Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City

Asmara, the capital of the small east African country of Eritrea, bordering the Red Sea, is one of the most important and exciting architectural discoveries of recent years. Built almost entirely in the 1930s by the Italians, Asmara has one of the highest concentrations of Modernist architecture anywhere in the world, and has been evocatively described as the Miami of Africa. Desperate to build quickly, the colonial government of the time allowed radical architectural experimentation that would not have found favour in the more conservative European environment. Asmara therefore became the world's prime building ground for architectural innovation during the Modern Movement. That this occurred at all is remarkable enough, but that these buildings should have survived in such numbers today makes it one of the finest Modernist cities in the world. Asmara's extraordinary history, engagingly retold at the beginning of this book, has meant that this important architectural legacy has escaped the destruction wrought by war and the exploitation of land that, elsewhere, has occurred in peacetime. Now that the city is open to the world, following the declaration of Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia in 1991, there has been a growing awareness of its architectural richness and significance, but never before has this legacy been published. This building-by-building survey, illustrated with rare archival material and specially commissioned photographs, is a groundbreaking publication that is set to become one of the most important new books on Modernist architecture of recent decades.