Built on the outskirts of the Senegalese capital as a showcase for global trade in 1974, this astonishing city-sized hymn to the three-sided shape was designed by young French architects Jean Francois Lamoureux, Jean-Louis Marin and Fernand Bonamy. Their obsessive geometrical composition was an attempt to answer the call of Senegal’s first president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, for a national style that he curiously termed “asymmetrical parallelism”. Many such projects feature in the Atlantic coast volume of Sub-Saharan Africa, an immense new architectural guide that brings together a staggering collection of more than 850 buildings from 49 countries within 3,400 pages. Seven years in the making, the publication provides an illuminating cross-section of the continent, from the glittering skyscrapers of oil-rich Luanda in Angola to the mud mosques of Mali and the art deco buildings of Burundi. It boasts more than 350 authors, half with African roots (it’s also available in individual volumes, allowing you to spread out the load of the full 8kg set).
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN