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. 

Austellung: Das Architekturmodell: Werkzeug, Fetisch, Kleine Utopie

FRANKFURT.

There are less than two weeks left to see what I think might be the most marvelous and wonderful exhibit that I've seen in several years: The Architectural Model: Tool, Fetish, Small Utopia at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt. This fantastic show closes on 16 September.

Visually describing a building evinces the possibility of another building

One measure of how outstanding this show is would be to report that I left a Mediterranean beach a day early in mid-August, flew to Germany and spent the night, and the show was worth missing out on another day in the ocean and the substantial extra expense of making a dedicated trip to Frankfurt.

A mid-century German children's toy of a bank block.

A delightful series of peep-holes offered views into built and unbuilt worlds

Another demonstration of the show's merits is to show here three-dozen or so images from the exhibit, which takes up three floors of the German Architectural Museum with a plethora of astonishing, inspiring, and simply gorgeous architectural models, from children's toys to presentation models, iterative study models to vast recreations of ancient monuments, rare proposals of never-built masterpieces, peep-hole views into far-off rooms and staggeringly detailed, person-sized skyscrapers.

Conrad Roland's drawing for an exhibition hall with floating levels, 1964

Conrad Roland's Spiralhochhaus, which incredibly was conceived in 1963.

Still mesmerizing: the original model for 

Frei Otto's Medizinsche Fakultät Ulm, 1965.

Wolfgang Rathke's German Pavilion for the 

Worlds Fair in Montreal, 1964-65, mode of pink straws.

The ground floor snaps entering visitors to attention with a room-full of rare masterpieces, many of them brilliant visions which never were, interspersed with tabletops stuffed with mass and volume studies of foam and wood and preliminary designs whose forms are as adventurous and ingenious as their choice of materials such as the drinking-straw dome of the Montreal Pavilion proposal. These early-stage demonstrations continue of the top floor, such as the number of studies for Christian Kerez's unbuilt Swiss Re: Headquarters in Zürich, which reached its climax in a refrigerator-sized wooden assemblage of floors, beams, ramps, and stairs.

Christian Kerez's unbuilt Swiss Re Headquarters in Zürich.

These are just some of the hundreds of items that the exhibit has collected together, some from its own vaults, some rare gems borrowed from the archives of old masters. Together, these might roughly fall into three categories: those places which exist in the world (models of real buildings, but which give license to show an alternate reality both in terms of scale with view but also material and transparency); ancient places which exist no more, and so those models which are the best representation of what was once real; and those places which have never existed: whose closest realities are the models themselves. Highlights include the tabletop hypermetabolist landscape of Arata Isozaki's Cluster in the Air to the smaller but equally wondrous proposal by Emilio Ambasz for the Center for Applied Computer Research, an unrealized Digital-Aztec precinct on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Detail of the table-size model of Arata Isozaki's Cluster in the Air, 1962

One of the more striking models in the whole exhibit: 

Emilio Ambasz's design for the Center for Applied Computer Research, 

Mexico City,1974-75

James Stirling's Churchill College proposal, Apr-May 1959

While these never-to-be environments, found on both the ground floor and the top, would alone make for a noteworthy exhibit, the second floor is particularly awesome: At model-railroad scales (most 1:200), the visitor can play bird, or god, hovering over the humungous dioramas of ancient, medieval, and modern landscapes, many of which turned to dust centuries before the helicopter. The room opens with the quintessential rotorcraft view: a frenetic five-block slice of mid-town Manhattan, bustling with taxis at the foot of the Pan Am Building and bending around Grand Central Station.

This bustle contacts with the eerie serenity of the other scenes nearby. In the whole exhibit there might be nothing so incredible a visual experience as standing alone above these landscapes of the never-more. Of all these, the lone model of the Crystal Palace presented the most jaw-dropping surprise. Even at the scale of an insect, the enormity of its enclosure is arresting, its relentless frame disappearing into the scene's dark far edge, as if it emerged from the blackness of lost history for the brief instant of this installation.

The Royal Crescent at Bath next door is similarly isolated yet, given its history, less forlorn. The other dioramas of even older times, stretching back all the way to Mycenae and Rome, Egypt and Sumeria, are not at all melancholy, but delightful and breathtaking. These might be more common in history or anthropology museums, if not toy emporiums, and certainly not in galleries of architecture, which is precisely one of the main reasons which its so refreshing to have the heart of the exhibit given over to such "popular" and non-academic displays.

The Royal Crescent, Bath.

A busy day in central Pompeii

The acropolis at Mycenae

Temple of the Pharaohs, Dêr El Bahari, Egypt.

Bruchfeldstraße Housing Development, Frankfurt-Niederrad, 1926-27

The Baroque town of Arolsen, North Hesse as it appeared in 1719

An unfortunate moment of sorts occurs as the visitor returns to the stairwell: the last diorama shows an Orinocoan settlement, a ring-clearing in the forest constructed by the indigenous Yanoama culture, one of the few moments of non-Indo-European architecture in the whole exhibit. Having seen these mono-structural villages in anthropological texts, I can attest to their impressive monumentality imbued with spiritual reasoning, which juxtaposes quite well with the square of Pompeii nearby and the Valley of Egypt across the room.

Yet the accompanying wall panel merely assigns the Yanoama the word, "primitive" which is at best a thoughtless translation, and at worst a very unenlightened classification system for a German institution to be using to categorize various peoples of the world. The more ignominious connotations of this moment are ameliorated by the floor above, which give over ample space to the importance of models in Hitler's Reich, with photos, texts, and objects from the office of Albert Speer, and the like.

The village center, a clearing the rainforest, ringed by dwellings, 

signature construction of the Yanoama, 

and how these "Indians" are described on the wall label.

A placard explaining the fascist plan for Munich, 1939.

While there is plenty of text for student or professional visitors, cueing into process, explanations of formal evolution, struggling with formal idea to execution, the constraints of construction, material, and reality, these aspects can become a bit heavy and technical, especially for those viewers who associate foam and plywood with late nights in the studio. With such a large exhibit, the great number of items to view is itself overwhelming. The exhibit might be most enjoyable in the unfamiliar moments of a micro-vista or a lilliputian skyline, understanding its translation to scale and contemplating the possibilities it suggests. These are sensations of another world.

A stunning series of small foam creations.

One particularly large display on the second floor is Foster and Partners' presentation model of the Commerzbank, one of hometown Frankfurt's most well-known skyscrapers. From this Vogelperspective, the tower still soars above the tops of heads, but the vantage point allows a view into the diminutive courtyard created by the successive arrangement of buildings of various heights and vintages, all dwarfed by the massive bank, which seems to have carved out a space in the air.

It is a simple matter of a 15-minute walk from the museum, crossing the Main on foot to see this architectural moment in person. While the model's white foam pieces come alive in brick, stone and glass in the sunlight, the dynamic might of the tower's mass against the block and older offices is somehow lessened from the street. Yet this arrangement of masses is more familiar now. Having looked down, it is better understood. For a moment, you flew above it, and could hold a tower in your hand. But you are no longer flying. The imaginary helicopter has landed back on earth, in reality.