Architecture in Africa: 'Lasting Foundations'

Map It:  Judiciary Square   Shaw-Howard U 

THE SHOW ABOUT art and architecture is OK in "Lasting Foundations: The Art of Architecture in Africa," which runs through Jan. 13 at the National Building Museum.

Between the lines is a better show about time, the extreme tests of which, on these huts, houses, mosques and palaces found throughout Africa, have no parallel in a society that produces the Toll Brothers' Santa Barbara Foyer.

The rubric seems overbroad, but what aligns Mali's mushroomlike Dogon granaries, the Dorze huts of Ethiopia and the melting mud houses in Sirigu, Ghana, is the notion of exigent architecture, often impermanent, harassed by the elements over generations until natural materials, intuitive structures and basic purposes combine into the simplest of machines for living.

The houses of the Saharan Tuareg nomads with hide walls go up and come down in a day. Mud-and-rice mosques like the famous example at Djenne in Mali can be replastered easily every year for centuries, by virtue of built-in log scaffolds that stud the high walls and create yet another exuberant patterning as part of the canny reduction in means.

Little has been rationalized into anything like a floor plan: One of the few architects mentioned by name, El Hadj Abou Moussa, says his vaulted adobe interior of a mosque in Sanam, Niger (1998), came to him in "a dream sent by God."

Given so many design languages at once, more translation into our own — with a few diagrams, better maps and dates of the works — would be illuminating. Yet nothing speaks more clearly than the West African wood house posts arranged down the middle of the pumpkin-colored gallery. In the rawest media, a design spites its constraints by animating them.

» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW, free; 202-272-2448; nbm.org. (Judiciary Square)

Written by Express contributor Bradford McKee
Photos courtesy National Building Museum