University of Washington anthropologist Danny Hoffman stood outside the Hotel Africa on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia. Before the nation’s fourteen-year civil war, West African elite and global investors gathered at the resort to escape the noise of the city. Now, like much of the capital, the hotel was in ruins.
The history of Hotel Africa is deeply intertwined with Liberia's journey through prosperity, conflict, and the struggle for a sustainable future. This once-luxurious landmark, located on the outskirts of Monrovia, served as a haven for West African elites and global investors before Liberia's devastating civil war. Today, its ruins stand as a poignant reminder of the nation's complex past and the challenges it faces in moving forward.
Monrovia, Liberia Skyline
Abandoned Modernism: The Rise and Fall of Luxury Hotels
Across select regions of the African continent, luxury hotels have been, and continue to be, key city landmarks. The 102-year-old Stanley Hotel in Nairobi, for instance, is an unmissable part of the city's Central Business District. While some of these hotels may have an air of invincibility - continuing to be in operation for hundreds of years, some of these luxe buildings have been left abandoned and neglected, due to political turmoil or change to economic conditions in their immediate context.
In 1979, the hotel, the largest in Liberia, hosted the Organisation of African Unity conference. The conference was led by President William R. Tolbert, Jr.
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A gem in an African crown of hospitality - it was one of West Africa’s thriving hotels, but by 1990 the last guest had checked out. Liberia had sunk into civil war and fighters and looters were moving in. It stood over Monrovia as a symbol of the sad side-effects of civil war.
The Ducor Hotel swimming pool - Monrovia, Liberia
The Empty Pool: A Metaphor for Failed Pan-African Dreams
At Hoffman’s feet lay the hotel’s centerpiece, an empty swimming pool in the shape of Africa. The pool seemed to offer a forlorn commentary on the failed hopes of a pan-African prosperity. As a seasoned photojournalist, Hoffman knew how to spot a metaphor when it gaped up at him from the ground. But as a thoughtful scholar, he also knew how to spot a cliché. Using the pool as a cheap symbol wouldn’t bring him any closer to his goal of studying how Monrovia’s future is shaped and constrained by its urban forms.
He took a photograph and kept moving, discovering throughout the city a richer and more complex portrait of the way architecture influences a city struggling to move forward.
Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination
The resulting book, Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia (Duke University Press, 2017), follows former fighters as they move throughout the capital making a living and finding homes in abandoned spaces. The book departs from typical approaches of both architectural criticism and post-conflict ethnography, though it draws fruitfully on both. Hoffman brings an anthropologist’s sensibility to architecture studies, examining buildings not as they look but as they’re actually used. He combines text and image in a form he calls “photowriting” to show how the practice of photography itself shapes how we see buildings.
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In weaving these strands together, he shows how Liberians struggle to envision a civic future that does not rely on military strongmen. More broadly, he shows how photographing everyday architecture can reveal the ways that built forms shape how people live within them. Just as a town with private shopping malls but no public squares encourages some activities over others, a postwar city with ruins but little middle-class housing enables residents to imagine some futures but not others.
The book offers a novel approach for thinking about how to live well in places shaped by the hopes and the failures of the past.
“How do we make the modern city habitable for those who experience it primarily as a site of alienation and dispossession?” Hoffman asks. “The goal is no longer to invent a new world of forms or to invent a new world through forms. The goal is to learn to inhabit ruins.”
Abandoned pool at Hotel Africa in Monrovia, Liberia.
Postwar Life and the Scars of Uncertainty
The end of combat in Liberia led in 2005 to Africa’s first democratically elected woman head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. But the years that followed were marked by unemployment, currency shortages, and an overwhelming sense of uncertainty. After years of instability, the ownership of property was frequently contested or unclear, discouraging anyone, rich or poor, from making long-term investments. When Hoffman asked Monrovians to describe a better life for themselves, they almost unanimously envisioned themselves elsewhere - returning to ancestral villages, or immigrating to New York.
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He was surprised by how many people said they would accept the return of a strongman like Charles Taylor, whose brutal rule was at least marked by predictability and less street crime than now. “The absence of a strong man had not yielded a more benevolent, participatory, or democratic state,” he writes. “It had produced a more crushing form of authoritarianism in the form of extreme uncertainty.”
That uncertainty was on full display during his research trip in the spring of 2012. In Monrovia Modern, he recounts meetings with former soldiers like Arthur Kollie, who insists on going by his war name, Major General Human Garbage. Kollie shows him the unfinished state building where he once squatted, then the small room behind a makeshift plywood door where he keeps his possessions. He tells of his military rank, though it is unclear to Hoffman exactly which military group he belonged to. Kollie identifies a nearby women and baby as his wife and child, although another former fighter tells Hoffman the story is untrue.
Decolonizing Architecture: Lessons from Monrovia
Like Lagos, Nairobi, and other sub-Saharan African cities, Monrovia experienced some of its fastest growth in the mid-20th century, when the influence of architectural modernism was at its highest. The architectural movement, at its idealistic core, believed that social uplift was possible through benevolent design. It found some of its fullest expressions in those relatively young cities, often by young architects out to make a name in less-regulated markets. Yet the movement’s most-celebrated and photographed models tend to be in Europe, North America and, to some extent, in Latin America.
This matters, Hoffman realized, because architecture is fundamentally a visual form, with influence transmitted through images. Even the most well-traveled architects have studied more buildings through photographs than by visiting them in the field. In researching Monrovia Modern, Hoffman took courses in architecture at the UW and through the Architectural Association in London, supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He saw the importance of “reference buildings” - standout examples that play an outsized role in architectural education. Most of these examples are located in climates and political contexts far from West Africa.
“Most of what design ends up being is playing with these inherited forms,” Hoffman said in a conversation. aid that benefitted only a small elite. Part of decolonizing its heritage, Hoffman argues, is recognizing that Monrovia has much to teach critical scholars of modernism.
“Ironically,” Hoffman writes, “it is the urban spaces least visible in the critical thinking about modernism and its legacies that provide the richest ground for understanding how urbanites live in modernism’s spaces.”
Monrovia in Four Buildings
Monrovia Modern is structured around four buildings.
- The Ministry of Defense headquarters commissioned under the violent leader Samuel Doe. It was designed and begun by an Israeli firm but never finished, its austere concrete mass hulking on the edge of the city. Its chief influence is brutalism, a style meant to project transparency and egalitarian integrity through clear layouts and a lack of ornamentation. Doe repurposed the style to project menacing militaristic strength. In Hoffman’s photos, men stand awkwardly within its massive impersonal proportions.
- The E.J. Roye Building, a damaged corporate tower that once hosted the national beauty pageant. Its original design, a generic office plan that could be anywhere, reflects a capitalist sensibility devoid of local culture or politics. Hoffman’s photos contrast the orderly symmetrical lines with the blown-out gaps and jagged edges of history imposing itself.
- Hotel Africa, he found one of West Africa’s premier luxury hotels reduced to a condition unsafe even for wandering, its rubble-strewn floors pocked with dangerous holes from visitors harvesting materials. People are fascinated with ruins, Hoffman says, because of their implicit commentary on the false promises of capitalism, technology, and modernity. But he questions whether these critiques lead anywhere productive. For ruins to work as a space of critique, their relationship to the future is as important as their connection to the past. To interpret a shuttered Rust Belt factory, we might consider the corporate executives who moved manufacturing jobs overseas. We might question the tax policies and quarterly-earnings incentives that reward them for doing so. But the only author of Hotel Africa’s decline is the vast impersonal warfare that renders absurd the idea of a restful vacation in Monrovia, Hoffman says.
“What is left is unreadable,” he writes. “It is form without critical possibility, more rubble than ruin.”
- The unfinished headquarters of the Liberian Broadcasting System, which has an external structure every bit as grandiose and brutalist as the Ministry of Defense. Inside, however, a transparent ceiling and open interior cavern send dappled light filtering downward. As Hoffman’s photos show, quotidian domestic life is imaginable in this space. He captures the signage of food vendors, women washing laundry and watching babies, and a young girl climbing playfully through its jungle-gym spaces.
Rather than using poetic imagery to gloss over large structural problems, Hoffman zooms in closer. The building’s original large-scale intention of supporting connectivity through radio had failed. But its new residents have begun new small-scale activities that do not require a strongman. Hoffman finds promise in the “minor architecture” movement away from grand social-engineering projects and toward flexible design that can be adapted by users. This direction might lead closer to the still-unrealized potential for a distinctly African architecture, he says.
A girl plays inside the unfinished Liberian Broadcasting System headquarters.
The Untold Stories of Hotel Africa | Liberia's Forgotten Legacy
Inhabiting Ruins
“Monrovia’s history has been a difficult one,” Hoffman writes. “Its future will be as well.”
Since the book’s publication last fall, Liberia has completed its first peaceful transfer of power in more than 70 years, with Sirleaf succeeded by the soccer star George Weah. The nation’s pathway to a better livelihood will not look exactly like developmental pathways elsewhere. It may involve recognizing mobile lifestyles as just as legitimate as static home ownership.
Hoffman, who is turning his research toward the interaction of US military forces and private security entities in foreign cities, has continued to experiment with form, publishing an arresting photo essay on diamond mining and submitting a short documentary to film festivals. and African organizations and how they can honestly reckon with power imbalances, whether they are study abroad trips, medical interventions, or ethnographic research trips.
Ducor Palace Hotel, Monrovia
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