Paper for Docomomo 2024 Conference,
December 9-15, 2024,
Santiago, Chile.
December 9-15, 2024,
Santiago, Chile.
In the second half of the 20th century, educational buildings played an important role in the process of nation-building of the newly independent African states. Between the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of elementary and technical schools, teachers’ colleges, and universities were endowed with the task of educating the new generation of African professionals and public administrators. Large university projects were among the most significant public buildings constructed at the time, contributing to public and civic life. The educational politics of “Africanization” was also reflected in the buildings’ architectural language, as imported modernist forms were adapted to local climatic realities through a wide range of tectonic devices, local materials, and stylistic elements. Today, the architectural histories of these educational buildings and their role in national heritage remain severely overlooked.
The paper corrects this shortcoming by dissecting the many architectural layers behind the project for the Institute of Developmental Management (IDM) in Tanzania, built in the early 1970s and financed through the joint effort of the Nordic countries. Originally intended to address Tanzania’s manpower needs, the project underwent a series of design transformations introduced by local and foreign “experts.” Its architecture then represented a site of negotiation between local Tanzanian needs and imposed Western techno-scientific education models of the late 1960s. Building on the original archival research, the paper investigates the many archaeological layers behind this seemingly typical “tropical modernism” university project, intending to complicate the long-assumed divide between the Global South and the Global North. Today, these buildings are still in use, and this paper, focused on histories of architectural inter-dependencies, suggests the term “mixed modernisms” to encourage a different line of thinking about the architectural value of such projects—and hence, their preservation.
[paper draft]