01 Twenty-five arches
The screen of arches is what justifies the trip. It does not hold the building up: it wraps it, working as a sunshade and a monumental façade at once. Seen head-on it is a continuous arcade ordering a façade over a hundred metres long; seen from beneath, in perspective, it becomes a succession of openings closing over one another.
02 What else there is, and by whom
The library on the same campus is the second piece. It is a low volume, half-buried under a grass roof, whose wall is resolved as a continuous mosaic mural: abstract forms in ochre, green, blue and white wrapping the building from end to end, leaving a band of horizontal windows across the middle.
Beyond the campus there are three more pieces. The Hotel Président, from 1973 and extended in 1980, is a 285-room concrete block by the Tunisian architect Olivier Cacoub, who also signed the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Foundation. The golf club, from 1980, was designed by the Frenchman Roger Taillibert — the architect of Montreal's Olympic stadium — with two large concrete shells. And the National Higher Institute of Technical Education, from 1983, is Pottier again, with colonnades.
Five works by three international architects in ten years, in a city that then had fewer than fifty thousand inhabitants.
03 How well it fits you
04 How to build the two days
Day one, the campus. Arrive in mid-afternoon: the screen of arches faces in such a way that late in the day it stands silhouetted against the light, and that is when the building reads best. Before going in, ask at the gatehouse; it is a working institution, with classes and halls of residence, and it is worth saying what you are there for.
Day two, the rest. The hotel and the golf club sit on the same axis and can be seen in a morning; the Foundation, with its monumental forecourt and ceremonial axis, deserves a good hour just to walk around the outside. Hire a taxi by the hour: walking between them means four or five kilometres with no shade.
Season matters more than usual for this trip. From November to January it rains little — between 15 and 50 millimetres a month — and there are 6 to 7 hours of sun a day, which is what you need to photograph concrete. Between June and September the sky is covered almost all the time and sunshine drops to 3.5 hours a day in August.
