Urban Africa

According to David Adjaye in his Design Museum exhibition Urban Africa, the digital camera has taken over from the sketch book as a way of recording and understanding what he sees around him. It was certainly the only way that he could achieve his monumental survey of 53 African capitals – landing in a city and snapping away as he criss-crossed each city in an effort to understand their character.

The exhibition, on until September 5, is a fine record of this huge ten year undertaking. It was, he recognises, a case of collecting images fast and then reflecting on them later – a very different process to the more lengthy business of sketching. Born in Tanzania, Adjaye lived in several African cities as a child due to his father’s work as a diplomat. The project, was his attempt “to piece together fragments of memories, documenting where I was born and grew up as a child.”

Adjaye’s early work was in exhibition design, and this exhibition shows he hasn’t lost his touch. The first room is bright yellow – yellow carpet, walls and rows of flags hanging from the ceiling. The effect evokes heat, and the sun. On these walls are six giant graphics of Africa, showing flags, languages, terrain, population densities, borders and capitals, and a satellite map. This was a fascinating and much needed primer before plunging into the middle room where images of Adjaye’s photographs are projected in loops on to half a dozen huge screens, while a soundtrack of city sounds give an immerse quality to the experience. 

Grandiose monuments, crumbling colonial buildings, dusty, bustling thoroughfares, churches, universities, theatres, embassies, markets – this is the busy city experience away from more usual African images we in the West see of wildlife, landscape, strife, or famine.

The final room is as red as the first was yellow, with hundreds of Adjaye’s photographs on the walls, arranged in city clusters and interspersed with brief notes on the type of architecture he found. This requires lengthy perusal. The photos are small and clearly snaps. But put together they form an engrossing portrait of the built nature of each city. What comes across is the diversity of the huge continent – from the domes of Cairo cityscape to the tropical modernism of Accra. The colonial history is clear in the architectural legacy – Belgian modernism in Bujumbura, Burundi, Italian fascist architecture in Asmara, Eritrea, French modernism in Brazzaville, and English colonial planning in Victoria, Seychelles.

But as Adjaye says the project is not really about identifying architectural styles: “It has been a fast track course in C20 urbanism and city dwelling and has given me an understanding of cities as a phenomena, the flow of a city as a thing itself and not just a collection of buildings.”

More interpretation of the images would have been useful but with its huge scope, this exhibition can only ever hope to scratch the surface. But it does that to great and fascinating effect.

Urban Africa – David Adjaye’s photographic journey until September 5, Design Museum, Shad Thames, London www.designmuseum.org

Images courtesy of David Adjaye and Luke Hayes