At eye level

Modern architecture in Africa emerged after the First World War and was characterised by colonialism from the very beginning. Bauhaus forms spread far and wide across the African continent.

Initially designed mainly by European architects, this architecture was an expression of the "modernisation mission" propagated by the colonialists.

"modernisation mission" propagated by the colonialists to justify their claims on the continent.

Modernism was realised here using local materials and techniques. The result was an adaptation of the International Style adapted to the climate. Examples can still be found today in Angola, Burundi, Eritrea, Kenya, Congo, Mozambique and South Africa. Building activity began here from around the end of the 1930s and picked up speed from the 1940s onwards.

The African continent had inspired the world of ideas at the Bauhaus early on, as can be seen in the design of the "African Chair" (1921) by Gunta Stölzl and Marcel Breuer. With the Bauhaus students Arieh Sharon and Pius Pahl and their buildings in Nigeria and South Africa, there is a direct link to the Bauhaus school in Dessau and Berlin, where the architect Pius Pahl studied.

In 1930/31, exactly at the time when Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was director. He himself taught architecture at the University of Cape Town from 1952-54. In his lectures and buildings, he brought modernist ideas to South Africa.

In 1957, he built Botha House in Stellenbosch, an open-plan bungalow with white columns and large glass surfaces. Arieh Sharon worked in the Bauhaus architecture department under the direction of Hannes Meyer at the ADGB Bundesschule in Bernau. He was particularly responsible for the teachers' houses.

Ile-Ife in Nigeria is home to the most important Bauhaus complex on the African continent, at the time a prestigious object and model city of modernism.

These are the buildings on the campus of Obafemi Awolowo University, including the Humanities Building of the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Agriculture Building.

Obafemi Awolowo University of Ife was founded in 1962, two years after Nigeria's independence, as the country's first university and was built between 1962 and 1976. It was intended to reflect the new self-confidence of the independent country, but not to close itself off from tradition.

Ile-Ife is the holy city of the Yoruba, a West African people who live mainly in south-west Nigeria. Obafemi Awolowo University was designed as a post-colonial project, between modernity and tradition. Both the traditional architecture of the Yoruba royal palaces with their open courtyards and echoes of the international style are reflected in the masterplan by Arieh Sharon and his son Eldar.

Today, the architectural ensemble extends over an extensive area of over 32,000 hectares. Modernist architecture in Ile-Ife is adapted to the tropical climate, with high humidity, plenty of sun and monsoon rain and the location in the open countryside. The buildings stand on supports, connecting corridors are roofed over to protect them from extreme sun and rain, external walls become louvred ventilation grilles.

The humanities faculty buildings form pyramids placed on top of each other, the upper cantilevered storeys shade the lower storeys and also protect them from the rain. Courtyard structures create shady oases for the students.

Ernst May was also one of the architects who built in Africa and was committed to modernism. He did not study directly at the Bauhaus, but is known to have attended the first Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923. In the 1920s, he was responsible for the planning of the New Frankfurt, and in the 1930s he was head of the May Brigade in the Soviet Union. Disappointed by Soviet government policy, he left the country but was unable to return to Germany after 1933.

He went to Tanganyika in East Africa, initially to become a farmer, and eventually opened his architectural practice in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. His house in Karen was built from 1937 in the New Building style. The idea was to achieve communication between European and African culture. The Kenwood House in Nairobi, a residential and commercial building from 1937/38, is one of the many buildings that May realised during his time in East Africa. With its curved façade, it is reminiscent of Emil Fahrenkamp's Shell House in Berlin from 1930-32.

Numerous modern buildings can be found in the Indian quarter of Kisumu, the former "Port Florence" and terminus of the Uganda Railway. The British colonialists brought thousands of Indians to Kisumu, which was also known as the "Bombay of West Africa", to build the railway line from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria. In Meru, Kenya, St Joseph's Cathedral, built in 1957, is fascinating and has an aesthetic affinity with Expressionism, for example the Grundtvig Church (1921-26) in Copenhagen.

The fascist colonial policy under Benito Mussolini planned a second Roman Empire in Eritrea. The capital Asmara, also known as "piccola Roma", was expanded in the 1930s, primarily by Italian architects. The population quintupled due to immigration from Italy. To this day, the cityscape of Asmara is characterised by many Art Deco and Italian Rationalist buildings. Residential and commercial buildings, villas, bars, cinemas, medical buildings, stadiums and bank buildings were built. The Fiat Tagliero petrol station by Italian futurist Giuseppe Pettazzi became an architectural icon. The Italians left Eritrea in 1941. Since 2017, "Asmara: a Modernist City of Africa" has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In Mozambique, it is the detailed works of art decó in Maputo that symbolise architectural awakening, such as the Cathedral of Nossa Senhora da Conceição by Marcial Simões de Freitas e Costa (1936-44) or the Cinema África (1948). When building cathedrals, the Portuguese architect orientated himself on modern churches, such as the reinforced concrete church Notre-Dame du Raincy (1922/23) by Auguste Perret and the Lisbon church Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Fátima (1934-38) by Porfírio Pardal Monteiro.

The modernism of the 1960s and 70s is characterised by a new beginning.

One representative of this new beginning is Hannah Schreckenbach. Born in Osnabrück in 1932, the architect and civil engineer dedicated herself to working with African countries and her projects contributed to the development of local infrastructure and to improving the quality of life of the people living there.

She used local raw materials in her buildings and focussed on social commitment and sustainability. She built the post office in Accra (Ghana) in 1974 and held a professorship (Senior Lecturer) at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Kumasi (Ghana) from 1974 to 1982.

At the end of the 1950s, the gradual political, economic and cultural decolonisation of Africa began. This phase of state decolonisation began in Africa following the Second World War. There had already been independent states in Africa before this. In 1945 there were three independent states: Liberia, Ethiopia and Egypt. The number grew to 15 by 1960. In 1960 alone, a further 17 African colonies achieved independence, including Congo and Nigeria.

East Africa was then decolonised in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the Portuguese possessions of Mozambique, Angola and the Cape Verde Islands were added. The last step was the settlement colonies in southern Africa until the first free elections in South Africa in 1994.

Life in Africa changed rapidly during this time, a continent on the move, with all its ups and downs. New social demands, investments in education and health were new challenges - comparable to the time in Europe after the First World War, in Germany the time of the Weimar Republic.

Guest architects were invited, including Walter Gropius.

Other architects from the Bauhaus school also came to build a new Africa, such as Arieh Sharon and Pius Pahl. Later, there were exchange programmes with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, East and West Germany and France.

Ghana was one of Africa's first independent states when it gained independence from Great Britain on 6 March 1957.

The highlight of Ghana's modern architecture is the Arch of Independence.

It is located in Accra on one of the largest public squares in the world, on the gigantic Black Star Square.

"Black Star Square" (also known as "Independence Square") in the Osu district, directly on the Atlantic Ocean.

 The Independence Arch was completed in 1961. It represents the country's quest for independence from British rule and honours the soldiers who died fighting for Ghana's freedom.

Symbolically, the arch was also conceived as an "arch of return", the opposite of what many Africans had experienced as part of the transatlantic slave trade, namely a "door of no return".

The arch was commissioned by the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah.

He was a supporter of tropical modernist architecture and saw buildings as monumental beacons for a united, free Africa.

Nkrumah had brought the Harvard-educated architect Victor Adegbite back to Ghana from the United States to make him the country's chief architect. As part of Nkrumah's Africanisation policy, Ghanaian architects were the basis for all of the country's construction projects. Victor Adegbite, known as "Vik", designed the Arch of Independence, an impressive landmark. Adegbite was also a member of the Gold Coast Society of Architects (GCSA), which was founded in 1954 and has been known as the Society of Architects since Ghana's independence.

The society was initially strongly characterised by European architects. It therefore took enormous efforts after independence to be accepted as an indigenous architect in his own country. When

"Vik" was appointed architect for the headquarters of the Convention People's Party (CPP) and for the Farmers' Council building project, both in Accra, in 1957, the Society of Architects threatened to expel him. However, Victor Adegbite managed to successfully assert himself in this restrictive network. From 1962, Victor Adegbite was chief architect of the Ghana National Construction Corporation.

In the late 1940s, the British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew had already developed ideas on Tropical Modernism in the context of what was then British West Africa (Ghana, Gambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone). The region became a laboratory for colonial architects.

 Here in Africa they found opportunities and commissions that were not available on this scale in Great Britain. Fry and Dew's in-depth knowledge of climatic issues enabled them to become internationally recognised pioneers of Tropical Modernism.

Their book "Tropical Architecture" was published in 1956, and in 1954 they founded the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. The background to this was that European architects were to be taught how to work in the colonies. This variety of tropical modernism is ambivalent, as it served the colonial administrators, was intended to offer them comfort and ultimately counteract the demands for independence.

The Kumasi College of Technology was founded on 22 January 1952. As early as 1957, the year of independence, the school was recognised by the

"Department of Architecture, Town Planning and Building". In 1961, the college was granted university status.

An important part of the post-independence policy was an exchange and training programme between the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi and the Architectural Association (AA) in London.

KNUST became a kind of "Bauhaus in the tropics".

In the 1960s, experimental buildings were created, led by Buckminster Fuller, among others, who came to Kumasi to teach.

Students built geodesic domes. The highlight was a huge dome at Ghana's first international trade fair in 1967.

Tropical modernism was gradually and consciously enriched with traditional Ghanaian design elements to create visions for the future. The KNUST campus can therefore also be seen as a laboratory for the Africanisation of architecture.

To this day, Africa is still an unknown continent in Europe in many respects.

The unfiltered photographic view of the street, in the form of street photography, is a good way of getting to know it.

Joint projects, such as DOCOMOMO Germany's Shared Heritage Africa project, offer both a historical retrospective and a look into the future.

The appointment of architect Diébédo Francis Kéré to the Bauhaus professorship established at the Bauhaus University Weimar in 2018/19 was an important signal for the future. Diébédo Francis Kéré designed the Gando Primary School in Burkina Faso. He also involved the local population in the construction. The architect was honoured with the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture for his work. In 2005, he founded the architecture firm

"Kéré Architecture".

At eye level

"At eye level - Africa and its modernity" is the title of the exhibition with photos by Berlin photographer Jean Molitor.

For the first time, he paints a more complex picture of life on the continent and does not focus solely on architecture with the concept of modernity.

Rather, it is about encounters, about joint projects in intercultural exchange.

At eye level describes the process of growing together. Whereby every assignment of position remains open, no collective approach is predetermined but it is up to the individual viewer to enter into direct contact with what is perceived in order to find his or her own point of view.

Translated into French, at eye level means face to face and back again, face to face!

Dr Kaija Voss (architectural historian)