Africa: Architects for the Developing

Some emerging nations seem convinced that they can best establish status by expelling or jailing American diplomats. An increasing number, fortunately, have found a more useful path to national pride: hiring foreign architects to design government buildings, hospitals, universities and even cities. To meet this demand, a colony of American firms has sprung up in Rome, which otters the nearest reservoir of technical talent and the best transportation to the underdeveloped nations. Last week Rome's top American architects ranged over Africa and Asia Minor, supervising hospital construction in Nigeria and Iraq, launching a highway project in Libya, delivering final drawings for a prison in Baghdad.

From Thailand to Senegal. The largest of the Rome-based American firms Whiting Associates International, arrived on the scene ten years ago and has since participated in construction projects worth $750 million in 19 countries from Thailand to Senegal. Another U.S. firm, Robert S. McMillan Associates, has been in Rome only two years but already has won contracts for an 8,000-student university in Iran, a mosque in Tanzania and a series of military-training centers in Nigeria. The newest entry, McGaughy, Marshall, McMillan & Lucas, had specialized in overseas work for the U.S. armed forces for ten years before it established headquarters in Rome in late 1963 and shifted its emphasis to needs of emerging nations. The shift has paid off. McGaughy is working on the plan and initial construction of a new city of 30,000 to replace the Libyan town of Barce, destroyed in a 1963 earthquake. These firms, which constitute a sort of architectural peace corps, stress speed, diplomacy, language fluency and building techniques that can easily be learned by local unskilled labor. Aware that traditional European architectural styles evoke unpleasant memories of the

colonial era, the architects concentrate on ultramodern styles. They also avoid native themes: new nations resent being considered quaint.

Speed is essential. "In Africa," says Robert McMillan, "governments often assume that once you get a commission the building will start popping out of the ground in a few days." Anxious to oblige, McMillan Associates began making preliminary drawings for one of its first jobs—the University of Lagos —in April 1963, worked hard to get construction under way by the following September. But the architects cannot always cater to their clients' demands. Whiting Associates' President Edmund Whiting rejects proposals by new nations for massive hospitals with sophisticated equipment, fights for acceptance of more modest facilities "We could take their money," he explains but they would be losers in the end."

From Camels to Ju-Ju. Architecture for emerging nations has its own set of special problems. In designing houses architects must often plan not only enough bedrooms for parents and children but also space for the family's camel and goats. Buildings in Libya require weather stripping and storm windows to keep sand from blowing in African buildings must be equipped with insect shields, and bird and snake screens. Excavation sites are usually sterilized to kill voracious African bugs that can even bore through concrete