Some exhibitions introduce us to works of art. Others invite us to look differently at history.
With Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, New York’s Museum of Modern Art takes us into a chapter that has long remained at the margins of the dominant narratives of modern architecture. From university campuses in Ghana to public buildings in Côte d’Ivoire, from infrastructure in Cameroon to Dakar’s changing urban landscape, more than two decades of architectural production re-emerge through drawings, photographs, models, films and archival documents.
Since its founding in 1929, MoMA has played a major role in the recognition and dissemination of modern architecture. As early as 1932, its exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition helped establish the notion of the “International Style.” Nearly a century later, the museum shifts its focus. Following four years of research across West Africa and numerous collections, Architects of Liberation brings together around 400 objects, the vast majority of which are being shown to the public for the first time.
Giving Form to the Aspirations of an Era
Built around the theme of “liberation,” the exhibition explores a particular historical moment in Africa: a period when new possibilities were opening up and newly independent societies were seeking to build their own frameworks.
During this period of intense activity, projects multiplied. Cities expanded, new institutions emerged, and the need for housing and public facilities grew. Schools and universities, government buildings, cultural and commercial spaces, railway stations and infrastructure gradually began to shape the spaces of a changing collective life. It is this extraordinary proliferation that the exhibition documents, through projects that engage in particular with the city, education and housing.
In Kumasi, the university became not only a place to study, but also a place to live and meet. In Yamoussoukro, a school facility could take the form of a concrete auditorium with almost sculptural lines. In Douala, a railway station accompanied new patterns of urban movement. From one programme to another, architecture gave concrete form to new needs: to learn, live, work, travel and connect.
This architectural effervescence was part of a movement that had already profoundly transformed architecture elsewhere in the world: modernism. Emerging several decades earlier from a desire to break with inherited styles, it privileged function, clean lines and the new possibilities offered by concrete, steel and glass. In West Africa, however, this vocabulary was far from simply reproduced. It was adapted and reinvented according to the programmes, cultures and specific conditions of each territory.
The exhibition captures the full diversity of this architectural landscape. While many of the buildings on view were designed by international architects, MoMA pays particular attention to a generation that was emerging at the time: some of the first professionally trained African architects, who were beginning to take their place in this history.
The career of Ghanaian architect John Owusu Addo offers a compelling example. Trained in London in the 1950s, he returned to Ghana in the years following independence and joined what would become the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. There, he both designed and taught: by contributing to the development of the campus, he was also helping to train those who would go on to shape the cities and buildings of the decades ahead.
Other trajectories emerge throughout the exhibition. In Nigeria, Demas Nwoko explored the possibilities of an architecture informed both by modernity and by local building and artistic traditions. In Côte d’Ivoire, Jean Léon developed an architecture whose forms could be strikingly bold. In Senegal, Cheikh Ngom also belonged to this first generation to which the exhibition gives particular attention.
It is this polyphony that the exhibition seeks to bring to light. But how can one make visible, from a museum gallery in New York, buildings scattered across West Africa? This is the challenge at the heart of the exhibition design conceived by MoMA.
Looking at a Building Differently
A photograph can capture the silhouette of a building; a plan can reveal its organisation. But how can we recover its volumes, its circulation, the architect’s intentions—and sometimes what time has transformed? This is precisely where MoMA’s exhibition design becomes particularly compelling.
In the galleries, buildings are never reduced to a single image. Drawings, plans, historical photographs, archival documents and models enter into dialogue with new photographic commissions and films produced for the exhibition. From one medium to another, our gaze moves closer and shifts in scale.
The Bessengué railway station in Douala provides one of the most compelling examples. To bring it back into view, researchers had to return to the archives of the Cameroonian architects Jacques Nsangue Akwa and Emilien Douala Bell. Historical photographs and documents are accompanied at MoMA by a reconstructed model of the station. What had survived only as plans, images and traces once again acquires volume; a distant building suddenly becomes more intelligible.
Elsewhere, drawing brings the visitor closer to the architect’s gesture. Jean Léon’s sketches reveal a formal exploration echoed in the boldness of his built work. Without attempting to reconstruct a linear progression from one building to the next, their presence offers a glimpse into an architectural imagination searching for its own forms.
La Pyramide in Abidjan offers another way of bringing different moments into dialogue. Archival material recalls the silhouette imagined by Rinaldo Olivieri at the turn of the 1970s, while new photographs allow us to encounter the building as it stands today. The exhibition thus directly confronts the way the building was seen at the time of its construction with the perspective of contemporary photographer François-Xavier Gbré.
Time itself enters the galleries. A historical photograph restores a building at the moment of its emergence; a drawing reveals the research behind it; a model helps us grasp its spatial qualities; a contemporary image shows what it has become. The exhibition no longer simply brings together architectural works: it allows us to see them at different moments in their existence.
And this shift in perspective can sometimes lead to another discovery. The closer we look at these buildings, the more certain details begin to stand out: the depth of a façade, an overhang creating shade, an open circulation space, an orientation chosen to protect against the sun. Solutions once dictated by the very conditions of construction now resonate in strikingly contemporary ways.
Perhaps this is the moment when these buildings cease to belong solely to their own history.
Designing with the Climate
In Abidjan, La Pyramide first catches the eye through its monumental silhouette rising in the heart of the Plateau district. But as we move closer, other details emerge. The shading devices rhythmically arranged across its façades create areas of shadow; exterior circulation spaces form intermediate zones; light penetrates deep into the building. Behind its spectacular form lies another concern: how can architecture work with the sun, heat and air?
This attention to climate is one of the threads running through the exhibition—and one of those that resonates most strongly with contemporary concerns. Recessed façades, sunshades, shaded galleries and natural ventilation: in the climates of West Africa, comfort cannot be separated from the way a building is oriented, opened or protected.
In Dakar, this approach is particularly visible in the work of Cheikh Ngom. On the Fayçal building, the modules that give the façade its striking pattern of “scales” are not merely graphic devices: they also protect the openings from the sun. Orientation, depth and façade design contribute directly to interior comfort.
Climate response becomes architecture. What might initially appear to be an aesthetic signature also emerges from a very concrete necessity: creating shade, limiting exposure to the sun and making spaces comfortable to inhabit. Technology does not come in afterwards to compensate for a building once it has been designed; it helps shape the building itself.
With Demas Nwoko, in Nigeria, this reflection extends further still. Climate does not simply influence the façade but the project as a whole. Openings, air circulation, natural light, the thickness of walls and materials are conceived together. Architecture begins with the environment in which it is embedded, rather than with a form that must subsequently be adapted to it.
It would be tempting today to read these buildings as ecological manifestos ahead of their time. That would be to impose our own categories upon them. Their architects were first and foremost responding to immediate realities: intense sunlight, heat, rain, the need to circulate air and the resources available. Yet it is precisely because these constraints were integrated from the earliest stages of design that some of their responses feel so relevant today.
Our questions, after all, have changed. Reducing dependence on air conditioning, rediscovering the virtues of passive cooling, orienting buildings more effectively, using shade and ventilation before turning to mechanical systems: what was once a direct response to a particular environment now intersects with some of architecture’s most urgent concerns.
These solutions cannot simply be transplanted elsewhere, nor should they be elevated into universal models. But they remind us that another relationship between buildings, comfort and the environment is possible.
Fifty years later, these buildings offer us no ready-made formula. They may, however, remind us of something more fundamental: before seeking to compensate for the constraints of a climate, architecture can begin by designing with it.
-> To go further: Africa Hall: Africa at the Forefront of Circular Architecture
