Adjaye Africa Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture

This mix of travelogue and architectural study tracks eminent architect Adjaye’s journeys to 53 African cities (Mogadishu is also included but he deemed it too hazardous to visit) in an effort to document the continent’s built environment. The principal organization of the book is climatic, with the cities grouped according to natural location. He then considers geography, colonial history, histories of independence, religious identity, local quirks, and the many other elements that lead to “the architecture of habitation, of humanity in general: the city as an inclusive conglomerate.” The volume features plenty of photography and numerous interesting structures, such as the expressive water towers of Bamako and the modernist villas of Nouakchott, but Adjaye’s aim is to capture the overall built traits of a place. “It is a way of looking at architecture in terms of its collective identity, not as a series of freestanding icons,” he explains. One elementary but crucial example is his steady attention to which cities feature substantial apartment buildings and which are composed mainly of single-family homes. That the look of a city will be determined substantially by the buildings residents want to live in is the type of organic detail often missed in most ordinary overviews; this is not one of those. Color illus. [em](Oct.) [/em]