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In an African City, All Roads Lead to Rome
September 11, 2003
By MARC LACEY
ASMARA, Eritrea
THERE is a joke about an Asmarino, as the proud residents
of this African capital call themselves, who visits Italy
and is surprised at how much the architecture there mimics
the buildings back home.
Naigzy Gebremedhin, an Asmara architect who has cataloged
the city's historic buildings, chuckled as he recounted the
tale. "The Asmarino loves his city," he said, sipping a
macchiato in an Asmara cafe. "He thinks everyplace else is
pedestrian. The typical Asmarino believes there's no place
in the world like Asmara."
On that point the Asmarino is right. History has been
extraordinarily cruel to Eritrea, which suffered many
decades of foreign occupation, but it has been quite
generous, too. Today Asmara, the capital of Africa's newest
state, which is nestled along the Red Sea, finds itself a
standout among the continent's congested and tattered urban
centers.
The Italian occupiers who built up Asmara in the 1930's
used the city as an architectural Petri dish. Bold
experimentation that might have gone too far in Europe was
permitted, even encouraged, in this colonial outpost. "The
Italians tried to express the modern Roman empire in grand
terms on a blank slate, just as the British did in Delhi,"
said Gabriel Abraham, an Eritrean architect based in
Cambridge, Mass. What remains today is an architectural
mishmash, but one that makes Asmara one of rarest
concentrations of modernism in the world.
It can require some imagination to look past the crumbling
plaster and appreciate the bold designs behind it. But it
is clear that these buildings were erected for more than
their functionality. There are turrets and grand arches,
Art Deco awnings and, in the spirit of Italian Futurism,
swooping references to trains, planes and ocean liners.
Most of this has sat untouched since it was built in the
first half of the 20th century.
A book on the city's architectural wonders, "Asmara:
Africa's Secret Modernist City," to be published next month
by Merrell, provides a building-by-building look at a place
that Mussolini dreamed would be the start of his Italian
empire in East Africa. "The Miami of Africa" is what some
have called Asmara because of its Art Deco treasure, but
other architectural styles are represented as well -
Rationalism, Novecento, neo-Classicism, neo-Baroque, and
monumentalism among them.
"I was astonished to see the architecture of Asmara," said
Nadine Bolle, a professor of architectural history at the
University of Applied Science in Geneva, who visited Asmara
several years ago. "There aren't many cities anywhere in
the world with such an assemblage of well-preserved
historical buildings."
Mr. Gebremedhin, an architectural consultant who wrote the
book with two colleagues, Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren,
soaks up his city's treasures as he strolls. Like so many
Eritreans who fled the long years of fighting in his
homeland, Mr. Gebremedhin, 69, spent most of his life
elsewhere, in his case in Ethiopia. But he is back now,
trying to help his country make the transition to peace.
"Beyond the peeling paint, you see an urban idiom that is
so pleasing," he said, gazing up at a refurbished villa.
"Look at that gutter system. It is almost sculpted. Asmara
is full of secrets."
But preserving the past is a challenge in a country that
ranks among the world's poorest. Mr. Gebremedhin stood
recently in the center median of Sematat Avenue, a broad
roadway dedicated to those who died helping Eritrea win
independence in 1991 after a succession of administrators
from Italy, then Britain and finally Ethiopia.
As traffic rushed by in both directions, including cars as
old as the buildings, Mr. Gebremedhin began scowling. He
motioned toward a nondescript office building called Nakfa
House, towering at nine stories above all surrounding
structures. "Here's a building that doesn't fit in
anywhere," he said.
Mr. Gebremedhin pointed out that the building, erected in
the early 1990's, dwarfs a former Fiat Tagliero service
station built in the streamlined style of Futurism and
blocks the view southward from the city center. But some
good has come from it. "That's the terrible building," he
said, "that caused us all to decide to save the city."
The old stone and cement facades are relatively intact, but
the interiors have received little or no maintenance over
the years, especially since many owners fled the country.
Now, in a rare period of peace, Eritreans are repatriating,
bringing with them not only additional car traffic through
narrow streets but new demands for housing.
In response, Asmara established a historical district of
one and a half square miles in the heart of town two years
ago and restricted alterations to any of the significant
properties there. Such preservation impulses are rare in
Africa. Not all Eritrean property owners relished the
designation, some seeing it as an infringement on their
property rights. But dissent has been muted by Eritrea's
intense community spirit, as well as by rising property
values.
The effort has been led by Mr. Gebremedhin, who heads
Eritrea's Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project. Financed
with a $5 million World Bank grant, the project aims to
catalog Asmara's historical treasures and work to preserve
them.
Usually, war destroys history, but not here. It was
Eritrea's long history of conflict, which isolated it from
the outside world, that preserved Asmara. The British, who
took control of Eritrea from the Italians during World War
II, did little to alter the place. Their main influence on
Asmara architecture was to remove some of the more blatant
architectural tributes to Mussolini.
Ethiopian control over Eritrea, its tiny northern neighbor,
lasted from 1962 to 1991 but did little to change Asmara
either. The city was largely left to languish as Eritrean
rebels waged a 30-year war for independence, a grueling
campaign that required them to sustain themselves in the
country's harsh landscape. Asmara was a place they dreamed
of returning to one day.
In 1991, after the fall of the military regime in Ethiopia,
that dream came true. The new nation of Eritrea, created
officially in 1993, found its capital tattered but
standing. But peace did not last long: a border skirmish
with Ethiopia broke out in 1998 and lasted two years,
leaving tens of thousands dead and wrecking the country's
economy. Asmara emerged a little more weathered but still
largely unscathed.
The city was designed as an extension of the Italian
lifestyle of the 1930's. The broad avenues promoted the
passeggiata, or evening stroll. The sidewalk cafes and
ornate cinemas were places of diversion.
Despite Eritrea's difficulties, that lifestyle lives on.
Eritreans, more than any other Africans, still relish
leisurely walks. They crowd along the old Viale Mussolini,
now called Harnet Avenue (from the Tigrinya word for
independence), ambling along to nowhere in particular.
As they stroll, Eritreans pass some of the city's grandest
architecture. There is the stately Asmara Theater, with its
Romanesque and Renaissance flourishes, sitting on a hill
framed by palm trees. Although in serious need of
refurbishment, like so many of Asmara's buildings, the
theater has a well-preserved Art Nouveau fresco showing
eight women dancing overhead.
Across the street is the former Palazzo Falletta, which
like other Novecento-style buildings has the distinctive
balance of modern and classical that characterized Italian
design between the wars. The structure, an apartment
building erected in 1937, was designed as a modern version
of a medieval castle with corner towers built around a
central courtyard.
The Viale Mussolini itself was built as a parade ground,
wide enough for throngs of Italian faithful. The old
Fascist Party headquarters shoots up prominently at one
corner, a brick-and-mortar tribute to the supreme leader;
it now houses Eritrea's Ministry of Education. The austere
building, whose height was meant to give it outsize
authority, was never finished, because Allied troops
arrived in midconstruction in 1941.
The dark side of the Italian occupation of Asmara can still
be seen in the grim ghettos set aside for the local
population. Italians built none of the city's grand
structures for the Eritreans. They planned to stay forever,
and their development of the city showed clear disdain for
those they called the "natives."
The slums remain, and the poor residents there still feel
cut off from the Italian part of town, now home to more
prosperous Eritreans. "We feel like part of our city is a
museum, but this is real life," said Ahmed, a college
student, standing by the tin-roof shack he calls home. He
said he was frightened to give his full name because of the
government's intolerance of any dissent.
Eritrea has not gone the way of other African countries,
which have sought to wipe out reminders of their colonial
past. Perhaps because they suffered mightily under
Ethiopian occupation, many older Eritreans recall the
Italian days with some nostalgia. Most traces of the
Ethiopian rule have been erased, but remembrances from the
Italian days endure.
Bar Crispi, named after Francesco Crispi, the Italian
foreign minister who organized the original colony of
Eritrea, still serves up homemade vino. A plaque at the
Orthodox Cathedral indicates it was built in the year XVI -
1938 on the Mussolini calendar, which started time at the
beginning of his rule in 1922.
"This is our town," said Tesfai Menghistu, a retired oil
executive who was born in 1937, at the heart of the
building boom. "Maybe it's an Italian concept, but our
blood and sweat built it. I don't feel this is a foreign
place. It may look like an Italian town, but it's
Eritrean."
Today, Asmara finds itself caught in an odd interplay of
past, present and future. At the cavernous Cinema Impero,
built in 1937 and elaborately decorated with sculptures and
bas-reliefs, a few dozen people walked up the marble
staircase into the grand interior the other day to watch
value="55649;187123">"X-Men," the futuristic
2000 film starring Halle Berry. The old projection room,
where film reels used to roll, was abandoned several years
ago in favor of a modern DVD projector.
As for the old Fiat gas station, designed in 1938 by
Giuseppe Pettazzi, it is now in the midst of a renovation,
surrounded by construction fencing. Invoking the Futurist
style, Mr. Pettazzi designed concrete wings that jut out 97
feet. The city authorities of the time, not trusting his
structural calculations, required him to put pillars under
the wings. But Mr. Pettazzi, by local legend, installed
detachable pillars and forced the builder at gunpoint to
remove them at the station's opening.
More than six decades later, the wings (still pillarless)
remain in place. Soon the building will house a disco.
The former Bank of Eritrea building, one of Asmara's first
Modernist buildings, escaped the wrecking ball in the
1990's, when developers began trying to spruce up the
capital. The bank, with vertical windows and simple
geometries, was to have been replaced by a huge glass
high-rise. But the building's past helped secure its
future. In an earlier incarnation, the bank had served as a
prison - Caserma Mussolini, it was called - and some of the
Eritreans who were jailed there wanted a reminder of the
difficult old days of foreign rule.
Not everybody agreed. Mesghina Almedom, 78, a retired
schoolteacher and a former member of the Eritrean
Parliament, said the old building had too many bad
memories. "People suffered and died in there," he said. "If
I were head of the country I would have destroyed it
overnight."
As for the rest of the old buildings, Mr. Almedom said he
does not view the Italian structures as truly representing
Eritrea's heritage. "They're useful to us," he said of the
grand architecture. "Why should we destroy them? The
Italians left us some good things. Let's not deny the past,
good and bad."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/garden/11ASMA.html?ex=1064310051&ei=1&en=8b0a43c2554a5f28
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