African Metropolitan Architecture
David Adjaye, edited by Peter Allison
Rizzoli, 2011
Paperback (7 volumes w/slipcase) | 9-1/2 x 11-1/2 inches | 576 pages | 3,000+ illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0847837168 | $100.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
The architecture and built environment of African cities are documented in groundbreaking photographs by acclaimed architect David Adjaye. David Adjaye is renowned for his highly acclaimed buildings in Europe and the United States. Of Tanzanian descent but raised and educated in London, he has found endless inspiration for his modern buildings in Africa. This book is the culmination of a personal quest--a decade-long project to document the built environment of every major African city.
Adjaye has photographed thousands of structures and places, letting each speak for itself in contrast to a design world obsessed with photorealistic slickness. Fifty-three cities are featured, arranged by terrain and region, including: the Maghreb, the Sahel, Savannah and Grassland, Mountain and Highveld, Desert, and Forest. Each is presented with a concise urban history, fact file, maps, and satellite imagery along with the photographs and essays by leading scholars and critics.
This handsome seven-volume slipcased edition is one of the most original and ambitious publications of our time and is sure to be among the great architectural collectibles.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
About a decade before the latest collaboration between architect David Adjaye and editor Peter Allison — the monograph David Adjaye - Works 1995-2007: Houses, Pavilions, Installations, Buildings — they created Adjaye • Africa • Architecture, which was published in the UK by Thames & Hudson in 2011 and simultaneously released in the USA by Rizzoli under the name African Metropolitan Architecture. With seven volumes, a slipcase, and a large page size adding up to a big price tag ($100), the book was out of reach for many. But five years later T&H released a compact version (one of my favorite books of 2016) that gave Adjaye's decade-long documentation of African capital cities a wider audience. For years, all I had was the compact version, but fortuitously I came across a used copy of the earlier slipcased title, specifically the US version, which is what I'm covering here.
Adjaye was born in Tanzania and raised in Ghana, where his parents were from. He saw much of the continent as a boy, since his father was a diplomat and travel was part of the job. After studying architecture in the UK and forming his practice in London, Adjaye made a return to Africa to cover much the same ground he traversed as a child. (He now has an office in Africa, in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in addition to offices in London and New York.) He methodically documented cities in 53 countries on the continent (South Sudan is the missing 54th, having gained independence the same year the book came out) through photographs, many of them taken from taxis. Adjaye goes so far as to thank all of the taxi drivers at the back of the book's first volume (it consists of essays and serves as an introduction to the whole) for "insights into their cities and communities I have relied on while mapping the project." That "mapping" is also literal, since, in addition to Adjaye's own photographs, which are organized typologically (civic, commercial, residential), each city is described through aerials and maps, demographic data, and historical descriptions, the last by Allison.
In my "brief" on the book's compact edition I mentioned that if the 8x10-inch book were any smaller Adjaye's photos would be too small on the page. That is certainly not the case with the larger multi-volume book, but his photos suffer a bit from the choice of paper: a matte surface that makes the large slipcased object lighter than it would have been with glossy pages but results in less-than-vibrant photos. If he took photos like Iwan Baan, who has documented Africa a lot, this paper choice would be a huge problem, but Adjaye's photos are fairly crude, meaning there's a synergy between the content and the medium. Most important about his photos are their abundance — around 65 per city, adding up to well over 3,000 — as well as what's depicted, which is to say a lot of what's missing from books on architecture and cities: the buildings and places that depart dramatically from capital-A architecture. Adjaye's thorough documentation of African cities is a revealing treasure-trove, a passion project that in the long run is sure to overshadow the monographs and other books Adjaye and Allison have made together.
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