Reframe : A Close Reading of Western Africa Modernism
Ajay Manthripragada • Independent Study Project
Rhode Island School of Design • Spring 2019
Following a series of the declaration of independence by countries in western Africa in the mid-twentieth century, the region has witnessed a surge in architecture production, surfing the wave of post-independent optimism. The rapid execution of the project takes advantage of the newly liberated land as the ground of architectural experiments. The movement produces a strand of modernism which has deviated from that of the western pedagogical understanding. This particular difference has become the subject of exotification through image consumption and knowledge production dominated by European institutions. The language of analysis through a set of worm’s eye axonometric projections accompanied by a set of exploded axonometric drawings aims to produce a set of formal analysis which zooms in onto the buildings without privileging or isolating any exotic views. The process of re-framing the gaze towards this particular period of architectural movement is to disassociate the exotification and the commodification of architectural artifacts.
A close reading of the project is the acknowledgment through the disciplinary study positioned to understand the formal and ideological assemblage of the sampled buildings. Twenty building-samples are selected in Côte D’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, Zambia, constructed during the period of 1945–1979. Each of the building typologies takes on a branch of the societal purpose with a highly focused agenda. The architectural artifacts are consolidated through the absorption of International National style and modernist language tuned specifically to the vernacular climate, construction technology, and social condition.
