Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City

by Edward Denison, Naigzy Gebremedhin

Asmara, the capital of the small east African country of Eritrea, bordering the Red Sea, is one of the most important and exciting architectural discoveries of recent years. Built almost entirely in the 1930s by the Italians, Asmara has one of the highest concentrations of Modernist architecture anywhere in the world, and has been evocatively described as the Miami of Africa. Desperate to build quickly, the colonial government of the time allowed radical architectural experimentation that would not have found favour in the more conservative European environment. Asmara therefore became the world's prime building ground for architectural innovation during the Modern Movement. That this occurred at all is remarkable enough, but that these buildings should have survived in such numbers today makes it one of the finest Modernist cities in the world. Asmara's extraordinary history, engagingly retold at the beginning of this book, has meant that this important architectural legacy has escaped the destruction wrought by war and the exploitation of land that, elsewhere, has occurred in peacetime. Now that the city is open to the world, following the declaration of Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia in 1991, there has been a growing awareness of its architectural richness and significance, but never before has this legacy been published. This building-by-building survey, illustrated with rare archival material and specially commissioned photographs, is a groundbreaking publication that is set to become one of the most important new books on Modernist architecture of recent decades.

Genres: Eritrea, Architecture

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Dr Edward Denison is a Lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture and an independent architectural, urban and cultural specialist. He is Director of the MA Architecture and Historic Urban Environments, Co-coordinator of Year5 Thesis, Module Coordinator of Multiple Modernities Architecture on the MA Architectural History, and a PhD Supervisor.

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhat misnamed - not very secret, and not particularly modernist, either, with around half the buildings neo-Gothic and neo-classical - but a fascinating illustrated guide to the capital of Eritrea, with an unusual and sophisticated analysis of them strongly emphasising both the cruelty of the colonial regime and the value of the buildings.

[Ichor · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important work of scholarship on the architectural history of Eritrea's capital city. Constructed largely by Italian colonists in the 1930s, the city's planning and architecture was imbued with a Modernist resplendence that was anachronistic for African cities at that time. The authors do a good job of balancing their admiration for Asmara's architectural fingerprint with a sensitivity to the horrific historical circumstances out of which it emerged. Native Eritreans for much of the city's life were forced into surrounding slumland and at the hands of the Italian occupiers forced into poverty and segregated from the 'Italian' parts of the city in which these Modernist buildings were constructed. That the authors underscore the interlock between the oppression of the native population and the city's architectural heritage feels somewhat novel for a visually-dense work of architectural history. Far too often works like this forego reflection on the tormented sociocultural imbroglio out of which the buildings they're celebrating emerge.

A minor deficiency: the first 40 pages of city history could probably have been cut with little consequence to the authors' mission. Harking back to the works of Aeschylus and straying into archaeology seems to me to be a historiographical excess in this case.

[Tom M (London) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The late nineteenth century houses and gardens of Asmara, capital of Eritrea - 2000m. above sea level, twenty miles inland from the Red Sea port of Massawa - exude a confident air of colonial settlement. Oreste Scannavini's neo-gothic, neo-romanesque cathedral (1895), arranges courtyards and loggias that mediate carefully between street and church interior; the Hamasien Hotel (Paolo Reviglio, 1919) with its sharply pitched tower and lush gardens, is as elegant as one could find in Italy. The fine timber veranda of the Italian military commander's office (1889), or the interior of the Asmara Theatre (1919) with its Art Nouveau ceiling, exemplify Italy's Belle Époque architecture at its most charming. This African takeover, controlling the sea-route to India, gained the new Kingdom of Italy her admission into the imperial club but, as in the colonies of the other European Powers, the Africans themselves were treated as subhuman - the men forced into military service, the women into domestic servitude (or worse). Now this eagerly-awaited book by the Eritreans themselves gives us their African account of Asmara's urban and architectural history - incidentally helping Italy's historians out of a hole, by investigating an experience most of them are still too embarrassed to discuss.

Asmara's 1913 development plan, drawn up by military engineers, was a rudimental accretion of grids adapted to the topography. On this plan were constructed the elements of a simulated Italian city, in the eclectic styles of the time: villas, schools, a grandiose postal and telegraph office, government departments, and a railway station. But almost immediately, these conceits of the Belle Époque were rudely trampled by the Italian Futurists, in their fervour for "war, the only hygiene for the world". In 1922 Mussolini seized power, and old Asmara suddenly became the launching pad for a Fascist onslaught on Ethiopia (conquered 1935). For the ensuing twenty years, until the British took it in 1941, Asmara was a hothouse of architectural expression, so far away from homeland Italy that "many new architectural styles replaced the earlier eclecticism [...] in a perfect environment for innovation and experimentation". Numerous buildings of all types were constructed, often by uncouth colonial architects, but also by erudite, innovative experimenters.

The book's introductory historical essay is excellent and makes absorbing reading, but those who know their Italian modernism may find the critical analyses of the architecture less than satisfactory. The authors openly acknowledge their reliance on the American critic Richard Etlin's "Modernism in Italian Architecture" (1991). This notoriously unbalanced account appears to be the only critical reference they have consulted, and their assumption, reiterated many times, that "Italian modernism" is synonymous with "Italian Rationalism" comes straight from Etlin. This is very misleading. True, Asmara's architects did toy with Rationalist design ideas they probably saw in the magazines, but like many dilettantes in Italy itself, they mistook Rationalism for merely another new style. The examples of "Rationalism" which the book identifies in Asmara, though sometimes amusing and occasionally elegant, are but stylistic imitations, with none of the intellectual intensity that animated Rationalist movements working in the mother country. Projects like the Mai Jah Jah fountain, the stupendous Orthodox Cathedral by Gallo and Cavagnari (Aldo Rossi on acid) or the audacious Tagliero garage with its twin 30m unsupported cantilever roofs, are not Rationalist at all, and too often -alas - the authors use erroneous critical parameters to assess their aesthetic value. Innumerable other major and minor buildings in the city are sometimes styled in a local version of the Novecento "classical wallpaper" idiom, but in general the profusion of aerodynamic curves, smooth plastered walls, porthole windows and bullnose ends are Futurist in derivation. It is surely rather serious that the book almost completely fails to perceive this.

When Fascist Italy fell and the British conquered Asmara in 1941, an astonished English official discovered "a European city of broad boulevards, super-cinemas, super-Fascist buildings, two-way streets and a first-class hotel". With typical colonial incompetence, Eritrea was then incorporated into Ethiopia; a terrible thirty-year war of liberation followed. Ironically, the lack of investment preserved Asmara, and some buildings have now been carefully restored. But a conservation plan is required to control the new development which is coming. Written by those directly involved in promoting Asmara's conservation, this book has had rave reviews in the American press. Despite its inaccuracies, it's essential reading.

[Mike Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

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