Africa Is a Country

David Adjaye's Urban Africa

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

David Adjaye's Urban Africa

By
Sean Jacobs

For a while now I’ve been wanting to post some of the images by celebrated architect David Adjaye‘s to “… photograph and document key cities in Africa as part of an ongoing project to study new patterns of urbanism.”  It is also part of Adjaye’s “… personal quest … to address the scant knowledge of the built environment of the African continent.” The pictures were displayed at London’s Design Museum till earlier this month as a series of large projections against a backdrop of African beats composed by Adjaye’s brother for the exhibit. David Adjaye visited 46 cities and took 36,000 pictures. Only 3,000 pictures were displayed in the gallery. Some of it gives the impression of holiday snapshots, while others have more to them, like the one above taken in downtown Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, a city once referred to as the “Paris of West Africa.”  Here‘s a link to a mainstream review. Anybody went to see it? Would love to hear your reactions of seeing the photographs in the exhibition. The pics here are only a small sample.

(BTW, Adjaye has been commissioned to design the new Smithsonian National Museum of African History and Culture planned on the Mall in Washington D.C.).

Asmara, Eritrea

Cairo, Egypt

Gaborone, Botswana

Dakar, Senegal

Nouakchott, Mauritania

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