The luxury hotel, as an architectural typology, is distinctive. In effect, it’s a self-contained community, a building that immerses the well-off visitor into their local context. Self-contained communities they might be, but these hotels are also vessels of the wider socioeconomic character of a place, where luxury living is often next door to informal settlements in the most extreme examples of social inequality.
Across select regions of the African continent, luxury hotels have been, and continue to be, key city landmarks. The 102-year-old Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, for instance, is an unmissable part of the city’s Central Business District. While some of these hotels may have an air of invincibility – continuing to be in operation for hundreds of years, some of these luxe buildings have been left abandoned and neglected, due to political turmoil or change to economic conditions in their immediate context.
These hotels have had an architectural afterlife of some sort. Some have taken in squatters or have otherwise been left alone, displaying the immense fragility of high-end architectural interventions amidst conflict and societal change. Two hotels, in Liberia and Mozambique, are arguably the most emblematic of this phenomenon.
The Mozambican port city of Beira is home to perhaps what is one of the most striking examples of luxury hotels with an afterlife in Africa – the Art Deco-style Grande Hotel. Built between 1953 and 1955 by architect Francisco de Castro, it was part of an urban planning project designed by Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial – the office responsible for urban planning in Portugal’s African and Asian colonies.
In the mid-1950s, Mozambique had been under Portuguese control for more than 400 years, and as the Grande Hotel opened in 1955, it was with colonial fanfare, the catholic Bishop of Beira inaugurating the 130-room structure that housed an Olympic-size swimming pool and balconies that looked out into the Indian Ocean. This architectural opulence existed amidst a hierarchical social order – the only indigenous Africans permitted in the hotel were employees.
Grande Hotel was built to attract wealthy tourists and influential people from across the Portuguese colonial empire and the white-minority-ruled states of Rhodesia and South Africa. Its lifetime as luxury accommodation, however, was short-lived. It was never profitable, and in 1963 closed to guests. When Mozambique gained independence in 1975, the 21,000-meter-squared site radically changed occupancy.
The first post-colonial hosts were FRELIMO, the socialist party that had come to power after a 10-year war with the Portuguese state. Now under independent rule, reclamation of the hotel from its colonial origins was underway. Spaces of leisure such as the pool bar became home to the office of FRELIMO’s Revolutionary Committee, while the main hall came to be used for party meetings and events. The basement, according to some reports, would serve as a site of incarceration for political opponents of the new government.
As civil war broke out in Mozambique in 1977, the hotel came to be used as a military base, before housing refugees from the countryside displaced by the war – a precursor to its current condition.
Today, the hotel is home to over 3500 people, this population converting the 130 rooms into apartments, with larger communal rooms divided into smaller ones by sheets of fabric. Common spaces such as the exterior courtyard and lobby areas in-between floors are used as marketplaces, and some spaces of leisure still have remnants of their original purpose. The swimming pool, for instance, is in use as a washbasin as it collects rainwater, but also sees the occasional swimmer. It’s a reflection of the architectural legacy of a hotel representative of colonial excess, that bears the scars of a segregated Beira and multiple conflicts.
Another Modernist icon stands reminiscent of a time long past in the Liberian capital of Monrovia – the 1960 Ducor Hotel. In its heyday, the rectilinear building was considered one of the few five-star hotels on the African continent, a favorite of leaders including Guinea’s Sékou Touré and Ivory Coast’s Houphouët-Boigny.
Designed by Austrian architect Adolph Hoch and German architect Caim Heinz Fenchel, the hotel was situated on Monrovia’s highest point, with the upper floors providing panoramic views of the capital and the Atlantic Ocean. Its various amenities – a pool, multiple tennis courts, and a French restaurant, made it a popular landing point for tourists from Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, as well as professionals from Asia, Europe, and the US.
Liberia’s historical context, however, was complex. Founded in 1822 as an outpost for returning freed slaves from the Americas, the state had grown into a tiered social system that was economically and politically controlled by the minority descendants of the original African American settlers, marginalizing indigenous Africans in the process. With Monrovia prospering in the 1960s, the Ducor Hotel would have been part and parcel of an exploitative society, this period seeing the migration of rural migrants to the city to avoid tiring work in rubber plantations up-country.
Conflict followed. A 1980 coup deposed the minority-rule president, and two subsequent civil wars, from 1989-1996 and 1999-2003, saw the Ducor Hotel completely transformed. From a haven for the local and foreign elite, it became a military site as gunmen were positioned there during the 2003 siege of Monrovia. More permanent residents came in the form of residents of the West Point township, as they moved into the hotel seeking a more permanent form of shelter, and refugees escaping the conflict.
With the eviction of Ducor Hotel’s residents in 2007, the hotel is now empty, carrying the marks of superfluous wealth, conflict, and abandoned domesticity. Like Grande Beira, its empty swimming pool sees occasional use, Monrovia’s younger residents communing to lounge and play. A form of informal economy has seen “security guards” charge visitors for building tours – its architectural orientation meaning that the Atlantic Ocean views from the upper floors are still highly sought after.
The architectural decay of Ducor Hotel and Grande Beira tells a simple story, that of two hotels no longer in operation. But this architectural decay has come with an architectural afterlife. An afterlife that has seen repossession of an architectural typology formerly geared to the elite, and an afterlife that has narrated historical stories of inequality.
