September 11, 2003
DESIGN DISPATCH

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 "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."