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African Perspectives Casablanca Conference

African Architectural Education Roundtable SessionDavid Rifkind, Florida International University

African Perspectives Casablanca Conference

African Architectural Education Roundtable Session

moderated by Ola Uduku and Ana Tostoes

Saturday, 5 November 2011

David Rifkind, Florida International University

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El Anatsui, untitled work.

Africa plays a major role in my teaching. Yet it is not primarily as a source ofmaterial to augment the canon of architectural history. …

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En route to Lalibela

Rather, my experiences with Africa, as traveller and as academic, havechallenged me to re-examine the presumptions underlying my teaching andhave simultaneously charged my work with greater urgency. Africa, in otherwords, has both compelled me to spend more time reflecting and move muchfaster.

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Tunis

I write this from my position teaching architectural history and theory in anAmerican university. My concern is global, and my focus is on modernity asunderstood through the built environment. The problem for me is not somuch the limited body of buildings and landscapes we study – the canon – butrather the tool kit of analytical tools we help students develop in order tounderstand the world around them in profound ways, and to impact thatworld positively through thoughtful architectural practice. This educationhinges on a student’s ability to understand the transformation of our worldthroughout the modern era, and architecture’s role in effecting those changes.My concerns are both historiographic and prospective, as I try to instil abetter understanding of historical phenomena on their own terms and a senseof the ethical imperatives facing our field and the necessity of realizing themthrough practice.

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Jimma

The experience of architecture and urbanism in Africa challenges a number ofhistoriographic assumptions associated with modernism in the West. Theuniversality of Enlightenment values, the essentialist conception of culturalidentity and the utopian notion of progress are difficult to sustain whenconfronted by the complexity and diversity of environments across thecontinent. Contemporary development, particularly in African cities, lays baremany of the internal contradictions within the neo-liberal system that manyWestern architects have embraced with uncritical euphoria, while materialculture in African metropolises demonstrates the complexity of culturalidentity in a world marked by migration, travel and media (both broadcast andsocial). The experience of Africa requires rethinking the way we framediscussions of the built environment.

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Why is history so important here? One remarkable feature of modernarchitecture in the first half of the twentieth century was the importance ofdiscourse in shaping practice. Discourse – the web of publications,exhibitions, lectures and competitions through which the discipline redefinedits roles – provided the polemical energy that propelled Europeanmodernism. Historians figured prominently in these debates. NikolausPevsner, Emil Kaufmann, Sigfried Giedion and Alberto Sartoris all usedpartisan historical chronicles to make the case for specific tendencies withinmodernism, thus affecting changes to the discipline by setting the very termswith which architects approached the built environment. …

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Manfredo Tafuri used the term operative criticism to describe this tendencyto guide design practices through polemical or partial historical accounts, andit sets into sharp relief the ethical responsibility of the historian in relation tothe present and the future. While I don’t see my research or teaching in suchinstrumental terms, I am nonetheless cognizant that our work as historiansand teachers of history will also have purchase on the future. We cannotshape the past without shaping the future.

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Kumasi

The concept of multiple modernities, as defined by Charles Taylor and others,has been particularly useful in challenging the mythic homogeneity of the termmodernity. Taylor criticizes the idea that the values and aspirations thatemerged during the Enlightenment are universally applicable, and thatsocieties undergo the same processes of modernization. The case for multiplemodernities can be made in the experience of African metropolises, whereurbanization does not always proceed apace with industrialization,secularization and democratization. The diversity of urban life across thecontinent poses a distinct challenge to another Western misconception, theessentialist idea of cultural identity representing a native genius tied to placeand demonstrating an unchanging, ahistorical essence. …

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Harar

Arjun Appadurai’s work is particularly important in this regard, as he hasdiagnosed the global imaginary emerging from societies marked by large-scalemovement and global communication. Finally, an analysis of the designdisciplines’ participation in the processes of colonial administrationthroughout Africa challenges the utopian notion of progress that provided theethical foundation for much of modernism, especially urban design. In eachcase, the study of Africa’s many modernities helps design students understandthe pluralism inherent within modernism.

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Alexandria

For those of us who write and teach history – whether or not the subject isAfrica – the experience of African cities instils a suspicion of overarching andtotalizing narratives. The status the Renaissance once enjoyed in thehistoriography of western architecture, for example, no longer seems tenable.This is a good thing. Instead, we need to develop methodological concernsspecific to locations, cultures and programs. …

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Accra

We need to extend our studies beyond the art historical convention ofpatronage in order to better understand the complex question of agency inthe transformation of the built environment. And we have to allow theanalytical tools with which we examine the built environment to emerge fromthe subject of study, rather than forcing pre-existing theoretical concernsonto African subjects.

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Axum

This last point is as valid, and vital, for designers as it is for historians. AsAbdouMaliq Simone has argued, Africa is full of answers, not just problems.We need to impress on our students the importance of observing andlistening, in order to help identify the myriad solutions to problems already inpractice across the continent. …

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Joe Osae-Addo, the architect’s house, Accra

We need to teach our students that while solutions are often context-specifc,methods and attitudes are often broadly applicable. This requires temperingour missionary zeal and recognizing that, as often as not, innovation can be anAfrican export. …

joe osae-addo

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MMA Architects, Freedom Park, outside Cape Town

The best medium for this kind of learning may be a new kind of study abroador educational exchange program, in which visiting students work with localarchitects already engaged in social and cultural projects. Such serviceopportunities might in turn pose fertile critiques of the structure ofarchitectural practice in the West.

[MMA Architects, Freedom Park, outside Cape Town]

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Cairo

While the critique of modernism’s utopian vector leaves us sceptical of theEnlightenment notion of progress, the reality of urban Africa shouldnonetheless reinforce the sense of social purpose essential to architecturalpractice. The built environment alone may not be enough to ensure positivesocial change. However, we need to charge our teaching with the recognitionthat the rapid transformation of social structures through migration andurbanization, along with the built environment’s continuing role in sustaininghuman health and happiness, compels the design disciplines to both proposeand realize better futures, whether or not our sites are in Africa.

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Beit Giorghis, Lalibela; Great Mosque, Djenné; Tuareg tent

It’s not quite accurate to say, as I implied at the outset, that Africanarchitecture doesn’t contribute to my efforts to expand the canon. On thecontrary, recurring encounters with African architecture allow me tochallenge basic concepts in my architectural survey courses. For example,successive classes on the churches of Lalibela, the Great Mosque of Djennéand the tents of the Touareg help students gain a more complexunderstanding of permanence, site-specificity and ritual. Later classes thatexamine twentieth-century colonial urbanism and architecture ask students toconsider questions of power and agency alongside the concerns of climateand culture. In each case, African examples complicate the simple narrativesthat encourage uncritical adoption of practices and attitudes.

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Italian colonial plan for Addis Ababa, 1937

African cities bear witness to the importance of colonialism in thedevelopment of modern architecture and urban theory. Colonialism was a keycomponent of Western modernity, and the design of colonial cities (as well asthe colonial economy’s impact on material culture in the metropole) played alarge role in the design disciplines. Yet this relationship’s omission (untilrecently) from the historiography of modernism remains striking, andprovides evidence of how the ongoing encounter with African urbanism andarchitecture provides important challenges to the received tradition ofmodernism. Studying the transformation of cities from Casablanca to CapeTown challenges the comforting myths of modern architecture in ways thatencourage increasingly better methods for framing the relationship betweenthe design disciplines and the built environment.

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Diébédo Francis Kéré, primary school, Gando, 1999

One danger we face while incorporating African material into survey coursesof world architecture is inadvertently reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Forexample, the extraordinary school buildings by Diébédo Francis Kéré inGando and Dano (Burkina Faso) deserve to be celebrated for their manyexcellent qualities, but they need to be presented in context. Otherwise, thebuildings – and the engaging story of their financing and design – can reinforcethe image of a largely rural and technologically unsophisticated populacereliant on first-world technical knowledge and charity. …

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“JR,” photographic installation, Kibera

Similarly, it is to our discipline’s credit that so many architects have directlyaddressed the problems of the world’s growing informal settlements, such asthe vast Kibera district in Nairobi. Yet the image of large urban slums – and ofa discipline whose services need to be dispensed through charities, ratherthan engaged through conventional models of patronage – reinforce commonmisperceptions of African cities and urban populations. As historians, criticsand teachers, we need to frame architecture and cultural production in Africawith appropriate breadth, depth and diversity.

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This breadth, depth and diversity will come from expanded historical researchin Africa. The African Perspectives conferences provide a model forpromoting such research, and the organizers are to applauded for theirefforts. The group’s interest in publishing is of vital importance. Futureconferences should more directly support new research by coordinatingpublications to accompany the events. This would create an invaluable venuefor making historical research in Africa accessible to a global audience.

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Bureau EAST, Fez River reclamation project, 2008-present

We should also acknowledge the importance of international awardsprograms in promoting contemporary architecture in Africa. The Aga Khanprogram (which admirably does not distinguish between Africa and otherregions) is particularly important in this regard, as are the Holcim Awards forsustainable construction and the World Architecture Awards. Outside ofAfrica, we should develop regional networks to bring African practitioners tolecture in universities, much like my colleague Donna Cohen and I have doneinformally at our respective universities in Florida.

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We can develop other initiatives to sponsor and promote the researchnecessary to expand the canon. At Florida International University, I began aseries of symposia for emerging scholars to develop and present newresearch on modern architecture and urbanism outside Western Europe andNorth America. We are preparing a number of essays from the first fivesymposia for publication in an edited volume. The success of this symposiumseries has spurred my colleagues to propose forming a new doctoralprogram, one of whose research concentrations will emphasize modernism inLatin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. We hope to develop ageneration of scholars whose work will expand the canon in terms of bothsubject matter and historiographic methodology. We especially hope toattract students from across Africa and support work that will form thefoundations of future canons.

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Fasil Giorghis, Martyrs of the Red Terror Memorial Building, Addis Ababa

These educational initiatives offer an important tool for infusing Africanmaterial into the design curriculum at schools outside Africa. We have addednew content to survey lecture courses and seminars, and are discussing waysof engaging African material through design studios and travel/study programs.…

[Fasil Giorghis, Martyrs of the Red Terror Memorial Building]

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Peter Rich, Community Centre, Alexandra

One course that I am itching to teach is a seminar on African cities that wouldbe cross-listed between FIU and the University of Florida, using videoconferencing to link our classrooms and to connect us to guest lecturersaround the world. This ambitious enterprise was proposed for the springsemester, but will have to wait until next year while we work out furtherlogistics. Our hope is that video conferencing technology will allow us togenerate new opportunities for classroom interaction between our studentsand scholars and practitioners in Africa, and around the world.

[Peter Rich, Community Centre, Alex]

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Addis Ababa

As important as this new content is – both within the classroom and in theexpanded canon – the experience of Africa is even more valuable in the way itinspires a transformation in the way we teach architecture world-wide. …

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Addis Ababa

Africa’s pluralism explodes the comforting myths of a monolithic modernismand static cultural identities. …

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Alexandria

Africa’s problems charge our discipline with greater urgency and challenge theformalist narcissism of post-criticality and radical autonomy. …

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Alexandria

Africa’s resilience demands careful reconsideration of agency andtechnological determinism. …

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Accra

And Africa’s many modernisms require that we revise histories that arepartial in both senses of the word.