Who builds your ‘Concrete Monsters’?

In this keynote talk, I draw on ongoing discussions within a large, 4-year research project entitled “Construction History Above and Beyond. What History can do for Construction History”, conducted together with colleagues from Ghent University, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, to respond to the invitation of this conference to “make architectural history through the prism of environmental and decolonial issues”. In line with some emerging scholarship, I will argue that focusing on the structural characteristics and materiality of built projects, and the related sources, can offer a productive entry point to engage with such issues.

In this talk, I will use the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kinshasa, constructed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and thus under president Mobutu’s rule, as a case study. Initially designed by a trio (1 Italian and 2 French architects) as the headquarters of the United Nations in the former Belgian colony, the building speaks of Congo’s turbulent Cold War years and Mobutu’s ambitions to stage Zaïre on the global scene. But the building’s – in part daring – structural design and construction simultaneously reveal the continuing role of foreign, and in particular Belgian ‘experts’. A reconstruction of the material ecologies linked to this specific project, with attention for the use of smaller, more mundane and easily overlooked building components, however, points to the necessity of taking more complex local and global connections into consideration which also raise questions of deforestation and (imperial) debris (A. Stoler). Finally, we will engage with the difficulties of trying to answer the question who actually built this concrete architecture, despite the seemingly abundant archival source material, and reflect on how to make an architectural history of this building that takes into account the “muck down below” on the building site (S. Ferro).