ABSTRACT
Instability lingers at the periphery of architecture given the transformation of colonial spaces into those of the post-colony. Nowhere is this more evident than in Somalia, during whose nearly 50 years as an Italian colony and subsequent mandates by transitional external governments, including Italy’s financial stewardship toward independence in the 1950s, the conditions by which the nation was conceived also became the means by which they were dissolved. A colonial modernism, or its inverse, suggests conflicting formations through and by which Italian fascism attempted to fortify and otherwise purvey (Italian) modernità via architecture and urbanism. The post of postcolonial or the de of decolonizing, however, suggests that these structures were diminished, forgotten or invisible at the conclusion of the Italian Empire.
This essay examines the imperatives of a modern colonial architecture in Mogadishu as a material analog to failure.
