing
policies. Few relevant models for development of these kinds of nations were available, and a locally
contextualised translation of communist, socialist or social-democratic models had to be done. The
agendas eagerly pursued modernisation and industrialisation. Policies for settlement and
urbanisation were considered as needed to achieve defined goals, these policies were however
specified with distinct local flavour. The Khmer Rouge policies of deurbanisation might be looked
upon as an ultimate and extreme variant of these kinds of consideration.
The talk will look into the post-colonial urban and regional policies in Tanzania. The local variant of
socialism in Tanzania, established as the ideology that should be adapted for building the nation,
was named Umajaa. The ideas of Umajaa implied to restructure regional settlement patterns into
new communally based villages, and to strengthen trade and production by establishing urban
centres in all regions. The general policy mirrored Nordic plan-economy based planning. Initiated by
the Tanzanian Government and financed by Nordic funding for development, Finish architects and
planners in the beginning of the 1970s developed comprehensive masterplans for the towns of
Mbeya, Moshi, Tabora and Tanga.
A research project at the Oslo School of Architecture summarizes the knowledge on Nordic initiated
Umajaa-based planning and intends to discuss the long term effect of these urban policies.
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Espeland, Rune Hjalmar (Oslo)
Urban Party cells after African socialism
Tanzania’s ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) took over many state properties before the
introduction of multiparty politics in 1992. It is therefore today one of the major owners of land and
buildings in the country, and its party premises are found in almost every village and urban
neighbourhood. This paper explores some current meanings and uses of party buildings and
locations in Dar es Salaam, focussing on 'party cells', which have not only survived African socialism
but also proliferated - seemingly paradoxically - under conditions of multipartyism, and neoliberal
politics.
Folkers, Antoni Scholtens (Amsterdam)
Georg Lippsmeier and pragmatic modernism
Georg Lippsmeier (1923-1991) was a German architect, (L+P Architects, founded 1950s) and the
Institut für Tropenbau / Institute for Tropical Building (IFT, founded 1969).
He became the most successful German tropical architect and researcher on tropical architecture of
the second half of the 20th century. Lippsmeier combined trade-fair planning with development-aid
supported projects, and developed a critical and pragmatic view on tropical architecture through his
extensive research work for the IFT, which differed from the ‘great narratives’ of the modern
movement. He acknowledged and observed other ‘African modernist’ directions, such as Chinese
modernity in the building of the Tazara Railway.
However, African Modernism* goes well beyond imported modernisms from the Global North or
China. Pursuing the double aim of the project: Forms of Freedom. Legacies of African Modernism; to
“(...) shed light on Africa’s global architectural past, and enhancing our understanding of
contemporary Africa’s architectural and temporal palimpsest,” will ask for a broader perspective on
time and players.
As a teaser, a quick introduction to an early form of African Modernism, Royal African modern
architecture in relation to forms of freedom, will be offered.
* African Modernism here is understood as modernity in African architecture in terms of expression
of the (aspirations to) modern life in typology, technology, materials and aesthetics, and not as
exclusive product of the architecture of the Modern Movement from the Global North.
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Geissler, Paul Wenzel (Oslo)
Laboratory unbuilt: an architectural biography of postcolonial science in
East Africa
This paper follows the unbuilding of an African laboratory (1950s-1980s), and the biography of Dr W,
the Kenyan scientist working in it. It begins with an old research station in Tanzania where Dr W was
trained for 'Africanisation'. Later, as the famous station's first African director, he demolished the
laboratory to build a modernist multi-storey institute. It was never built, but Dr W took his modernist
project for a national laboratory back to Kenya, where he planned a science city, with laboratories,
housing and social infrastructure. Before construction began, Dr W was hospitalised with a
psychiatric disorder. After his release he established, with his wife and technician, a small
laboratory, first in a rented room, then in a semi-permanent building at home, and continued
experimenting with medicinal plants, until he died.
This is an architectural biography of loss: from the abandonment of a globally networked laboratory
built for Imperial eternity, to the disappearance of an ephemeral building surrounded by hopes for
an African science. A wooden signboard: 'Manyasi (trad.medicine) African Science Research
Foundation', emblazoned with the symbol of African socialism, kept under a stack of firewood,
remains as monument to the brief moment when a radically different African science was imagined,
before it was discredited as mere dream: unrealistic aspiration without material basis, misguided
refusal of 'universal' scientific excellence - or, as in this particular case, pathology
Herz, Manuel (Zürich / Basel)
The Project of a Nation
Herz will about the Hotel Ivoire, and the related project of the "African Riviera"
Abstract follows.
Lachenal, Guillaume (Paris)
Ruins of public health. Case studies on the political life of medical buildings
in Africa
I will present three African buildings, which I encountered in my fieldwork research as a historian of
medicine: the Pasteur Institute of Cameroon, conceived by Henri-Jean Calsat in the 1950’s, the
Medical Teaching Centre of Kinshasa, designed by Marcel Boulengier in the Belgian Congo, and the
medical complex of Ayos (Cameroon) built by French colonial doctors in the 1920’s and recently
rebuild by African Bank of Development.
I will briefly retrace the biographies of these buildings, which could be seen in many ways as
monuments of colonial and post-colonial public health, beginning with their various blueprints and
ending with their current states, as demolished, rehabilitated or deeply transformed scientifico5
medical infrastructures. Moving away from a commentary of their (too) fascinating modernist
aesthetics, my aim is to reflect on their history of ruination, destruction or renaissance to propose a
critical history of global health in Africa. Their architectural histories can help us understand how the
current (and unprecedented) wave of investing in health in Africa – defining the so-called “global
health era” – is articulated, beyond success-stories, with destruction, dispossesion and the
projection of speculative futures: with the actual ruination of public health in the African present.
Lagae, Johan (Ghent)
“Tout le Congo est un chantier”. The role and position of the Belgian
construction firm Blaton in shaping the architecture of promise in late
colonial and postcolonial Congolese/African cities
Ever since the first article on colonial architecture in Congo appeared in 1986, a substantial amount
of research has been conducted on the topic, scrutinizing late 19th century prefabricated metal
structures, the introduction of modernist ideas in design and planning since the 1920s, the
emergence of 1950s tropical modernism and more recently, investigations of “nation building”campaigns under Mobutu’s reign. Over the years, the perspective of scholarship has shifted from an
approach focusing on issues of style and form to studies of the “politics” of (post)colonial
architecture or the shaping of urban landscapes. While some scholars have started to look at the role
of players like missionary congregations or, for the period after 1960, development aid
organizations, most of the current research still puts the architect at the center of the investigation.
In this paper, I propose that much is to be gained by shifting the focus on the built production in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by putting its mode of production at the center of the analysis.
I will illustrate this by discussing the activities of the Belgian construction firm Blaton, which started
to operate in the DRC under the label Compagnie Congolaise de Construction (CCC) from the mid1940s onwards and remained active there until the mid-1970s. As one of Belgium’s major players on
the domain of building and infrastructure, Blaton rapidly succeeded in gaining significant
commissions from both the colonial authorities, private entrepreneurs and, after 1960, the political
elite of the DRC. I will also demonstrate how Blaton extended its activities to other African countries
in an effort to secure its position during the turbulent era in which Mobutu developed his policy of a
‘Recours à l’authenticité’. By discussing a number of particular projects constructed by CCC, this
paper thus seeks to highlight the role of a construction firm in shaping the architecture of promise
that emerged in the urban landscapes of Congolese/African cities during the late colonial and early
post-independence era.
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Livsey, Tim (London)
Reserved areas: some mixed legacies of modernist planning and statebuilding in Nigeria
The late colonial and early postcolonial years saw modernist buildings created across Nigeria for
parliaments, universities and other new institutions. This paper offers some preliminary thoughts on
the genealogy and legacy of these modernist spaces with reference to the European Reservation.
These areas on the edge of Nigerian cities, where residence was restricted to Europeans, were
established by British colonial officials from around 1900. Their low building density, gardens and
sports grounds distinguished the Reservations, forming a built environment with strongly racialised
associations.
In the years after World War II, the British sought to increase Nigerian involvement in government to
prepare for an eventual transfer of power. The new Nigerian civil servants lived side-by-side with
British officials on the Reservations, now renamed Government Reservations. The number of
Reservations increased during decolonisation to house the growing, Nigerianising civil service, and
new buildings for parliaments and universities were planned on layouts similar to the Reservations.
For radical critics of decolonisation, Nigerian elites’ occupation of these spaces showed how they
took on the qualities of the departing colonial rulers. Most famously, the musician Fela Kuti took
new Nigerian elite lifestyles to task. Yet the Reservations are still used, now known as Government
Reserved Areas or GRAs, constituting a highly problematic spatial and architectural legacy. It is
tempting to see the GRAs as mirroring the Nigerian state itself – in a detached, extractive
relationship with the rest of Nigerian society.
The paper concludes by offering some suggestions about the relationship between late-colonial
state building and ‘African Modernism’. Perhaps the challenge is to try to pinpoint how and why the
Reservation model has been appropriated in different times and places, asking why it has been
considered of continuing relevance. The Reservation offers huge potential for transnational study.
My new research seeks to engage with this potential by exploring spaces associated with
development across four West African countries, asking how conceptions of development were
formed through interactions between transnational dynamics and local agendas and contexts.
Makachia, Peter (Nairobi)
Modernism and housing in urban Africa
For most of Africa, modern architecture coincided with the advent of European colonization, and
urbanization - its settlement facet. Spatial concepts were thus defined using modernist values,
evidently developed and nurtured from without. The usage of space was thus always at crosspurposes with this imposed modernist style and functionality. The postcolonial state pursued
similar practices leading to an architecture, perennially in conflict with the users. The inevitable
appropriation of the modernist concepts led to a hybridity - modern vernacular - blending the
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traditional vernacular and imposed modernity in user –instanced transformations. These
transformations now typically define city neighbourhoods across Africa and particularly in Nairobi,
the Kenyan capital. Chided as inappropriate, these transformations however offer an opportunity to
revisit the methodology of architecture in order to retain custody of its stylistic product in reemancipated and hence reinvigorated societies. This liberation is new and has emerged outside of
the state political structures and is instead an affirmation of grassroots empowerment and devolved
socio-economic power that now defines the architectural process and product in Africa. The paper
explores modernist architecture as represented in urban housing. This choice is informed by the
conviction that the best measure of cultural ‘absorption’ or otherwise is through the usage,
exemplified best, in the architecture of domestic space. It uses historical and contemporary urban
housing strategies in Africa. Further, it focusses on aesthetic, morphological and space-use
outcomes through spontaneous actions by dwellers evidenced in housing and urban
transformations. It is concluded that individual actions, though well-premised, may deliver
outcomes that may compromise the social, economic and physical environment, indistinguishable
from the modernist failures elsewhere. The proposal is that social multi-lateral synergies offer the
least harmful approach to an architecture tailored for urban housing in Africa. The form and
structure of such community-driven entities are the bases of my recommendations.
Manton, John (Cambridge)
De-building leprosy control
Drawing on the language of exhibition design, and on metaphors invoked by the dismantling of the
spectacle in gallery settings, this paper considers the ironies of material persistence and the
melancholic afterlives of massive institutional mechanisms for leprosy control in Eastern Nigeria. It
interrogates the overwhelming, charismatic and yet eventually evanescent scientific and cultural
forms which haunt architectural remnants of this major colonial exercise in scientific research and
public health management. In doing so, it poses the question of how the heritage of colonial science
should be understood and managed as a Nigerian and global cultural good.
Mususa, Patience (Cape Town)
Re-texturing the modernist recreational landscape on the Zambian
Copperbelt
The towns on the Zambian Copperbelt, in what many describe as the golden era of the 1950s to the
1970s, had much to offer in terms of the residential lifestyle of those who stayed in the areas
administered by the region’s mining companies. Supported by revenues from copper and a
paternalistic welfare system, apart from decent subsidised housing, for recreation, mine employees
had the option of sports clubs, libraries, theatres, cinemas, and ballroom dancing facilities, which
were also open to their families. This period too consolidated architectonically the spatial order of
modernism. A long slow economic decline in the 1980’s and sharper downturn in the 1990’s, as
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copper prices tumbled, spelled the end of the welfare largesse of the Copperbelt mines. As social
realities changed, so too, did Copperbelt resident’s recreational activities. Grass sprouted in the
cracks of the asphalt tennis courts of the mine recreation area in Luanshya. Fields of maize were
planted here and there through the town. Anthills at the golf course were broken down to make
building bricks. The local cinema was converted into a church since few could afford cinema going.
The squash club was converted into a drinking-place. Remaining in their place, were the
archaeological fragments of a modernist vision of leisure. The paper describes the changing
character of these recreational landscapes and the re-texturing of social life around them.
Muthuma, Lydia (Nairobi)
Nairobi’s City Square: modern symbolic civic space?
Modernism, as a philosophy with various cultural manifestations, flowered as a consequence of the
social upheavals of the industrial revolution. It took place in Europe and North America beginning at
the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. Rebelling against the preceding Romantic movement,
rebelling against the realistic expressions of art and ornate baroque architecture, modernism was
just that –a revolt. And it was a revolt, not just against traditional forms of art, but also against
traditional moral norms. It was an embrace of the overwhelming promise of the new technological
advances.
Africa had not lived through European Romanticism, or the Enlightenment, or the Christian religious
order and structure. Africa was governed by different social norms and beliefs. And it was in the
midst of these separate world views, that European civilization burst onto the African continent. Not
having experienced traditional European life, Africa could not rebel against it –the essence of
modernism. Instead African modernism has meant ‘westernisation’, embracing European culture,
beliefs, institutions and even art forms. It is perceptibly different. A discourse about modernism and
the African landscape carries its own challenges.
However, the African city is an important site and symbol of social change. Since the spatial symbols
with which we choose to identify ourselves are important in expressing the values we hold,
examining Nairobi’s official symbolic space – its City Square– may help make meaning of this city.
And although city denotes a physical location, a geographical circumscription, this location is
qualified by the people who occupy it and by the relations they build among themselves. Social
constructs are woven out of (and into) spatial references: living cultures are nurtured and developed
with reference to specific space.
What culture is embodied in the forms and figures that comprise Nairobi City Square? The type and
style of its colonial architecture makes it a symbolic inscription of Pax Britannica while its post
colonial addition is equally expressive of indigenous political freedom. The law courts proclaim the
former; the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) reiterates the latter. It is as a product
of political performance that City Square is examined.
The task of the artist is to provide forms that help make sense of society, forms artistic or cultural.
City Square is therefore viewed as a symbolic expression of social reality which reflects and also
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influences the social, cultural and personality systems of which it is a part. Art history critiques,
though directed at material artefacts – in this case the built environment– are concerned with what
any political and economic arrangement does to the spirit and values governing human
relationships. The aim is to illumine the animating spirit behind this iconic image – Nairobi’s City
Square.
Prince, Ruth (Oslo)
Modernist dreams: hospital architectures, Soviet aid, and medical
modernisms in cold-war Kenya
In 1968 a new hospital was built in the city of Kisumu in Kenya. It was designed by Soviet architects
and funded by the USSR. The hospital was to be Kenya’s largest. It was to serve the new nation, a
citizenry whose intimate experience of racial exclusion under British colonialism made them eager
for a new kind of medical modernity. For the Kenyan bureaucrats involved in its planning, the
hospital – an imposing three story, modernist structure -promised to be the “most modern and upto-date” in East Africa.
Drawing on Kenyan archives, this paper attends to the hopes and dreams of progress that
surrounded the project, situated as it was amidst cold-war tensions as well as anticipations of
solidarity and inclusion. The letters, meeting minutes and reports exchanged between the medical
services, urban planning, housing, and lands departments trace out the lines of a new nation that
sought to provision the public. I follow this paper trail, and place of the hospital as a central symbol
of progress.
Still known by its nickname, ‘Russia’, today the solid modernist building continues to offer public
medical care. After decades of resource drain, however, only those who cannot afford the exclusive
private hospitals catering to the city’s growing middle class use it. I bring the anticipations of
modernity that saturated the planning of ‘Russia’ in 1968 in dialogue with the very different
expectations and dreams of medical progress that the new private hospitals engender in the city
today.
Raedt, Kim De (Ghent)
Architectures of education in the era of development. Towards an
alternative historiography of architecture in post-independence Africa
In my contribution, I propose to present the research that I have conducted in the framework of my
PhD for the past four years. This research specifically concentrates on the architectures of education
that have been financed through multilateral development aid agencies in Africa in the ‘era of
development’, more precisely the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, the architecture production in
Africa has increasingly received scholarly attention thanks to the ‘discovery’ of modernist buildings
on the continent, as well as the unlocking of the archives of professionals that operated in Africa in
the postcolonial period.
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By taking the financers of architecture as a point of departure in my own research, I was capable of
bringing into the limelight a considerable number of designers that have remained ‘off radar’ to this
date even though they had a significant impact on the built environment and urban landscapes in
Africa in this era. Moreover, it has allowed me to broaden the scope of the study of architecture in
Africa beyond flagship modernist complexes to include less prestigious but equally fascinating
efficiency based designs for technical and vocations schools, industrialized and pre-fabricated
primary schools, or design prototypes for innovative teaching. I contend that the different
approaches to school design and building were a direct exponent of the logics underlying the donor
agencies, ranging from their political and economic interests, to their background, internal structure
and operational mechanisms.
Smith, Constance (London)
Present Pasts, Uncertain Futures: Temporality and Materiality in a Nairobi
Housing Estate
Although contemporary Nairobi is undergoing rapid infrastructural and architectural change, the
underlying skeleton of Kenya’s capital is colonial. Glossy visions of Nairobi as a global city of the
future often sit uncomfortably with the architectural legacies of this history. For the residents of the
colonial-era Eastlands estates, the past is very much present, as they continue to live in a material
environment originally designed to contain colonial subjects. Whilst the legacies of this history can
be problematic, these estates have nevertheless become home, reinscribed and reconfigured by
residents over several generations.
But as the future regeneration of this area of Nairobi looms ever larger, the pasts of these
communities have come into sharp focus. Vision 2030 seems to have no place for these historic
neighbourhoods, emphasizing instead the model of a networked, ahistorical, world city. My PhD
research focuses on Kaloleni, one of the Eastlands estates, as residents negotiate their lives in
relation to these ambiguous histories and uncertain futures. Drawing on theories of temporality and
materiality, I explore how the material world of colonial urban planning intersects with residents’
contemporary concerns and desires to generate practices of relating to the past and the future.
Stanek, Łukasz (Manchester)
Zbigniew Dmochowski and the Politics of Architectural Drawing in PostIndependence Nigeria
The Introduction to Traditional Nigerian Architecture was considered by its author, the Polish
architect and architectural historian Zbigniew Dmochowski, to be a contribution to the nationbuilding process in post-independence Nigeria and a starting point for a “modern school of Nigerian
architecture”. Published posthumously in London in 1990, this three-volume book resulted from a
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comprehensive survey Dmochowski carried out in Nigeria, first as an employee of the colonial
Department of Antiquities in the 1950s, and later as the head of the Institute for Tropical
Architectural Research at the Gdańsk Polytechnic (1965-82).
As an “expert” from socialist Poland travelling to West Africa during the Cold War, the work of
Dmochowski was legitimized both by Polish state-led urbanization after the Second World War, and
by a longer tradition of architectural engagement into nation-building processes in Central Europe.
The latter reverberated in his survey of Nigeria’s architecture, which appropriated and developed
drawing and mapping techniques that he had employed in his 1930s surveys of traditional wooden
buildings in eastern Poland. This specific tradition of drawing, resulting in Dmochowski’s synthetic
axonometries, contrasted with the drawings of the British, late colonial “tropical architecture” in
West Africa, which privileged the analytical section. By focusing on the production process of
Dmochowski’s axonometries, this paper will argue that this difference reflected a distinct project of
Nigerian architectural culture which came to the fore in the designs of national museums initiated
by him at the colonial Department of Antiquities, and developed after independence by his
collaborators, both Nigerian and Polish (museums in Benin, Esie, and Kaduna).
Svendsen, Sven Erik (Oslo)
Technology Transfer as Nation Building
The point of departure of this contribution* is that architecture represents an obscure dimension in
Norwegian development cooperation. Architecture in this case is understood as a potential medium
for conveying features and values in a nation building process, as this was said to be the overall
political aim alongside modernization of the cooperation with newly independent colonies.
Outline
Resources ending up in buildings – in one way or another – were considerable as part of this
cooperation in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, and for many years probably added up to as much as one third
of the total program- and project-support. In addition the authorities (Norad) acted in many cases as
a client without taking formal responsibility. Despite this it is difficult to find:
 strategies with regard to architecture,
 environmental or architectural targets for the operations,
 adequate professional monitoring of programs and projects,
 relevant design guidelines related to actual context and support to
 professionals in the field, and
 few evaluations – hardly any - of design and building performance.
This is in contrast to procedures in other sectors like heath and education.
The approach – as I see it - was purely utilitarian from the donor side, and probably the
understanding of the usefulness and importance of the architectural dimension and qualities in a
nation building process was greater at the receiving end.
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Background
 Pioneer modernist example (Ernst May in Eastern Africa)
 Post-war British colonial export (ex: University campus development)
 Postcolonial import (lack of local professional capacity).
 Technology transfer case: The Kenyatta Centre
Conclusion
Architecture as part of development cooperation was in the 60’ and 70’ mainly seen as technology
transfer – at least from the donor side. If architectural merits as part of this cooperation in any way
enhanced freedom and contributed to democracy and nation building, my proposition is that it was
partly incidental and partly due to the professional effort of individual architects participating in the
programs as technical experts.
*It is not research based, but merely reflections after visits to Eastern Africa over the past years.
Yacobi, Haim (Negev)
From Terra Nullius to Terra Incognita and Back: Israeli planning,
development and architecture in Africa
My paper will focuses on Israeli involvement in Africa throughout 1956-1973. Moving back and forth
between Israel and Africa, I intend to analyze the way the Israeli settlement project was duplicated
in Africa, which served as a verification laboratory for the colonial spatial practice of population
control and space shaping. Specifically I suggest that the expertise of Israeli architects who worked
in Africa during the 1960s-70s stemmed from wider colonial knowledge networks, and at the same
time served as an additional tool for the imagination of African geography as well as the
solidification of moral justifications for intervening in African space. This presentation will determine
the difference between the bulk of writings about European colonial architecture, planning and
development in Africa and the Israeli case.
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