As many sub-Saharan African countries gained independence throughout the 1960s, they experienced a burst of experimental architecture, marking a severance from once Colonial pasts. A new show chronicling those understudied architectural examples opens Friday via the Graham Foundation.
Based on a book by architect Manuel Herz, "Architecture of Independence: African Modernism" features nearly 80 buildings in commissioned photographs as well as archival material chronicling nation-building efforts in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and Zambia.
The buildings themselves were often products of large state-sponsored initiatives and included new parliament buildings, stadiums, universities, central banks, convention centers and other major public buildings and housing projects designed to elevate the new nation-states’ presence on the global stage.
While numerous local designers, planners, and builders participated in that period of building, very few local architects were commissioned for these projects until the later half of the 1970s. Those include Senegalese architects Cheikh N’Gom and Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, who designed the Central Bank of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (1975–90) in Dakar in the mid- to late 1970s. In most cases, however, the architects came from countries such as Poland, Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, Israel and even the former Colonial powers.