Lifestyle/Culture
From Thatched Huts to Wakanda, a Massive New Architectural Guide Explores Sub-Saharan Africa By NATE BERG ► Xavier Vilalta, Lideta Mercato shopping center, 2017. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. [Photo: Dom Publishers]
Mosque of Dioulasso-Bâ in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, a fine example of Sudano-Sahelian architecture made of earth and wooden beams. [Photo: © Philipp Meuser/courtesy Dom Publishers] IN 2014, PHILIPP MEUSER was looking for information about architecture in Africa. His Berlin-based architecture firm, Meuser Architekten, was designing two German embassies, in Mali and Ghana, and he wanted to get a better sense of the history and variety of architecture in West Africa. But aside from a few academic research projects and one-off building profiles, he and his team weren’t having much luck. “There was no comprehensive overview,” Meuser says. “This was the motivation in the beginning to start doing an architectural guide.” Seven years later, Meuser and his colleague Adil Dalbai have edited a sweeping architectural guide for the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa for Dom Publishers, featuring more than 800 buildings from 49 countries. Illustrated by more than 5,000 images, the seven-volume guide fills more than 3,400 pages, and features essays and building profiles from an international group of more than 300 authors, including original essays from noted 96
July-August 2021
African architects like David Adjaye and Francis Kéré. Covering a wide range of architectural styles— from the indigenous and colonial to the modernist and 21st century—the guide is a significant attempt to fill the gap Meuser and his team faced back in 2014. Dalbai and guide collaborator Livingstone Mukasa were recently awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation to expand this work into an online network to share more knowledge and information about African architecture. But creating a guide to nearly an entire continent— now home to more than 1 billion people—is hardly a straightforward task. Here, Meuser and Dalbai discuss how they tried to encompass Sub-Saharan Africa’s architecture without oversimplifying it. Fast Company: The scope of this project is a bit daunting. How did you go about tackling such a wide and diverse subject? DAWN
www.africabusinessassociation.org
