The 2014 Venice Biennale program of national pavilions was titled “Absorbing Modernity,” which had the premise that local, regional, and national cultures had absorbed the modern way of building in different ways. One of the most exciting places that Modernism intersected with traditional aesthetic notions and traditional building techniques was in Africa.
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With the withdrawal of colonial powers, newly formed nations were left to their own devices to establish their own identities, resulting in a flood of inventive and ambitious architecture in these new countries. The movement continues today, and along with any straightforward architectural movement always comes someone even more creative and visionary. Some might say that Lebbeus Woods was that figure for the early digital or post-PoMo formalists, a cut hero whose legacy posthumously endures even today. Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez, who passed away on March 14, was arguably the one who dreamt up the urban visions in Africa and influenced others to dream big.
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Bodys made models of futurist African cities that imagined megacities with equally fantastic architecture. He called these artworks “Extreme Models,” and he used a variety of methods, such as cardboard and found objects such as bottle caps or tinfoil to realize these visions. His work was exhibited in places as far-flung as the Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany.
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The artworks are reminiscent of the modern-vernacular ambitions of Bolivia’s spaceship architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, whose new indigenous architecture that has an extreme influence from traditional arts and crafts. It is a politically charged local architecture that represents the ambitions of an entire population, much like the urban dreams of Bodys.
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