Harmony Murphy
Modernist Exile Beyond the Colonies: Architecture of Escape and Export in Sub-Saharan Africa
When Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson opened Exhibition 15 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1932, the style they had selected from Europe would ignite a canon. Crossing the Atlantic these designs became international, in an effort that sought to make modern architecture ubiquitous. Reiterated in the department’s next show, 10 years later, Brazil Builds, the momentum of this gesture had pushed the cannon beyond international, into universal. Despite Johnson’s claim that he intended to present an aesthetic divorced from political implications, the spread of his stylist dogma can not be separated form the connotations held within it. Modernism, projecting a new transparency, a rigorous hygienic prescription, and a dedication to technology would not break from history, but rather spawn a collective one through the shared experience of modernism throughout the world.
In Africa, the absorption of modernist principles was piecemeal. Europe poured its architectural projections onto the colonies of the North, extending modernism as an exportation of European culture and a solidification of its political strength and dominance. Southern Africa, physically an economically isolated, contained a more autonomous infrastructure than its northern counterparts. Resulting from this and the lack of attention to the region by mainstream western culture, the area was allotted a certain freedom from scrutiny and the promise of experimentation. Émigrés from Europe, such as Ernst May, Hellmut Stauch, and A.S. Furner, exiled from war-torn Europe or dissatisfied with the prospects of contributing to the movement within the framework established, relocated to the region. Their activities in the area helped promote a laboratory of modernism and establish a thriving and contained trajectory opposed to the empirical parasitic tourism in the North.
This thesis examines the central figures who carved a place for modernism in Sub-Saharan Africa, including the Africans Norman Eaton, G.E. Pearse, and members of the Transvaal Group. The thesis purports that an investigation into the dissemination of modernism and the impregnation of an International Style into what Corbusier called “the end of the earth” reveals the power of architecture to catalyze what is now referred to as globalization. The phenomenon of this period gives us greater understanding of how the effects of collective methods of production and lifestyles permeate the exportation and organization of cultures to expose a universality.

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