The Three Best Buildings in Ouagadougou

With all of the previous post's photographs, I'm splitting the post from Ouagadougou in two, this is the second part. In a city which overwhelms with astonishing architecture, here are what I thought were the three high points of the city's many intriguing buildings, in order of how I saw them.

I. Banque Commerciale du Burkina

Like many self-aggrandizing works of architecture, this astonishing office block is a chapel dedicated to the often-bizarre pseudo-colonial politics of the Trans-Sahara.

The Commercial Bank of Burkina Faso is one of the more prominent and permanent relics of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi's (however you like to spell it) various forms of intervention into Burkina, as part of a wider strategy to wield influence across Western and Central Africa at the height of his power in the 1980s and 1990s.

This resulted in this cartoonishly eloquent building, its body a pair of concave wings, tiled in two shades of greenish-blue, ribbed by an order of sharp-pointed fins which faces Ouagadougou's main commercial thoroughfare. The single most remarkable element is unquestionably the four robot-headed corner circulation wells, cubed where the rest of the building is curved, with protruding porthole windows where the rest of the façade is fronted in columns of tiny balconies, which are not not juliette-terraces off the offices but ornately-formed mechanical spaces to house external air conditioning units—this is not the only example such small external shelf-balconies without direct door access).

What's all the more incredible to contemplate is that this building was not designed or built in 1977 but was opened by Qaddafi personally in 2003, the chipped tiled exterior is barely ten years old(I find this still hard to believe and wonder if this building was built at the banks' founding in 1988 and that Qaddafi opened some other, newer building elsewhere in the city; such is the dearth of contemporary architectural history scholarship on the city that I haven't been able to work this out).

II. Grand Marche

One of the most important civic spaces in Ouagadougou is also one its most contrasting, and therefore all the more astounding. In a city which is characterized by pastel-painted pseudo-mud-brick post-modernism, one of the country's largest buildings is predominated by a magnificent brutalism: in its size, shape and material it appears straight off a state university engineering quad, from the fenestration orders shading tiny square windows, to the rest of the enclosed space articulated in the red brick of a community college library.

But most the space is not enclosed: the market's true triumph is the soaring girder spans, a section of highway overpass shading an upper-level trading floor, its ceiling height recalling the more inspiring atmospheres of brutal train stations or other civic architecture from other continents, yet with the benefit of the Sahelian climate; there are no walls.

I would have photographed more aspects of the structure but I was constantly mobbed by haggling craft dealers. I am not sure of the age of this building but while it also stylistically looks to be several decades old, it may be a replacement for the older market that suffered a devastating fire in 2003, and so may also be only about ten years old (but could also be the standing site of the fire; not clear). It also not the only brutal civic structure in the city: the main railway station also hoists aloft a soaring slab of concrete, but it was too difficult to try to photograph there.

III. Monument des Martyrs

Also known as the Monument to National Heroes, this is surely Burkina Faso's single most bizarre edifice, and for that reason the one that makes listicles like The Most Astonishing Space Age Buildings in Africa!, so it's conceivable that readers will have come across a straight-on shot of this mirrored-glass Eiffel Tower.

This was the grand-projet of Burkina Faso's president since 1987, not only glorifying the fratricide revolution that brought him to power, but the centerpiece of the brand-new planned quarter of the city that was designed for the turn of the century: Ouaga 2000 [French link], an elite diplomatic and residential area which sprawls in half-deserted, axial grandeur on the southwestern edge of Ouagadougou, like a French-inspired section of Tempe, Arizona. The Monument stands in the middle of a scrubby field, which makes its presence that much more strange and startling.

There is no more tired metaphor in architectural criticism as describing an ultra-modern building as looking like an alien spaceship has landed from another galaxy, and yet there is a certain effect of this bombastic quadruped that makes possible to imagine that a rocketship has descended from orbit as much as it looks ready for take-off.

For a third time, what adds to stupefaction is not just the form but the vintage: what is presumed to be a vintage 1983 structure was in fact ground broke in 2002.

Although still young in building-years, the Monument is hardly ready for take-off, as in typical fashion the elevators are defunct, and a visitor has to endure the stifling, twisting stare wells to reach the observation deck, and finally a regular ladder propped up against a ceiling hatch to reach the bellevue platform. There is an empty museum on the mezzanine level, but other than the old man who pockets $4 to escort you around, the place is deserted.

I was delighted by so many details: the plaid-legging effect of all that police-visor glazing, framed in smooth concrete, so akin to the stately slope of the Solow Building on 57th street; the under-side with its pizza-oven half-dome elevator lobby, ready to vacuum earthlings up to the mothership;  the engorged-to-bursting muscularity of the mezzanine level; the sharp flair of the fins on the tower's crown, a gesture like the tail 1958 Chevy Cobalt.

The building is both autocratically menacing and fancifully ridiculous: a cartoonish rendering of an world's fair tower built with the state resources of the world's third-poorest country to celebrate its own achievements. It is in this perspective that it becomes troubling to act merely as a tourist, and be amused or even aghast at the irony; it becomes necessary to reflect on the role of buildings and their architects in the furtherance and solidification of regimes. 

The Architecture of Ouagadougou

OUAGADOUGOU.

I am just returning from a long trip to West Africa, which partly-explains the three month silence on the blog. I was in one particular city for about six weeks, jumping back and forth to other places, working on multiple projects simultaneously. One of my last weeks there began with the unnerving anticipation of trying to finish everything, a long list of odds and ends and small details along with major, critical steps in the execution of the project. I got a call that Monday afternoon from a major partner, hoping to be informed that the paperwork was complete. Instead, as so often happens in that corner of the world especially, I was told that I would have to wait until Friday for anything to happen.

The grand mosque. 

So I had a week to burn, and rather than rage with frustration, I walked down the street to the ticket office of Air Burkina (one of the delights of that corner of the world is that travelers still buy paper tickets from ticket offices, in person), went back to my apartment, packed a duffle bag and took a taxi to the airport.

Another mosque under construction.

A few hours later, I was in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, a place that I had always wanted to get to, and had for many years been only as far away as the 90-minute flight that I had just taken. I had imagined being there since childhood, laying prone on the floor the living room with the Rand McNally World Atlas, the tip of my index finger my transport across the degrees and meridians. There are few place names that rank so exotically for a kid from Ohio than Ouagadougou—how to even pronounce it—and now twenty-five years later here I was, a smiling immigration officer sending me out into the Sahelian heat with an enthusiastic “bon arrivee.”

I hired a taxi to drive me around the city before I even figured out a hotel room or changed money. For $14 a day, a lawn-green vintage Mercedes zipped me around the city, and I spent most of the next three days taking photos of buildings.

A commercial block on the main commercial boulevard, Avenue Kwame Nkrumah

A French Bank branch, Avenue Kwame Nkrumah

What I saw, and photographed, astonished me. Nothing in my most imaginative moments of childhood, or my years of working in neighboring countries, had composed my expectations properly for the city that I came upon.

Ministry for Civil Service & State Reform

Burkinabé headquarters for the West African Monetary Union, BCEAO. 

Amsterdam and New Orleans come to my mind as two cities predominated by their own architecture, and where architecture somehow develops into its own condition: where each new building that rises in the city actively attempts to contribute to a wider, existing milieu.

Two views of the same building: A Ministry

To this I would add Ouagadougou: it is overabundant with a very particular, contextual variety of modern architecture, from the older ministries and the more bombastic edifices of the semi-autocratic state, to the commercial and banking offices, to the hotels, cafés, cinemas, markets, and fuel stations. Perhaps this is why, like Amsterdam and New Orleans, a relaxed atmosphere predominates in Ouagadougou: quite a contrast to other capital cities, in the region, tense and chaotic.

Another Ministry.

There is hardly a block without remarkable, if not masterful manifestation of a desert design that is difficult to date: some of the more dilapidated examples are from the 1960s, a product of the post-independence development of the sovereign state, many others augment the 25-year president's rule through monuments, yet others are just now being completed as the country experiences a gold-mining boom, becoming one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

A soon to be completed commercial tower, probably a north African bank.

Headquarters of the State Electricity Company, SONABEL.

Ouagadougou is basically a small city, although it is also a national capital of perhaps as many as two million people. Its commercial and governmental center is quite small, and most of the city spreads outwards in simple residential quarters of single-story, metal-sheet-roofed house compounds.

Rooftop view. 

I am going to post many of these to the Bauzeitgeist Tumblr, to give each its own proper platform for appreciation, but I thought that putting them all here, a single volume, would be slightly overwhelming just as the city of Ouagadougou itself is; I was only there for three days, and hardly had time to photograph a third of the buildings that rushed passed on the road, much less learn anything about the particular history and provenience of each.

A large commercial/banking complex.

For a bit more detail and to pace this post for length, I'll split into their own separate post three particularly fascinating examples of the city's architecture, but what I've noted here is what little I know at all about what I was able to see and capture on my iPhone (tragically, my Canon G12 broke before I got there). If I had the time, I would embark on a project to write an architectural guide to the city—it certainly deserves to be an architectural destination.

Zeichenwerk von Nairobi

NAIROBI.

The previous post's pictures of the Nairobi skyline excluded several of the city's tallest buildings.  In particular, it completely omitted the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC), but not because it wasn't worth mentioning. On the contrary, this is an all-time favorite of building of mine, literally, ever. And since that last post was so long, and this building is so great, I thought I would give the megastructure its own dedicated post.

KICC logo

While no longer the city's tallest building, and at about 40 years old, hardly its newest, the 23-story tower of the KICC is unquestionably the architectural symbol of Nairobi, and Kenya, and may be one of the most recognizable structures in Africa (if still an order of magnitude below the pyramids).

©April 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

The arrestingly handsome, hyperfuturistic tower is crowned by a wide-brimmed disc, which acts both as a sun-shade and also lifts a helicopter pad aloft, and smoothes into a halo the dodecagonal shaft's geometry, which is accentuated by metallic bronze awnings, shading the glazed façade. A defunct revolving restaurant occupies the top floor of the office block.

This dynamic ensemble would be fantastic enough if the office tower rose from the street into the sky, yet the tower is but one element of the complex. Not visible from afar is the plenary amphitheatre, which might be an even more astonishing structure than the tower itself.

©April 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

A dusty origami lotus flower balances over the rectangle reception hall, like a giant spinning top at the edge of a table, and seems to be giving off a similar kinetic, centripital energy. It is so tempting, when coming upon the KICC from ground level, to employ that most tired of architectural metaphors, the landing UFO, yet here both the tower and the congress seem to be of the squadron of an alien civilization. In fact, the inspiration for the amphitheatre's shape and shade were the conical thatched homes of rural Kenya. That even the more rational geometry of the ground-floor reception hall is reached by criss-crossing ramps from the street further suggests the landing docks of spacecraft.

Photo courtesy BuildDesign Magazine, Kenya

This is all the more remarkable when considering the architecture's vintage, in that it proceeded the first Star Wars movie by years, which invites speculation that the palace of Jabba the Hutt and the villages of the Ewoks could have been inspired by these edifices years before sci-fi animators imagined these later pop-cultural icons. One of those questions of architectural influence and inspiration that may never be answered.

 Photo courtesy BuildDesign Magazine, Kenya

The real story of the KICC is much more typical of a modern African landmark, which was commissioned as a headquarters for the country's ruling party, KANU, during the reign of the post-independence president, Jomo Kenyatta, and built with public funds. It later times its odd origins have lead it to be formally be transferred to state property, and has morphed into a venue for conferences.

Its architect, David Mutiso, was chief architect at Kenya's Ministry of Public Works, and although he went on to a successful practice and is still alive today, but much unlike the career calculations of today's starchitects, this building was neither hailed as a masterpiece nor did it form a aesthetic basis for a signature style to be applied and replicated on later projects, which only adds to its visual impact. There are certain buildings in the world like this, that are so singular and unique and yet never generate any offspring.

KICC is open to the public. For a few shillings a friendly security guard operates the lift for visitors, up to the top observation deck, where there is no one but another bored, friendly security guard, who walks you across the inoperable revolving restaurant floor and to a decrepit flight of stairs...

All 3 above ©April 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

...which lead up to the heliport, still very much in use, and reveals a panoramic view of East Africa's major city, from the airport to the shiny zinc rooftops of the city's infamous slums, to the sloping angles of malls and hotels peaking up from the verdure of affluent Westlands, all surrounded by mountains and edge of the stretching plains, as burgeoning Nairobi still houses a national park in its city limits, famous for its photo opportunities of African wildlife roaming the savannah in the foreground with an ultramodern skyline in the background.

via Wikipedia and Next City.

Hauptstadt von Ostafrika

On the same April weekend that I passed through Nairobi Airport's ill-fated terminal, I had a few hours to walk around Central Nairobi during a busy Monday. This was only my second visit to the Kenyan capital, and I don't know much about the city's history or its architecture, and I don't have time to research them enough to write a post equal to an equatorial Urban Trawl. But I so enjoyed wandering around the center of town that I wanted to share a few pictures of the city (which I couldn't narrow down to much fewer than 40). 

Moi Avenue at Tom Mboya plaza, with Stanbank House at right.

Nairobi is one of the most important cities in Africa and the hub of a large multinational region of nearly 200 million people. Like many a 20th century metropolis, it has its origins as a frontier railroad junction. Today the city sprawls southern California-style across an area where drier savannah meets greener hills, however the heart of town is a relatively small and compact grid, reflecting the colonial ordinance of more than a half-century ago. At independence it was a city of 250,000, and the population of the entire country (about 8 million in 1960) was closer to the population of greater Nairobi (over 3  million) today. 

Moi Avenue looking south from City Hall Way and the Hilton,

 the Ambassadeur Hotel at center.

While Kenya's economy has been growing rapidly in the past decade, along with much of the Africa, and its importance as a regional hub burgeoned simultaneously, Nairobi, like its airport terminal, retains a distinct air of the immediate post-colonial period, with striking examples of English mid-centuryism. While central Nairobi has constantly added large buildings in the 1980s, 1990s, and the past decade, and office towers are sprouting across the city while the urbanized area has oozed outward for miles, much of the city center's largest and most prominent office buildings all come from a building boom that built momentum in the optimistic ebullience of post-independence, and peaked in the early 1970s. 

Kenyatta State Hospital, like a Tricorn Centre on the horizon.

Bruce House, Muindi Mbungu Street.

20th Century Plaza cinema, Mama Ngina Street.

There are a number of such buildings around central area of the city, some in a certain state of dilapidation, from what appeared to be a lack of maintenance and heavy usage more than city-center abandonment, while many others which were examples of classic quasi-colonialist modernism. 

Norwich Union House, Kimathi Street.

It is somewhat astonishing to encounter, for instance, the Norwich Union House, with its bright yet faded paint of primary colors, and even without the incredible plaque depicting the grandly bucolic Norwich Cathedral emblazoned on its concrete elevation, it seems straight out of Oxford Circus. Nearby, the Hilton tower has stood for decades, and there is nothing so much like its presence on the divided boulevard of Moi Avenue than the London Hilton on Park Lane, or so it seemed to me. 

The Hilton, by Tel Aviv-based architects Zevet.

Norwich Union House is only one of many examples of facades featuring bright paint jobs, shaded in a range of color-television linoleum palette. There are two bright blue buildings within one block of each other on Utalii Street, one the Chester House, which seems to be a staggered arrangement of balconied apartments, and the other Jamihiriya House, which apparently has its origins as the Libyan government's building, although I would have thought that would make green the choice of color. 

Jamahiriya House, Loita Street. 

Chester House, Loita and Market Streets. 

I wasn't able to enter many of the buildings, just in general this wouldn't be feasible anywhere but in Nairobi especially, there is high security at most important addresses; this is the city of the 1998 embassy bombings. One tower I was able to enter was International House, due to its double-storey lobby of nothing but airline ticket offices (could there be anything that lends more to mid-century atmosphere than a city-center airline ticket office?). A hanging dual stairway, paneled in red marble, allowed access to the mezzanine, although only South African Airways was selling tickets on the 2nd floor, as the gentleman at the Air Malawi office regretfully informed me that the company has temporarily paused offering flights to Blantyre due to "administrative issues."

International House, built 1968-71. 

Double stairway, mezzanine level of the International House.

There is much else to central Nairobi besides Brittania and brutalism. The influence of the Arabian Gulf on East Africa is ancient, but as in most everything, everywhere, the influence of Dubai has crept in recently, although not so much in the way of wavy blue mirror glass curtains. What reminded me most of the UAE was this fascinating trio of tall buildings standing side by side together on a narrow alley, like nothing so much as one of the less impressive and updated stretches of Sheikh Zayed Road, or so it seemed to me. 

KEMU Towers and siblings on Utalii Lane.

Utalii House, Utalii Lane.

Nearby is Kenindia House, with a butter-colored billowing buttress sloping down from its columned face. Presumably, the name is a combo of Kenya and India, as South Asians have had a major commercial presence in East Africa at least since the British facilitated their arrival in the region. 

Kenindia House, Utalii Lane/Utalii Street

The heritage of South Asians in Kenya is only further evidenced on the Mokhtar Daddah Street, facing Jevervee Park, where 70 year old storefronts, most built by Indian merchants, make for an orderly if forlorn block in a less happening stretch of downtown. 

Mid-century commercial houses, Moktar Daddah Street facing Jevanjee Gardens.


The Old Mutual, Kimathi Avenue, a pre-independence edifice.

Probably the strangest-looking building in Nairobi is the dual-turreted Nation Media Centre, its floors alternatively striped in light grey, an unintentional Adolf Loos reference, with some sort of broadcasting mast, bright red, vertically up the center in the space between the two towers (which I will avoiding referring to as a warrior's spear).

Looking north down Banda Street, terminating at Nation Centre.

 I'd love to spend some more time understanding this architectural class, this exuberant, over-complicated, mis-fired modernism. There's an unwritten book on weird buildings like this, all across Africa. Indeed I think a belt of them is arrayed across the middle of the planet, from Marrakesh to Manila, where giddiness and non-existent zoning allows such strange creations. 

Kenyatta Avenue looking north to the Nations Media House.

The western edge of downtown is defined by the University of Nairobi campus, which is seemingly unaltered from the mid-1970, right down to the decorative-grille doorways and signage: 

On the other side of town sits Harambee Avenue, Kenya's Wilson-era Whitehall, which like its London cousin is surprisingly diminutive and off-center from the capital's larger axes. Instead of colonnaded Georgian blocks, Harambee is a parade of vintage modern office blocks consisting of the treasury, the ministry of finance, the President's office, and the state-backed Kenya Power company in Electricity House.

MOMWE Foundation, Parliament Road at Garden Square.

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Electricity House (now Kenya Power House), Harambee Avenue, 1974.

The Old Treasury Building, with the National Bank Building at left.

Like many an African capital, much of Nairobi's commercial-looking skyline is in fact government offices, including the massive Telepost Tower, home to the Ministry of Post and Telecoms. 

Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, Kenyatta Avenue.

In a narrow alley off Harambee, is the Zentech House. Internet research has not even confirmed if I have the name correct, or what goes on inside, and I couldn't even understand if two wings enclosed a courtyard, but it was nonetheless a beauty. 

After this astonishing set of elevations, I came upon the much more massive Kingdom Securities House, infamous as the sight of the 1998 Embassy bombings which blew out all its windows, but today fully refurbished and looking sleek in its angled blue glass fronts framed in concrete, like a sub-Saharan Solow Building in New York, although the white stone siding looked more Marble Arch than mid-town Manhattan. A matching sloped banking hall sits at its base.

Kingdom Securities House. 

Nothing quite embodies the Englishness of Nairobi's architecture so much as the stone-sided City Hall, which could be plopped down on Euston Road tomorrow and no one would notice. 

Nairobi City Hall.

Like many developing countries, Kenya is a difficult place to do business, especially something as capital-intensive and physical, in all senses of the word, as real estate. Lack of skills, higher costs, and corruption drag development. It's hard to get buildings built here, and generally only the government (or its donor partners) have the means to, which leads to very conservative constructions, so its all the more remarkable when there is any style, flair, of thoughtfulness. While such statements are generally true globally, like so much of society's hard edges, the realities are sharper here. A bit of decent design becomes an exuberance, a touch of dated decor a marker of a moment when the country tried to lurch forward, such as the early-desktop computer era octagonal openings on the block-long Kenya Commercial Bank, built sometime in the early eighties, inspired by the nascent aesthetic of personal computers as the first ones arrived in Africa:

Kencom House. 

Or, equally but in a completely different way, the rugged, raw-concrete daring of the Kahawa House, the offices where Kenyan coffee's commoditization is centralized. I was so mesmerized by this Umoja-Harambee Unité d'Habitation that I actually ignored the honking of a shared taxi and nearly got run-over photographing it. 

Kahawa House, the Coffee Exchange, Nairobi Aviation College, Haile Selassie Avenue.

These are curious buildings, their Britishness either overtly the result of Home-country firms dominating Kenyan industry and professional expectations and standards during and after colonialism, or the lack of glittering 21st century towers. The continued presence of so many nearly-historic mid-century buildings much more the result of dysfunctional economics and corrupt politics than historic preservation or aesthetic dedication. I wonder, as Kenya surges toward 50 million people by 2050, and Nairobi seeks to position itself as the super capital of Central Africa, which of these buildings will stay standing, which Kenyans continue to value.