Album Architectures, Abidjan

This is not an architecture book but a photography book on an architecture that expresses itself through diversity. It is a book that intends to offer a photogra- phic view of buildings in Abidjan that bear the imprint of a certain «tropical modernism». More precisely, Album Architectures, Abidjan is the testimony of an encounter between two individuals who live and share an aesthetic and emotional attach- ment to the lagoon city. Issa Diabaté, architect, contemporary actor of the architectural future of this city that never stops reinventing itself. François-Xavier Gbré, a photographer who has made architecture his preferred medium for apprehending the muted history of places by envisaging architectures as the sedimen- tary traces of the social and political changes of a country, the Ivory Coast. This book, and the Album Architectures collection more broadly, aims to initiate a reflection on the defini- tion of the notion of contemporary heritage through the valorisation of rich and singular architectural lands- capes, not always identified, often invisibilised, of cities in perpetual urban change.