The more portable version of the book comes at an important time for Adjaye—he was the lead designer for the National Museum of African American History and Culture that recently opened on the National Mall and was knighted by the Queen of England in December—and for Africa, as Adjaye notes that for architects today, the rapid expansion of the cities on the continent offer tremendous opportunity.

As Adjaye documented these buildings over time, he found most surprising that, though some of modernism’s great experiments were played out in the biggest cities on the continent, many of the citizens of these cities co-opted the universal form of construction that modernity presents and made it something local.

“In cities such as Abuja, Accra, Kinshasa and Maputo, I saw ways of constructing architecture that combine the science and technology of our age with their own identity and cultural nuances,” Adjaye says. “Working on the book taught me that you can’t understand Africa until you realize that it has six distinct climatic zones. Each one is very precise and extreme—each place, of course, has its own particularities, but culture grows from climate.”

This is why Adjaye organized his book into six terrain sections, as the diversity between each place lends itself to unique design needs. “If you look at the metropolitan centers and capitals as just individual phenomena—what I call population density and GDP—you miss how to understand the nuances between them,” Adjaye says. Over the course of several years as he was collecting information for the book, Adjaye realized the best way to understand the differences was to understand the geography.

....