Focus Week 5 - Design Museum

Given that they house hundreds of millions of people, African cities are not much talked about over here. With few exceptions, their monuments are unknown in Europe and places like Yaoundé, Nouakchott and Niamey conjure few mental images. Only occasionally are expeditions launched to explore them. Rem Koolhaas did a study of Lagos a few years back and there was a prize-winning study of Kinshasa at the Venice architecture biennale.
Architect David Adjaye, born in Tanzania of Ghanaian parents and living and working in London, has done something truly unusual. Over a period of 10 years he has travelled to every capital city in Africa, bar only, for reasons of personal safety, Mogadishu and Algiers.

The show works best as a collection of vignettes and as a way of delivering a message: look at African cities. These things are worth doing, but David Adjaye's monumental act of tourism could lead to so much more.