ACAHUCH - Macgeorge Lecture - Johan Lagae - The ‘Geopolitics of Concrete’ in Mobutu’s Congo-Zaïre

In this public lecture, Johan Lagae draws upon ongoing discussions within a large, 4-year research project entitled “Construction History Above and Beyond. What History can do for Construction History”, conducted with colleagues from Ghent University, Université Libre de Bruxelles and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, to respond to the challenge of making “architectural history through the prism of environmental and decolonial issues”. He will argue that focusing on the structural characteristics and materiality of built projects and their related sources can offer productive entry points to engage with such issues. Lagae 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 given to 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. He will engage with the difficulties of trying to answer the question as to 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 also takes into account the “muck down below” on the building site (S. Ferro). Johan Lagae is a Full professor at Ghent University, where he teaches the history of twentieth-century architecture from a global perspective. He holds a doctorate in colonial architecture in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has published extensively on this subject, as well as on urban history in Central Africa, colonial built heritage and photography in (post)colonial Africa. He has co-authored two books on the architecture and urban landscapes of Kinshasa and recently co-edited the volume African Modernism and its Afterlives (2022, with Nina Berre and Paul Wenzel Geissler). He is currently co-editor of the ABE Journal. He has (co-)curated and contributed to several exhibitions related to Congo and Africa, such as La mémoire du Congo. Le temps colonial (2005), À chacun sa maison. Housing in the Belgian Congo 1945-1960 (2018), and Style Congo. Heritage and Heresy (2023). He has also collaborated with several artists from the Democratic Republic of Congo, most recently with Sammy Baloji on the project Aequare. The Future that never was, shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. Johan Lagae has benefited from several grants, held a Francqui chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2020 and was resident at the Institut d'études avancées in Paris in 2019. --- Johan Lagae joined ACAHUCH for September 2025, supported by the Macgeorge Bequest at the University of Melbourne --- Image source: Interior of the assembly hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kinshasa (1968-1974), architect Eugenio Palumbo (source: photograph Fund Palumbo, AAM/CIVA, Brussels)