The Worlding of Architectural Labor

Abstract

The effort to imagine worlds beyond colonialism has become a central subject for recent historiography, and in this enormously important contribution from Łukasz Stanek, the postcolonial imagination enfolds the architectural labor of experts from the Comecon states who worked in West Africa and the Middle East from 1957 to 1990. Stanek’s long and detailed project is timely, not least as a counter to the dominance of architectural research conducted in Western European and Anglophone archives. Stanek has gathered project files from the dispersed personal and institutional archives of former socialist architectural bureaus and companies, and conducted site-based research, often with African academics. His remarkably persistent research — some details of it are given in a concluding note on sources (308) — has unearthed an extraordinary record, often in the form of long unseen plans, photographs, and publicity. Read as manifestations of new worldmaking during the intense growth period of Africa’s ‘short century’ and the Middle East’s early growth decades, these designs emerged from urban modernization, decolonial agendas, and foreign collaborations. After proposing to address both the histories and significance of these ‘new geographies of collaboration’ and hinting at projects in Syria, Ethiopia, and Algeria that fall outside this volume, Stanek limits his case studies to four main sites and periods: Ghana during 1957–66, Lagos during 1966–79, Baghdad during 1958–90, and Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City during 1979–90. These are places where some major projects designed for the new regimes were built, including international trade fair infrastructures, the complex built in Lagos to host the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac ’77), and government buildings for Abu Dhabi. In parallel, socialist consultants also contributed to several master plans or ‘type designs’ (215–22) of standardized building layouts or components. These commissions led to incremental growth in the exchange of expertise as socialist architects worked abroad, sometimes with African assistants, and occasionally beneath Middle Eastern experts. Sometimes, however, they suffered problems of coordination, unsustainable costs, and, in some later cases, outdated design approaches. The projects Stanek describes were often produced through collective ventures, including state-funded design institutes. This approach to procurement contrasted with the colonial practices of foreign architecture where research stations would offer expertise to professional offices and construction firms, a likely more flexible way of distributing knowledge, but a less efficient route to scaling up construction. While there are some extraordinary narratives of grand projects carried out by Comecon experts, the stories of those overseas experts who became more embedded in local societies by joining local institutions make for some of the most revealing content. These stories point to the significance of