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Eritrea's capital Asmara is home to one of the world's best collections of futurist architecture.
The is bidding to become the nation's first UNESCO World Heritage site.
Once a sleepy corner of the Italian Empire, Eritrea’s capital Asmara is home to one of the world’s best collections of futurist architecture. Now, the city is bidding to become the nation’s first UNESCO World Heritage site.
Asmara certainly deserves the distinction; its architecture – built in the modern era and informed by the school of futurism – is some of the most beautifully preserved in the world. And the city owes it all to Fascism.
A Futurist haven
Italy developed an urban plan for the capital of its colony as early as 1913, though it was under Mussolini’s fascist government that modern architects built the city into what it is today, earning it the nickname “La Piccola Roma.”
“There was a very intense period of architectural development from 1935-1941,” notes Edward Dension, a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL).
Everything from cinemas to cafes to prisons were constructed in rapid succession, an entire city popping up inland from the Red Sea. Little was left untouched my modernist hands – the Fiat Tagliero, Asmara’s most iconic construct, is on paper one of its most mundane: a service station.
“It’s that combination of urban planning and modernist architecture that makes Asmara so interesting,” Dension argues, “because it was a whole city, not part of a city, like Casablanca, or Tel Aviv.” As for why, he is uncertain.
“Were [the architects] there to champion fascism, or colonialism, or were they there to run away from it and just get on with what they liked to do, which was design buildings? We still don’t know enough about that, but I suspect it’s the latter.”
“By the 1930s [futurism] fell out of favor with the fascist government of Italy,” he explains. “And so one thinks, those who espoused futurism and wanted to articulate it in architectural form, could do so only in the colonies.”
What’s independence got to do with it?
"It was meant to recreate the liveliness of the traditional Ivorian marketplace, consciously (designed) in contrast to the sterile modern architecture that preceded it at this time," says Herz. Sadly, he notes, those aspirations never came to pass.
"Economically, it was never viable, and it's now gutted," he says.
When the hotel was first built, it was done with the aspiration of attracting rich businessmen and glamor tourists. When the country experienced political upheaval in the late 1990s, it became a headquarters for the militia. In 2004, following mounting tensions with France, the hotel was the location where a disputed number of Ivorians were shot by the French army. Now, says Herz, the hotel has reopened and is returning to its roots.
"It has again become a glam hotel, and has almost followed the development of the country," he says.
Herz says that one motivator of the exhibit was to focus on a side of Africa that he feels, is sorely underrepresented in the media.
"Almost every reportage of Africa is about misery, violence, crime, always with a negative connotation. Africa is never distinguished between its 54 countries, but seen as this gray mass of lack. The idea here is to shift the discourse and show an incredible wealth of cultural production," he says.
"It turned a building that was of national importance into one of international importance," says Herz. "It put Kenya on the map, and since it has become one of the most recognized buildings in Nairobi, and a symbol of Kenya's independence."
This is particularly true of Senegal, he notes, where the country's first president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, was a poet, and put a large emphasis on the arts. The Foire Internationale de Dakar, or FIDAK, for instance, came about during this period.
"These countries were developing a new national identity. There was a clear interest for the young nation in gaining this eye-level perspective, to be amongst the league of nations," he says.
"The late Sixties were a honeymoon period between Israel and Africa. Israel was seen as a friend because it had also lived through colonialism and gotten rid of its colonial power," he explains. By the Seventies, tensions within Israel had soured the relationship, and the construction company was thrown out.
"They took all the plans with them, and there are still parts of the university that aren't complete," he says.
"Nkrumah was singularly pushing this issue, so we see the construction of a tremendous amount of schools and universities at this time," he notes, all of which have what was then a heightened, modernist aesthetic.
"The KNUST campus really represent a purity of modern architecture," he adds.
"It shows there's not always a red line, a kind of hour zero," he says. "What architecture allows is an assessment of this process of independence. It allows us to see the gray tones in what we initially always thought was a black and white situation."
Italy’s loss was Eritrea’s gain, but in the years since it has been an uneasy road for the East Africa nation. From Italian colony to British administration to Ethiopian federation, the “process from colonialism to independence was uniquely protracted” for Eritrea, says Dension. And it is arguably why Asmara is in such good condition.
Dension suggests that Eritreans “probably view their colonial architecture a lot differently than say Libya does with Tripoli, or Somalia does with Mogadishu, where some of the colonial buildings were deliberately destroyed, or disregarded… which a newly-independent country would want to do away with.” Because of the lengthy path to independence, “those strong feelings against the colonial ruler were perhaps not quite so strong when independence arrived.”
Proud heritage
Eritreans today maintain a close relationship with their modernist heritage, spurred on by an unlikely source: ex-prison inmates.
Caserma Mussolini, a military barracks that served as a detention center during colonial rule, was due to be razed in 1996 and replaced with a German-designed high-rise.
“It was the former inmates of that prison that said ‘You can’t destroy this building, it’s part of our heritage’,” Dension explains. “It was the inmates who really started focusing Eritrean minds, and started them thinking ‘What do these buildings actually mean to us?’”
A World Bank-funded project, the Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project, ran between 2001 and 2007 and started preservation work, an initiative continued by the Asmara Heritage Project (AHP), established in 2014.
Dension has played a part in both teams, the latter under coordinator Medhanie Teklemariam, and says that on February 1 the AHP submitted Asmara for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage site – what would be a first for Eritrea.
“Africa is underrepresented on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and also in modernist history,” he argues.
“Our understanding of modernism is very much framed by a Western-centric, Euro-centric perspective. It does reveal a problem in the way that we understand Modernism and the way we understand colonial history. Asmara’s bid is just one of many that will increasingly try to redress this imbalance.”