This book about the new Netherlands Embassy in Mozambique’s capital Maputo is one of the few publications on architecture in which both elements coincide: a team of architects which has mastered the art of using daylight and a photographer with the skill to produce a fitting pictorial record of this artistic achievement. Christian Richters’ large-format photos present the architecture of the Embassy in all its changing moods of light: the glass façade giving onto the street is set back behind the portico to entice dazzle-free Southerly light (we are in the Southern hemisphere, after all) deep into the office rooms, the northerly façade with its multitude of vertical light slits create a stark but playful contrast in the entrance hall, and the roof lights are distributed around the building to supply even the ancillary rooms with a generous helping of natural light.
Felix Claus and Kees Kaan are masters in the art of lending grandeur even to buildings of modest dimensions. But this volume, surprisingly handy despite its 190 pages, does more than document top-class architecture. Alongside Christian Richters’ architectural pictures, photographs by Maarten Laupmann and Vincent Panhuyzen provide a haunting record of life on the streets of what is still a poverty-stricken metropolis with its 1.24 million population: footprints in damp concrete, wall paintings with advertisements for washing agents, street markets, beach scenes, and again and again post-war-modern concrete architecture. Maputo has a scarce but modern architectural heritage, which is presented by the Portuguese architect José Forjaz at the beginning of the book. He traces the history of a rapid rise, an equally fast decline and a rebirth: in 1887 Maputo became a city and in 1898 the capital of the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, which gained its independence in 1975. This was when the decay of architecture started: ten years later only six architects worked in the whole country. A revival began after the collapse of socialism, when the first architectural faculties were founded. Presently Mozambique is culturally (and architecturally) strongly dependent on South Africa.
Not earlier than on page 85 the book approaches the embassy itself. In a plain but knowledgeable manner Hans Ibelings explains the architecture of the embassy and its manifold relations to the surroundings, a decaying villa district. Whilst Ibelings often ascribes a “clichéd exoticism, an overly dutiful adjustment or, controversially, a lack of empathy to buildings in foreign countries (from the perspective of the architect), he succinctly finds the opposite for the embassy: “It looks as if it has always been there.” The building’s relative modesty (despite its exquisite details) is also a reaction to the still precarious social situation in the country: a palace, even a water basin in the garden initially suggested by Claus en Kaan (which could have been regarded as a waste of the valuable resource drinking water) was out of the question.
The architects themselves describe the learning process, which is inherent to building in a foreign context, in the subsequent essay. They experienced the planning and construction of the embassy as a sixyear adventure, which started with the decision by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to build five new embassies in Africa, included more than 25 visits to Maputo and finally ended with the official opening in May 2005. The different building cultures in The Netherlands and Mozambique became apparent in building tolerances sometimes measured in centimetres and the surface finishing made by hand.
Rob Gaunt of the South-African partner practice EQF responsible for the realisation, and Jan Willem Smit, project manager of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, picked up the narrative thread in their contributions. Smit writes about the first encounter of clients, architects and building site as well as the approval procedure, (“a sort of shop that sold building permits as well as goods”). The reader learns astonishing and sometimes amusing details of the daily building routine in a developing country; for example the putative timber supplier who prided himself on being able to supply enormous amounts of tropical wood and, when asked to show the customer his warehouse, pointed towards the jungle behind his hut.
Anecdotes like these characterise the book’s narrative style, which is pleasantly human despite the building’s official function. One or the other building detail remains without explanation, but that only makes the environment of this architecture stand out even clearer. The publishers have even included a ten-page architectural city guide of Maputo at the end of the book.