After the Miracle State

Built Environment: Reimagining a postcolonial Ivorian cityscape with less concrete and more natural materials

- Lennart Wolff

IN JOANA CHOUMALI’s mixed-media work As the Wind Whispers (2019), dawn light engulfs the modernist towers of Abidjan’s Cité Administrative. Here, the artist stitches an intricate figure-ground composition: a scene of everyday life – companions relaxing in the shade of trees – against the backdrop of the city’s seemingly indestructible buildings made from the 1960s through to the ’80s. Structures including Hotel Ivoire (1963) and La Pyramide (1973) cemented the national aspirations of postcolonial Côte d’Ivoire: unity, independence and modernization. Long after the ‘miracle state’ of the country’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, these buildings continue to echo an unfulfilled promise of unbuilding the (neo)colonial relations between periphery and core.

Following recessions, political instability and World Bank-mandated aggressive neo-liberalization, the cranes are once again turning in Abidjan, where the tallest governmental glass high-rise in the Economic Community of West African States is being erected. The recent economic and construction boom has coincided with publications, exhibitions and nothing less than the canonization of the independence period’s so-called tropical modernism. This climate-based architectural regionalism appropriated traditional and vernacular building typologies and techniques, and was developed from the 1950s onwards by the Architectural Association in London (AA), amongst others.