Review: Modern Architecture and Its Representation in Colonial Eritrea: An In-visible Colony, 1890–1941, by Sean Anderson

Abstract

Sean Anderson Modern Architecture and Its Representation in Colonial Eritrea: An In-visible Colony, 1890–1941 Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2015, 312 pp., 143 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 9781472414960 Sean Anderson's important new book, Modern Architecture and Its Representation in Colonial Eritrea: An In-visible Colony, 1890–1941 , significantly improves our understanding of the built environment in Eritrea during its half century of Italian colonial rule. Anderson discusses the many roles Eritrea served—as military outpost, demographic colony, agricultural settlement, and imperial symbol—under both liberal and fascist regimes. His nuanced reading of urbanism and architecture fuels a careful study of Eritrea's place in the modernization of Italy. Eritrea was the Italian state's first colony in Africa, and as the colonia primogenita (firstborn colony) it enjoyed a high level of public and private investment. It also received a great deal of attention from architects, who saw the colony as a place that would allow unrestrained experimentation. As Anderson explains, Italians conceived of Africa as an “empty space” that needed to be organized and ordered through the built environment. Professional organizations devoted considerable resources to promoting the design of colonial cities and buildings, and private companies invested significant funds in commercial activities in Eritrea and the later colonies of Somalia, Tripolitania and …