'Diwouta’s book provides one of the rare architectural portraits of the contemporary African city by an African professional... A treasury of thoughts, ideas and architectural examples'. To read the full review by Antoni Folkers please click on FULL TEXT.
Danièle Diwouta-Kotto (text) Sandrine Dole (photographs)
Suites architecturales – Kinshasa, Douala, Dakar
Publisher: d’architectures d’Afrique Association VAA (Épinal) 2010
ISBN 978-2-9537543-08
General preface by Gaëtan Siew, preface to chapter on Douala by Julien King-Georges and to chapter on Dakar by Annie Jouga.
Diwouta’s book provides one of the rare architectural portraits of the contemporary African city by an African professional. Diwouta, as active architect in Africa, writes from an experienced and self-conscious perspective. The book is very readable and happily lacks the complicated academic jargon that is so common in the architectural writing of today.
It is a treasury of thoughts, ideas and architectural examples. The comparison between the three cities Kinshasa, Douala and Dakar is relevant and commendable. Diwouta has studied other African cities as well and manages to bring in this knowledge into the introductory and conclusive chapters, which strengthens the arguments she offers.
The graphics, images and layout have been in the competent hands of Sandrine Dole making the work an altogether desirable book.
The design of the cover, at the first glance just attractive, reflects I think the multiple layers of the port city, and combines the traditional colors of the cities described: ochre, white and blue for Dakar; green and white for Douala; white, grayish and terra for Kinshasa.
In all its graphic attractiveness, there is some lack in the understanding of the city plans, which are decorative but incomplete and ask a lot of the reader to decipher, which is a pity as the urban histories of the three cities are well and thoroughly described.
The book is built up of a general introduction, the three city portraits and a concluding chapter binding the observations together. In the three portraits, the architectural history and current state of the cities are highlighted, in relation to other cities on the continent. As the attention is drawn to the historical centres, the fate and future of built heritage becomes focus of the book. For all three cities, this implies colonial heritage, dating back to the modern era, from roughly the turn of the century to the 1960s. An interesting and quite unexpected topic, as you would expect emphasis on post-independent or contemporary architecture.
Notwithstanding this focus, intriguing viewpoints are given on the contemporary situation of African architecture and urbanism.
According to Diwouta, the cities become individualized and commercialized. The individualization is a threat to the small scale public realm, for which there seems no place in the rare policies or masterplans drafted for the city. The buildings themselves become signs or are branded by commercial signage covering almost the entire facades. The branding in architecture expresses itself in either classicist or hyper-modern (‘surmodernité’) architecture, observes Diwouta, who continues to state that African identity in the African city is perhaps not so much sought after as a desire to compete with the upcoming economies of China and Dubai. It is a surrealist quantum leap into Kingelez’ future that, for instance in Kinshasa projects itself in the Cité du Fleuve, an entirely new city for the new elite, located apart from the crumbling skyline of old Kin. The skyline as a backdrop to an utopian world to be. Similar projects are dreamt up elsewhere in Africa, there is talk about a new administrative city next to Dakar for 200,000 people and a similar project next to Dodoma. This sounds like the old segregational modernist city planning of the colonials survived into this new century.
Yet at the same time, there is an increased interest awakening and desire to understand and perhaps build upon the African city as it has developed itself in relation to modernity, with a preferred reference to Addis Ababa’s intriguing early modern African tissue.
Diwouta concludes her musings about the contemporary African city with the observation that the African cities are permanent building sites, which can be said of any city in the world, with that difference that in Africa the sites take often very long time to be completed, are often half-way abandoned for whatever reason to be continued at much later moment. She calls these half-deserted sites the ‘greniers’ the storerooms of the African cities, in a parallel to the traditional village. Building sites are storerooms for the slowly or quickly accumulated wealth and are signs for the beholder to say that ‘I built, hence I am’ (je bâtis, donc j’existe’ cit p. 105).
For all the three cities it is apparent that the scarcity of means is at the basis of preservation of its built heritage to date: Why demolishing a building that can still perform duties? In Douala there is no demolition, no improvement but one carries out the minimal work according to the basic needs (‘on ne détruit pas, on n’améliore pas, on bricole suivant les besoins immédiats’ p.52). This preservation through poverty is not something to last. Diwouta confronts the reader with the question on how these cities – in which legislation on built heritage is minimal or absent – may develop with the inclusion of built heritage through a number of example projects by various architects. The freedom and respect that transpires from these projects is refreshing if compared to the European stifling situation. There are monuments that need to be revered, such as Prince Bell’s enigmatic Pagode of Douala, but there are also buildings that are fine in their structure but are definitely better off with a new façade or existing facades that deserve a new interior. The façade of the Siège IPRES in Dakar by Oscare Afrique is unrecognizable, but the underlying structure and rhythm survives in a new rhapsody of colour, movement and heterogeneous materials. The facades of the Siège CA-SCB in Douala by Diwouta are fully restored but a complete new interior with a free plan and skylights is inserted.
Dakar is taking a different position from the matter-of-fact cities Kinshasa and Douala. Dakar was intended from the start to be a showpiece of French cultural pride on the African continent, and has since preserved its architectural feel. Dakar is an architectural city, where ‘a political willingness survived to make Dakar into a showcase of African culture’ (cit: p.99 Il existait une volonté politique de faire de Dakar une vitrine de la culture Africaine), and you can discern a fertile architectural atmosphere in its buildings that is comparable to Casablanca and Maputo.
It was in this city that Cheik Ngom started the first Senegalese architectural practice in 1974, and in Dakar was a school for architecture. Why did this school close down, why is the school of architecture in Kinshasa endangered? It is beyond comprehension, the architectural challenge in Africa is larger than ever and there are hardly any architectural schools in francophone Africa.
In Dakar there seems to happen a convergence of historical styles (ne-mauresque, neo-moderne, international style) into a wanted Africanised contemporary modernism. According to Diwouta ‘the city invents its own modernity’ (cit p.101 ‘La cite invente sa propre modernité.’) starting from a balanced, self-conscious French colonial modernism it asserts its own Africanness. This self-consciousness is quite distanced from the phlegmatic point of view of the citizen of Douala who does not dream according to Diwouta but is just part of the day-to-day life, and endures what he or she meets on the way (cit p. 69 ‘À Douala, on ne rêve pas, on est dans le quotidien, on “supporte”)
