Known as the state house, the presidential palace, and an assortment of other terms — the building that hosts a country’s seat of government is usually quite architecturally striking. Frequently opulent, grand, and sometimes imposing, the state house is intended to function as a visually distinct marker of a nation — an extension of a state’s identity. In the African continent, a landmass that had seen a significant part of it colonized by European nations, this identity of statehood, in an architectural sense, is complex.
There is the 1960s and 1970s Modernism found in places like Ghana and Senegal, as newly-independent nations sought to express a markedly different architectural aesthetic in an age of liberation. Similar architectural approaches are found throughout the continent, in addition to the subsequent prevalence of a globalized “International” style.
