How do we, architectural historians predominantly based in Western Europe, write architectural histories of buildings and places in other parts of the world? Encompassing diverse viewpoints and disciplinary domains, the edited volume African Modernisms and Its Afterlives, published in 2022, makes a subtle yet compelling argument for a more inclusive architectural history.

At first glance, the book appears to be yet another collection of essays, broadly speaking, dealing with discrete case studies of modernist architecture and its lived heritage in postindependence Africa. The book has been visibly shaped by the northern European academic origins of its editors, Nina Berre, an architect at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Paul Wenzer Geissler, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, and Johan Lagae, a historian of 20th-century architecture at Ghent University. Most essays focus on the activities of either Nordic or Belgian actors, primarily in the former British East Africa and the territories of the Belgian Congo.

As the volume editors point out, the book is a follow-up publication of the Forms of Freedom: Legacies of African Modernism exhibition cocurated for the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2014 by Berre, exhibition architect Gro Bonesmo, and project manager Nina Frang Høyum.¹ The exhibition showcased projects by Nordic architects constructed in East Africa during the 1960s and 1970s with the support of Nordic aid programs that had never been examined. Featuring lavish photographic spreads by Norwegian artist Mette Tronvoll and Dutch photographer Iwan Baan, who are famous for documenting the work of starchitects, the volume resembles a 2015 take on the same subject, African Modernism: Architecture of Independence edited by Manuel Herz.² However, unlike its predecessor, African Modernism and Its Afterlives ventures beyond signature architecture and makes everyday African modernism its focus.

Seventeen essays address various building typologies from ecological research stations, swimming pools, and breweries to spectacular hotels, hospitals, and government buildings. The essays also consider the various actors involved in the buildings’ construction and their afterlives from individual architects, large construction companies, work ministries, and global bureaucracies of aid to residents and nonhuman actors such as termites, fish, and plants. The geographical focus is on the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia—but a few essays concentrate on the West African nations of Liberia, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast and the central African country of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a distribution that is tied to the former political interests of the European countries with which the volume’s contributors are academically affiliated. While the geographic focus of one’s research is often guided by simple access to materials, archives, and languages, the authors leave this inherited political dynamic entirely unexamined.

Methodologically, the volume builds on three main approaches to writing transnational architectural histories. The first approach aims to expand the modernist canon by focusing on the agency of lesser-known architects. Nina Berre’s account of the Kenyan legacy of the Norwegian architect Karl Henrik Nøstvik, Antoni Folkers’ research on the “bread-and-butter” tropical architecture of the German-born Georg Lippsmeier, and Iga Perzyna’s investigation of two landmark buildings in Liberia fall into this category. The second strain of research ventures beyond the interest in a single figure and explores the “politics of design,” an idea presented by the editors in the introduction that is referenced throughout the volume, tracing histories of financing, construction, ownership, and utilisation of modernist buildings.³ This approach is best exemplified by Ruth Prince’s meticulous investigation of the political bureaucracies behind the construction of the Soviet hospital in Kenya and Haim Yacobi’s exploration of the connection between Israeli foreign politics and the activities of Israeli construction companies in the Ivory Coast. In a more methodological essay, Johan Lagae and Robby Fivez discuss further implications of this approach by highlighting the role of new evidence they uncovered in the archives of Belgian-Congolese construction company Compagnie congolaise de constructions.

Finally, the third category explores the “social lives” of modernist buildings through the lens of social anthropology and ethnography. Among this group is Guillaume Lachenal‘s investigation into the overlapping historical and social trajectories of two medical buildings in Kinshasa, Patience Mususa’s poetic consideration of the social appropriation of recreational landscapes in the industrial Zambian Copperbelt, and Paul Wenzel Geissler’s account of a Tanzanian medical research station. Here, however, the methodological approach, suggested by the editors, finds itself slightly at odds with the volume’s structure. The book is divided into two parts, the first described as providing architectural histories of African modernism and the second represented as offering social histories of its afterlives. Yet despite the well-argued reasons for this division, one cannot help but notice that the accounts of lived experience inevitably creep into the pages on the other side of the book dealing with modernist architectural histories and vice versa.

Pairings emerge across the book that the editors could have capitalized on to encourage dialogue among the pieces and further the volume’s goal of offering cross-disciplinary architectural histories. For example, Berre and Kenyan architect Tom Anyamba examine the same Norse green housing development in Nairobi from different perspectives: the former focusing on the architect’s intention, while the latter explores the lived reality of these buildings today. However, due to the editorial choice to split two essays into two different sections of the book, they remain disjointed, even though the two distinct perspectives could have set a precedent for a more stereoscopic narrative in architectural history. Other essays that focus on the same geographies offer similar opportunities for further dialogue. For example, Kim De Raedt’s discussions of secondary schools in Zambia’s Copperbelt could have been combined with Mususa’s investigation of the Copperbelt leisure infrastructure and its afterlives. In an alternative editorial decision, it could have been possible to combine essays by scholars from different disciplines focusing on the same building typology or location, offering further opportunities for dialogue. Despite the interdisciplinary dialogue offered in the volume’s conceptual framing, the book shies away from establishing concrete conversations across geographic and methodological overlaps, leaving the links between the essays mostly implicit.

The epilogue of the book, framed as a dialogue between long-time friends and collaborators Lagae and Geissler, provides a crucial framing for the book’s central argument. The conversation highlights disciplinary shortcomings and proposes new avenues for collaboration. For example, as Lagae notes, architects and planners have long been understood as providing much-vaunted “objective” expertise and as having less interest in the on-the-ground realities of buildings. Architectural histories, he suggests, could benefit from adopting the tools of ethnographic and anthropological research, while social sciences could profit from developing a more informed historical understanding of the “messiness” of any design and construction venture, of getting a building on site.⁴

In practice, such interdisciplinary dialogues would require new work to be commissioned according to such an editorial vision, and perhaps it is too much to ask from a publication intended primarily as a follow-up to the exhibition. Without fully exploring the opportunities offered by cross-pollination of interdisciplinary perspectives across the essays, the volume nevertheless provides a valuable blueprint for further studies that seek to construct more embodied and polyvocal architectural narratives. What if the history of the same building was described from the perspectives of one, two, or three disciplines? Could a contractor’s view as expressed by a design historian be mapped onto contemporary lived experiences of a given project as recorded by an ethnographer? Could the boundary be pushed even further by including the perspectives of nonhuman actors and accounting for the geographic and socio-political positionalities of the researchers?

Over the course of the volume, the conventional myths of formal inspiration from “organic motifs” associated with the perspective of architects become less convincing in comparison with the detailed descriptions of the vibrant—and at times brutal—lived reality of these buildings. Researchers who build their stories on messy bureaucratic archives and ethnographic interviews or connect the impositions of literary imaginaries with everyday buildings successfully bring the background to the foreground and thereby transcend the constraining figure-ground relationship of traditional architectural history.

The book then serves as a great “starter pack” for scholars venturing into the histories of African modernism, especially those interested in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia. It provides valuable case studies and touches on various topics including aspects of temporality and time; maintenance, preservation, and heritage; projects of modernity and modernisation; and projections of the future onto the past. Each essay is well situated within the existing literature and is accompanied by a generous reading list. However, even the literature references betray one of the volume’s shortcomings: its long production time. Conceived in 2014, when architectural scholars were just beginning to show an interested in “other” modernisms, the volume did not end up being published until 2022, after the discipline had already gone through several generational reckonings and developed more nuanced perspectives informed by new sources and research stemming from scholars in the global South.

African Modernism and Its Afterlives thus lacks the combative criticality towards its positionality, geographies, and protagonists that characterizes more recent transnational architectural histories that challenge canonical narratives. The volume’s aftereffect, however, is more subtle; it plants the seed of the idea of expanding the conventional field of vision and offering more stereoscopic histories of buildings. Indeed, African Modernism and its Afterlives lives up to its opening promise—to approach African modernism with an open gaze. In doing so, it sets a precedent for a new, more polyvocal type of architectural history that is defined by collaborations rather than divisions and that is attuned to a multitude of voices and viewpoints.

Notes

1. The exhibition at the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 was curated by Nina Berre, with co-curator and exhibition architect Gro Bonesmo and project manager Nina Frang Høyum. [^{^}]
2. Manuel Herz, African Modernism: Architecture of Independence (Zurich: Park Books, 2015). [^{^}]
3. For ‘politics of design’, see references throughout the volume, particularly Paul Wenzel Geissler, Johan Lagae, and Nina Berre, “Introduction,” 12. [^{^}]
4. See Paul Wenzler Geissler and Johan Lagae, ‘Epilogue. Buildings and People’, 336–37. [^{^}]