Manuel Herz and his team of researchers and photographers have put together a stunning collection of material on Africa's little-known modern architecture. The book's 640 pages covering Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia—countries chosen for practical, geographic, and architectural reasons—contain hundreds of photographs of the modernist office towers, schools, parks, private residences, and hotels that shot up throughout the continent during the buoyant era of independence. These structures were often constructed of minimally adorned industrial glass, steel, and concrete, yet adopted “African” inspired forms, patterns, and climatic considerations (especially an emphasis on shade and air circulation), resulting in a distinct physical record of the triumphs, contradictions, and disappointments of decolonization and independence.
Herz's introduction, “The New Domain: Architecture at the Time of Liberation,” considers what scholars might learn from studying Africa's robust—yet quickly disappearing—modernist archive and considers what “independent” and “modern” mean in an African context. Drawing on the...