Building of the Month: The proposed Henry Hoff Commercial Plaza, Carey Street

Given the aviation kick I've been on this week I had been hoping to get a chance to photograph a new building out at the airport for July's Building of the Month, but that will have to wait for another time.

This set of photos has been the draft box since earlier this year, when I was walking around central Monrovia on an early Sunday morning. The city has a great number of proposed-building signboards at the moment, perhaps more than at any other time that I can recall. I post some others here as well, but this is probably the most ambitious of them all, not least given its height. It's not entirely clear what the scale is here, other than the presence of the cars at the bottom of the illustration, which looks to be a straight screen print off an aged, low-capacity version of AutoCAD.

The tower looks to be maybe three stories of parking, with maybe ten stories of offices that appear to rest on a level of thick, flaring columns which would cantilever  That would make the building within range of the tallest building in Liberia, which would be a remarkable development in and of itself, but the first time since the rise of the Ducor in 1959 that a commercial structure reached such a height.

It will be interesting to see first whether this project gets built, and then who occupies the offices: whether a UN Agency or NGO takes a chunk of space, whether a bank relocates its headquarters, or whether smaller private firms are able to absorb the square footage. Not sure what is going on at the crown of this building, but my guess would be either (a) another fancy rooftop restaurant or (b) an executive apartment.

If this building does rise, it will dramatically transform this tired, crumbling block of Carey Street, which thus far has remained a low-slung but dense block of concrete structures, and has yet to see the construction which has changed so many other parts of the city. As the signboard says, "Coming soon to the Carey !!!"

Building of the Month: NASSCORP Multi-Purpose Complex

 ©Matthew Jones

Although the NASSCORP Building has been featured on the M2M Architectural Tour for many years, as it has been under construction since April 2009 (and thus almost as long as I have been going to Monrovia), it made the front pages this month as the technicolor behemoth was officially opened by President Sirleaf just two weeks ago, over five years after groundbreaking. Although construction does take a much slower pace in the developing world, it is still astonishing just how slow the progress can be.

 ©Matthew Jones

Not to repeat too heavily on what I've already written on the Architectural Tour about the landmark building, I just want to emphasize that this tremendous and unusual building has a warm spot in my heart for several reasons. Firstly, the architect, Sylvanus O'Connor, is someone I consider to be a personal friend, having worked with him professionally during my first stint in Liberia in 2008-2009, when the NASSCORP building had only just taken shape on the drawing boards of O'Connor's firm, AEP Consultants, which is located on Front Street in Monrovia.

An early computer rendering. 

Most of the major elements remained intact throughout construction.

Sylvanus is a talented and increasingly prolific designer. NASSCORP embodies much of what is prominent in O'Connor's singular style: the ebullience of its arrangements, and the flamboyance of its post-modern costuming. Like O'Connor's earlier landmark, the LBDI headquarters at 9th Street and Tubman Boulevard, the NASSCORP employs semi-classical elements but articulates a thoroughly contemporary form and finish.

Reposted from the excellent Liberian journalist blog Sengbeh.Wordpress.com from

his article about the dedication.

These gestures are only more pronounced in the NASSCORP, which is a larger building, much more prominently situated on one of Liberia's most important road crossings, ELWA Junction. It could only be unmissable if it was another standard commercial building seen thrown up in this city: hulking, heavy, and hardly windowed.  Instead, it literally glistens in a bold employment of multi-colored Alubond panels, which sparkle in a rainbow of fluorescence not unlike the oil-slicked puddles arrayed on the road out front. The effect is luminous, and a still-rare but increasingly-common option to present a shimmering, glass-covered façade more like a curtain-wall of an office tower than another darkened edifice of crude cement.

From the Nasscorp website

The candyland effect of all this color greatly softens the substantial dimensions of the structure, which is further assisted by three major formal gestures: a pair of bulbous round turrets, bridged by a soaring lobby space, which together form the tower section of the complex, and a concave curtain which connects to a thin, missile-like clock tower, all planted on a colonnaded base meeting the street, providing a transformationally urban front to what is, after all, one the country's primary traffic crossings.

Nasscorp Building in early construction, March 2010 ©Matthew Jones

This setting is a chief reason to celebrate the complex. Monrovia, stretched out over a ten-mile-long peninsula, suffers desperately from traffic congestion, as thousands of workers drive from the expansive eastern suburbs into the Central business district daily, at the western end of the Mesurado landmass. The ELWA section of Paynesville, already the gateway to Tubman Boulevard, would be a natural second commercial center for the metropolitan area. This building is the most significant step toward formally establishing that as a planning goal to date.

©Matthew Jones

Remarkable as the architecture is, its significance is not limited to the design. That a government agency raised the $11 million in project funds from its own reserves, and used almost exclusively Liberian firms, for a commercial project that aims to safeguard public pension funds, is itself remarkable.  Quoting from the remarks of NASSCORP director van Ballmoos during the dedication ceremony:

This edifice is symbolic not only because of the potential to generate revenue; not because of its attractiveness and picturesque appearance from any section of Paynesville; not only because it transforms the landscape of the city; not because of its magnificence or its towering façade over other businesses in the area, but because it signals another achievement in the reconstruction and development of the nation.

Regardless of the appeal of its appearance, few buildings have the visual, commercial, spatial, social, political, and patriotic impact of the NASSCORP building, and for those reasons, it deserves note, respect, and even acclaim.

Building of the Month: A-U-G House

A small, strange structure sits facing a stretch of the increasingly-clogged Tubman Boulevard in the middle of Congo Town. It has all the proper dimensions of an average Liberian domestic compound: one lot, one story, ringed by a concrete fence.

But this building is strikingly different than most of Monrovia’s homes, which are usually finished in mustard-and-mint painted concrete, with bars on the windows and capped by a cascade of zinc sheeting. But this single-level building is squared off and faced with dark, glossy tiles, sheets of imitation lapis lazuli, plastic glazing mirroring the traffic crawling past.

This is A-U-G House. But what is it? Is it still a home, a residence? Surely it was at some point. But has it now been glamorized, gleamed-up and cubed, for a commercial purpose?

What is A-U-G? Or, perhaps, who is AUG? Is it refer to August, this city's most torrential month? Is it short for Augustus? Are they initials? A member of an elite family starting with a G?

No one seems to know. At least, not when the compound is approached and inquiries are addressed to nearby loiterers. The goings-on behind this indigo edifice remain as baffling as the young man lounging prone in the dust between the house and the pavement in the picture below.

No matter. Architecturally, it is certain that this is a quite compact, dense example of the transformation of this once-sleepy seaside city, at one time characterized by wide-porched mansions shaded under plum trees, into the premier post-conflict, post-modern development capital. The forces acting on Monrovia make A-U-G house is not so much surprising as inevitable. This rapidly-changing city froths with steroidal injections of charity from Seattle and Washington and the high-fructose syrup of aid from Brussels and Beijing, as it is simultaneously imbued with the aesthetic sensibilities of Beirut, suburban Atlanta and inner-city New Jersey. The final station for the world's philanthropic freight train is one-story high, covered in a cheap, slick veneer shipped from Guangzhou and Dubai, intending too look enviably modern but really masking a crumbling but more honest structure underneath.

Building of the Month: Renovated Labor Ministry

 I've spent some time in my photo archives, looking to see if I happened to have taken a photo of this building before, but it doesn't seem that I had. Surprising, given its prominent location at the city-side foot of Capitol Hill, at the terminus of a high-traffic intersection where U.N. Drive intersects with the “Bassa Community Short-Cut” –a steep, busy hill that connects to Jallah Town Road, which means it’s nearly impossible not to pass this building heading into central Monrovia. Secondly, it is relatively prominent in its former role as the Ministry of Labor. Yet the building is so indistinct that I never lifted my lens to capture it in five years of taking pictures of the city. It was just another peeling, chipping, multistory rectangle of hulking concrete without present purpose.

And yet suddenly, the building's notability is not only its location but its envelope. Like an increasing number of buildings in central Monrovia, the erstwhile Labor Ministry has emerged from its cracked concrete cocoon to reveal the iridescent scales of a beetle-green glass façade. The effect is dramatic.

This rehab is the latest work of the CNQC Qingjian International, which is one of the massive Chinese infrastructure companies which has had a major presence in Liberia in the reconstruction period, as it has in dozens of African countries from Mali to Lesotho.

I don't have more information on the building's future use for now–for all I know at present, the Labor Ministry could be moving back there–but the choice of materials is striking both visually and in terms of what this new stylistic paradigm continues to say about Liberia.

On the one hand, the proliferation of shiny glass sheeting down the fronts of the city's buildings, a startling phenomenon that began about five years ago and had been noted on M2M before, speak to investors' confidence in the economy and security situation at street-crossings that ten years ago were war zones, with nothing but shattered windows. Secondly, however, this paradigm of throwing up expensive, flashy envelopes to cover over cheaply-constructed concrete shells to make glasshouse bubbles of class-A office space, sucking up air conditioning from diesel generators, is not exactly a contribution to a long-term future. Not that buildings are built differently elsewhere.

In the here and now, these Dubai-style glass boxes stand in stark contrast the the other 99% of the building stock. While I haven't had time to find out more about the plans for the building, I was able to shoot the picture below from Redemption Road, looking at the backside of the new block. It is a somewhat astonishing juxtaposition of the new building and its neighborhood, Buzzy Quarters–the traditionally-Lorma-dominated enclave of informal housing, wedged along a swampy creek between the mighty edifices of Capitol Hill and the vast fortification of the Barclay Training Center, which is home to the Ministry of Defense (many early soldiers were Lorma, hence the development of the community decades ago). The old Labor Ministry's new skin shimmers like a pair of polarized Oakleys, one of several new buildings rising over the cityscape, which still consists of rusty corrugated zinc roofs, just as it has for decades.

Building of the Month: International Bank, Broad Street

I'm going to have to get some better pictures of IB Bank's Broad Street office, the three-story building at 64 Broad Street. I'm surprised I've never taken a head-on shot of bank. This is the best I have, a low-light, late evening shot from the Palm Hotel's rooftop Bamboo Bar several years ago, with an early-model iPhone:

But recently, I did come across this astonishing photograph of the building, in about 1950 or so:

The label clearly indicates that the building was the ticket office for Pan American Airlines, if the presumption that "Pan Air" refers to the US carrier at the time. It would be especially fitting that the airline, which was such a prominent economic pillar in Liberia's economic surge which began after World War II, would establish its corporate presence in such a notable site, at the center of Liberia's business district, on Broad Street near the corner of Randall Street, which at the time was just opposite the Executive Grounds (prior the the construction of Capitol Hill, nearly all of Liberia's governmental buildings were aligned along Broad Street).

It's therefore appropriate that one of the most prominent economic connections to the United States, International Bank (Liberia) Limited, which is controlled by a private group headquartered on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., would today make use of the building as their headquarters and main banking hall.

Although smaller than some other retail banks, especially the large Ecobank office half a block away in the Episcopal Church Plaza (what was once the Chase Manhattan Bank building), IB Bank's wide reputation as Liberia's most reliable and trustworthy financial institution is reflected in its occupancy of such stately, historic building. Most likely it was a private home at some point beforehand, although its design suggests possibly that it was purpose-built for public use.

Although its deep porches have been enclosed, and recently the building was inadvisably painted in IB's butter-and-pea color scheme rather than the more elegant white, the mansion remains a gorgeous example of preserved architecture in the center of the capital. I'll have to try to research its pre-commercial history, take some better photos, and add it to the Architecture Tour.

Building of the Month: Old Spanish Embassy, Monrovia

Keeping with the Embassy theme from yesterday's post, for the Building of the Month I thought I'd nominate an embassy that is one of many in the city that ceased to exist in during the war (really all except for the US Embassy closed), and one that sadly has not re-opened its diplomatic mission, even ten years after the end of the conflict. 

Spanish Embassy, without so much as a wooden fence. Flag flying at right. Date unknown.

The Kingdom of Spain, like all major European nations, had a consular legation in Monrovia. The Spanish Embassy was not part of the Embassy Row of Mamba Point, which had the American, British, Dutch, and French Embassies for decades. Yet the Spaniards had a seafront setting that was as equally dramatic as any clifftop compound in the city. 

The Spanish Embassy is at the center of the photograph, below and left of the Executive Mansion. c.1970

Tucked behind the Executive Mansion grounds, and possibly even predating its construction, the Spanish Embassy was at the end of a cul-de-sac off Redemption Road which to this day doesn't specifically have a name. A number of grand oceanfront residential mansions were built here from at least the 1950s onwards. 

Viewed from the beach in this washed-out photo, c.1965. 

The Executive Mansion, possibly under construction, is in the background.

As the last house on this lane, the house that acted as the Spanish mission is particularly recognizable for its curving, cantilevered gallery, almost looking like a turreted tower jutting out toward the sea. 

View of the Executive Mansion from Redemption Road, 2012, showing the vacant 

Spanish Embassy as the last building on the right. 

Even before the war, some of these private homes were given over to government agencies, and today this area houses the Liberia chapter of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (LEITI), and the Liberia copyright office, and at time some other governmental offices. 

Post-war map of Monrovia, c.1999, showing the old locations of the 

Kingdom of Spain Embassy, as well as the Swedish and PR China Embassies. 

More recently, this quiet corner of the central city has been buzzing with the recent opening of the grand Angler's Bar and Restaurant, which vies for the title of Monrovia's finest eating establishment. Sadly, the erstwhile Iberian embassy has yet to be refurbished, although it is still standing prominently above the beach. As mentioned a few years ago, Monrovia hosts an honorary Spanish consulate on Broad Street at the KLM/Air France/Kenya Airways ticket office.

Building of the Month: Pink Apartment Block

 ©2012 Matthew Jones.

I set these two photos aside from yesterday's post because I think they're actually two nice pictures, if I do say so myself, and of the many long-procrastinated ideas for this blog, I thought a 'Building of the Month' feature would be kind of fun. So here it is.

Obviously a pink building is strange anywhere, its implications of a certain juvenile femininity, perhaps, or even a twee tropical style. Whatever exuberance may have been intended or is possible to interpret is muted by the dark skies, pot-holed dirt boulevard and over-pruned tree. I see the resulting image as forlorn, in an unintentional way that compounds its melancholy. Some of Glenna Gordon's photos hold this aspect, such as this one, among others.

Tiling of buildings as a finish is common in Monrovia, as in other parts of tropical Africa, and the range of tiles that gets imported to Liberia (as with many categories of imported goods to West Africa) tends to be low-quality stuff from Dubai and China. In this example, I imagine these may have been more intended for bathroom interiors than multi-story façades. The builders obviously continued the theme with the paint job on the exterior wall ("fence") and elevated generator house. Note lastly the tinted glass windows, shaded much like the rain-heavy clouds, and balcony rails.

This building around Warren Avenue and 18th Street in Sinkor, went up through 2011-12 and is an example of the rapid in-fill on non-prime sites, away from the major streets and beaches, that have now experienced dense, high-end construction. This block  is now occupied, although I've never been inside and I think that ex-patriates from Asia, who may or may not be the building's owners, live there.