Doors of Africa

This work offers an architectural tour of sub-Saharan Africa taking the theme of the door as a key to understanding. Whether it is a simple passage, a method of protection or a link between profane and sacred, the use of the doors and entrances considered here is rarely limited to the sole utilitarian function. Their design obeys symbolic and aesthetic rules as much as those of functional necessity. In the form of brief monographs, the author draws up an inventory, drawn or photographed, of the doors and entrances that are among the most representative of the art of building or an ancestral practice of space. Following a journey through Africa from west to east, from the ephemeral camps of nomads to the coastal trading posts, passing through the main centers of earthen architecture, we discover the richness, the variety and the symbolic charge of these thresholds. Heavy, decorated doors or simple stretched wires, which today we pass through without being careful, which have lost their meaning or sometimes even disappeared.

Paul Marmottan Prize 1999 awarded by the Academy of Fine Arts.