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Manuel Herz , Ingrid Schröder , Hans Focketyn and Julia Jamrozik (eds.), African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence. Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia . Zurich : Park Books , 2015. 640pp. Photographs by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster.
Review of Books
Since the 1950s, much ink has been spilt praising or criticizing modernist architecture. The ink, however, has settled unevenly. We have learnt broadly about Brasília and Chandigarh, about Mies and Le Corbusier, but many other cases and contexts - sometimes spreading over entire continents - remain underexplored. Park Books has already published a number of compelling volumes on modernist architecture, but this, on African modernism, is groundbreaking. Not only has it collated and analysed (if superficially) a hundred architectural projects, stretching from Senegal, through Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, to Kenya and Zambia, but it also succeeds in highlighting some distinct features that each of these five countries possessed (for example, a Senghor-inspired 'asymmetrical parallelism' in Senegal versus a more strict application of theoretical principles of Tropical Modernism in Ghana). The authors emphasize that they do not aim at historicizing the transfer of western technology and ideas to African soil. Rather, they aspire to demonstrate 'how the countries of sub-Saharan Africa adopted a mode of architectural expression - Modernism - and made it partially their own' (p. 14). The book is divided into five chapters, each supported by an introductory note, a...