Dialogue I: Performing Modernist Architecture

Abstract

In this review article, two independently authored texts examine how modernist architecture on the African continent continues to shape and be reshaped by the operations that actively produce memory. The authors approach these operations in individual yet interconnected analyses of building ‘performance’, both a tool of colonial production and a practice of decolonial re-enchantment. The first text examines how modernist buildings, urban plans and infrastructures in West Africa created a narrow and technocratic definition of performance, focused mainly on European standards of climate comfort. Presented as bringing ‘civilised’ living standards to the continent, these interventions, equipped with sun shading, natural and mechanical ventilation, obscured the colonial and capitalist extractive practices that sustained not only European development in the 1960s but also the very same comfort. The second text counters this narrative by centring performance as an embodied, relational practice happening through and within architectural form. Looking at the life of the Uganda National Cultural Centre and Theatre, performance becomes a practice of reclaiming epistemic authority. The piece situates the struggles of reclamation within contemporary debates on preservation, where institutions often risk reinforcing a universalising heritage gaze that prioritises architectural form over lived experiences. Read together, both texts propose that decolonial futures emerge not by analysing and preserving architectural form alone but by interrogating the operations that produce memory and reclaiming performance as a situated, collective, and continuously negotiated practice.