African Modernism and Its Afterlives

Description

This edited collection of essays and image-driven pieces by anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, and historians examines the legacies of African architecture from around the time of independence through examples from different countries. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, and careful observation of buildings, remains, and people, the case studies seek to connect the colonial and postcolonial origins of modernist architecture, the historical processes they underwent, and their present use and habitation, adaptation, and decay.

Deriving from a workshop in connection with the 2015 exhibition “Forms of Freedom” at the National Museum in Oslo and the Venice Biennale, the volume combines recent developments in architectural history, the anthropology of modernism and of material culture, and contemporary archaeology to move beyond the admiration or preservation of prized architectural “heritage” and to complicate the contemplation—or critique—of “ruins” and “ruination.”

List of Figures

Introduction    Recognizing African Modernisms

Paul Wenzel Geissler, Johan Lagae and Nina Berre

PART 1:    AFRICAN MODERNISM

1. Karl Henrik Nøstvik: Remnants of Nordic Aid

Nina Berre

2. Africa’s ‘Lone Star’: Building ‘New Liberia’ in the Context of Post-war Africa

Iga Perzyna

3. Countryside Reconstruction in Postcolonial Africa: The Ujamaa Experience

Karl Otto Ellefsen

4. Technocratic Colonial Housing Policies and Reductive Modernism in Eastlands, Nairobi

Peter Makachia

5. Transnational Exchanges in Postcolonial Zambia: School Buildings at the Intersection of Architectural, Political and Economic Globalization

Kim De Raedt

6. Forms of Freedom: Soviet Gifts in Postcolonial Kenya

Ruth Prince

7. Georg Lippsmeier and His Tropenbau: Salesmanship and Pragmatic Modernism

Antoni Folkers

8. Israel/Africa: The Laboratories of (Post)colonial Modernity

Haim Yacobi

9. ‘Tout le Congo est un Chantier’: Notes on the Archive of a (Post)colonial Construction Firm

Johan Lagae and Robby Fivez

INTERLUDE

            Remnants of Nordic Aid in Africa: The Zambia World Bank Educational Projects

Mette Tronvoll

            Remnants of Nordic Aid in Africa: The KICC & Fishery Station by Architect Karl Henrik Nøstvik in Africa

Iwan Baan

PART 2:    AFTERLIVES

10. ‘Kenya Grew from Here’: Property and History in a Nairobi Housing Estate

Constance Smith

11. Grave Reservations: Nigerian Literature and ‘European Reservations’ during Decolonization

Tim Livsey

12. The Legacy of Nordic Expertise in Postcolonial Housing Schemes in Nairobi

Tom J. C. Anyamba

13. Privatization and the Reshaping of the Recreational Landscape of the Industrial Zambian Copperbelt

Patience Mususa

14. The Ruins of Turkana: An Archaeology of Failed Development in Northern Kenya

Samuel F. Derbyshire and Lucas Lowasa

15. The Brand New Ruins of Public Health: A Tale of Two Buildings, Kinshasa, DRC

Guillaume Lachenal

16. ‘Is This Anthropology Really a Modern Subject?’: Kenyan Students’ Experience of Nairobi’s (Changing) University Architectures

Ida Skjong Grøvik

17. Laboratory Unbuilt: An Architectural Biography of Postcolonial Science in East Africa

Paul Wenzel Geissler

Epilogue          Buildings and People: Interdisciplinarity, Juxtaposition and Experimentation

Paul Wenzel Geissler and Johan Lagae

Notes on Contributors

 

Sujets

• Buildings
• landscape
• HISTORY
• África
• General officer
• Region
• Building
• Modernism
• Anthropology
• Regional
• Central
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Africa
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789384055
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 28 Mo

Extrait

African Modernism and its Afterlives
African Modernism and its Afterlives
Edited by Nina Berre, Paul Wenzel Geissler and Johan Lagae
First published in the UK in 2022 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2022 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Signed texts, their authors
Rest of the book, the editors
Copyright 2022 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: Newgen
Cover and layout designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover photo: The librarian s hand showing drawings of a new lab building at
Amani, Tanzania, designed in 1975 by Designs and Services Ltd, Dar es Salaam
(Video still by Wenzel Geissler).
Production manager: Jessica Lovett
Typesetter: Aleksandra Szumlas
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-403-1
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-404-8
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-405-5
Printed and bound by Shortrun
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website.
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Johan Lagae and Nina Berre
PART 1: AFRICAN MODERNISM
1. Karl Henrik N stvik: Remnants of Nordic Aid
Nina Berre
2. Africa s Lone Star : Building New Liberia in the Context of Post-war Africa
Iga Perzyna
3. Countryside Reconstruction in Postcolonial Africa: The Ujamaa Experience,
Karl Otto Ellefsen
4. Technocratic Colonial Housing Policies and Reductive Modernism in Eastlands, Nairobi
Peter Makachia
5. Transnational Exchanges in Postcolonial Zambia: School Buildings at the Intersection of Architectural, Political and Economic Globalization
Kim De Raedt
6. Forms of Freedom: Soviet Gifts in Postcolonial Kenya
Ruth Prince
7. Georg Lippsmeier and His Tropenbau : Salesmanship and Pragmatic Modernism
Antoni Folkers
8. Israel/Africa: The Laboratories of (Post)colonial Modernity
Haim Yacobi
9. Tout le Congo est un Chantier : Notes on the Archive of a (Post)colonial Construction Firm
Johan Lagae and Robby Fivez
INTERLUDE
Remnants of Nordic Aid: Zambia World Bank Education Project
Mette Tronvoll
Remnants of Nordic Aid: Kenyatta International Conference Centre and Kalokol Freezing and Cold Storage Plant
Iwan Baan
PART 2: AFTERLIVES
10. Kenya Grew from Here : Property and History in a Nairobi Housing Estate
Constance Smith
11. Grave Reservations: Nigerian Literature and European Reservations during Decolonization
Tim Livsey
12. The Legacy of Nordic Expertise in Postcolonial Housing Schemes in Nairobi
Tom J. C. Anyamba
13. Privatization and the Reshaping of the Recreational Landscape of the Industrial Zambian Copperbelt
Patience Mususa
14. The Ruins of Turkana: An Archaeology of Failed Development in Northern Kenya
Samuel F. Derbyshire and Lucas Lowasa
15. The Brand New Ruins of Public Health: A Tale of Two Buildings, Kinshasa, DRC
Guillaume Lachenal
16. Is This Anthropology Really a Modern Subject? : Kenyan Students Experience of Nairobi s (Changing) University Architectures
Ida Skjong Gr vik
17. Laboratory Unbuilt: An Architectural Biography of Postcolonial Science in East Africa
Paul Wenzel Geissler
Epilogue: Buildings and People: Interdisciplinarity, Juxtaposition and Experimentation
Paul Wenzel Geissler and Johan Lagae
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank all participants to the workshop in Oslo in 2015, from which this book originated (and not all of whom finally contributed to the book), as well as all of those individuals and institutions who gave support, financial or otherwise, for the workshop, in particular project leader Nina Frang H yum and the team at The National Museum - Architecture, and the following institutions: National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo; Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo; Oslo School of Architecture and Design; and Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University. Both workshop and book project were moreover supported by the following research projects: ESRC/ORA project Memorials and remains of medical science in Africa (ES/I014535/2) - University of Cambridge, UK; FWO-project Re-assessing Congo s architectural history through a construction history approach (G053215N) and FWO-project Urban landscapes of colonial/postcolonial health care. (G045015N)- Ghent University. Editorial work on the book furthermore benefitted from a fellowship of Johan Lagae at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France), with the financial support of the French State, programme Investissements d avenir managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+).
The editors thank all authors for their contributions and patience, the two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on the manuscript, and above all the team at Intellect Publishers, notably Jessica Lovett and Aleksandra Szumlas, who accompanied us along the way in this project with great professionalism and skill.
Introduction
Recognizing African Modernisms
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Johan Lagae and Nina Berre
Remains of modernism
Travelling around twenty-first-century African landscapes, one comes across modernist buildings: sometimes radical in their formal language, either as adaptations from classic continental European modernism or in experimenting with African sculptural elements translated into brutalist concrete; at other times mundane and trivial - what one, at the time of their construction would have described as ugly, or more likely not have spoken about at all (Hoffmann 2017). Most of these buildings are found in cities, but also - as some of the examples below will show - dotted across savannah and rainforest. They are more or less derelict today, showing marks of time - of human use and reuse, aspiration and failure, non-human intrusions, moss, insects and ingrown tropical vegetation, or the effects of civil war and violence - which contradict the imaginary permanence of concrete as their preferred building material, as well as the futurity of modernist forms, such as the International Style .
These buildings - government offices, railway termini, airports, schools and universities - and to some extent larger urban plans and unrealized architectural projects, have recently received, sometimes renewed, recognition in scholarship and arts. They are a source of intrigue, not only for the traveller from afar, but also for the people living around and with them, most of whom were born long after the mid-twentieth-century modern moment, between the 1940s and 1970s, when these buildings were conceived of, built and put to use. They are recognizable to Africans and non-Africans at this point in time, partly as a function of figure-background relations. Their usually well-planned and distinct shapes stick out from the backdrop of progressively informalized urban landscapes, and stand in contrast to the fast-built, disposable, sometimes half-heartedly postmodern architectures of neo-liberalism (Spencer 2016) - gated communities, shopping enclaves, conspicuous office-towers, with little connection to urban texture, indeed often intentionally insulated from it - that overgrow, seemingly without a larger plan, the older urban structures of the postcolonial city (Boeck 2011), and that often remain half built ruins that never attain completion, or even the spectre of durability (Tousignant 2016).
But these edifices also are striking on account of their distinct language of expectation and predictability that they imply, the will to create an ordered social space, which seems alien, even exotic, from the vantage point of the African, and increasingly the global present (Uduku 2006). While a visitor to an African capital city in 1970, or indeed an urban dweller and citizen of a young African nation, would either have taken these buildings for granted or admired them as expressions of the emerging universalist future, they now stand as intriguing remains of a past that, as noted above, is beyond the experiential horizon of most living Africans, as well as that of current international graduate students of architecture, history or anthropology. Like equivalent modernist buildings in other parts of the world - notably in the former socialist countries - these are not only traces of the past, or, to be precise, of past futures (Geissler and Lachenal 2016), of long-lost assumptions about progress and, in particular, as viewed and proclaimed by contemporaries, modernization, welfare, nation-building and development, but also, as Schwenkel states, of a long-lost predictability and durability that stands in stark contrast to the current experience of precarity (Schwenkel 2013).
The archaeology of modern Africa
Such buildings - and related urban forms, as well as infrastructures - can be approached in at least three different archetypical ways, depending on one s disciplinary angle and personal inclination, each commencing with different questions. To an architect, or a classic Vitruvian architectural historian, the first questions would be about the architect, the author and about the building as work; from there arise further questions about formal language, meaning and intention, aesthetics, the historical origins and references made by the building as well as possibly the building s relationship to landscape and context. This approach fully appreciates the singularity of the building and is for that reason particularly suitable for spectacular, authored architecture and p