The series “Sous la lumière” by Christoph Montebelli describes modernistic rhythms in the cityscapes of two fascinating African metropolises of the 20th century which are famous for their architectural modernism: Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and Casablanca, the economic centre of Morocco. The series searches for abstract beauty in facades of the two cities mainly erected between the 1930s and the 1960s.
The name of the series relates to a quote of one of the fathers of modernism, Le Corbusier, according to whom architecture is “a learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light (“L’architecture est le jeu savant, correct et magnifique des volumes assemblés sous la lumière.”)
Dakar and Casablanca were chosen for this project as they were both playgrounds of modernism under the divine light of the African sun. These two Atlantic metropolises are geneses of the 20th century, with a few thousand inhabitants at the beginning of the century, and nowadays three, four, five million people – no one exactly knows. Modernist architects used the two cities for their urban experiments; they constructed aesthetically equilibrated buildings with seventeen, eighteen, nineteen or twenty floors, and characterized by stripes, rhythms and waves.
