Architecture as Technical Governance at the African Union

Abstract Few architectural sites seem as symbolic of the system of political rule whose official seat they accommodate as the African Union Conference Center and Office Complex (AUCC) in Addis Ababa. Funded, designed, and built by Chinese agencies, the complex sits at the center of a shifting set of international relations that also thread through the organisation’s longer architectural history. In analysing the project, this article explains processes of material, spatial, and administrative organisation at its core: an array of design and construction practices, building-related technologies, and forms of post-delivery management and maintenance that we argue amount to a mode of technical governance. Understanding this architectural form of governance requires a closer study of the design, construction, and post-occupancy of the AUCC as well as the adjacent German-designed Peace and Security Council building. It also necessitates situating these within a longer history of architectural contributions to the shifting nature of Pan-African governance in Addis Ababa over time.


Introduction
The African Union Conference Center and Office Complex (AUCC) in Addis Ababa has received significant international attention since its inauguration in 2012.Much of this has focused on the geopolitical implications of its Chinese finance, design, and construction (fig.1).Local responses to this architectural landmark have revolved around Pan-Africanism and African unity, as Daniel Mulugeta has recently shown. 1 By contrast, recurring reports in western media have offered general criticism of the building as an "alien object" planted by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Addis Ababa that embodies the PRC's "neocolonial" foreign-policy ambitions in Africa, rather than the spirit of mutual cooperation as it is presented by Chinese and African officials. 2NTACT Kenny Cupers kenny.cupers@unibas.ch;kcupers@gmail.comß 2023 The Author(s).Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
These diverging perceptions tend to overlook the cultural, diplomatic, political, and social exchange involved in the building's design and construction.Such exchange continues to take place at both transnational and local levels through the building's daily use and management.Current accounts also neglect the shifting international relations that thread through the African Union (AU)'s longer architectural history, the forms of local and transnational technical expertise, performance, and management in which this architecture is enmeshed, and its potential long-term effects on development in Africa. 3he new conference center may offer overdetermined architectural symbolism, but its design, construction, and everyday use raise more mundane but important questions about technical performance, expertise, and repair.These elements compose what may be understood not simply as a form of transnational architectural expression, but as a mode of technical governance in and of itself: a physical and procedural instrument designed to enable and regulate decision-making within an organisation or society at large.
The AUCC is grafted on a longer history of large-scale building projects for the AU dating back to the organisation's original founding as the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963.That year remains a distinctive inflection point in Cold War-era discourse concerning decolonisation, Africanisation, and development-themes that have remained pertinent to subsequent projects, including the Chinese-built headquarters.The AUCC forms part of a 2007 master plan that also includes the still-unfinished African Union Grand Hotel, funded by an Ethiopian-Saudi billionaire, as well as the AU's Peace and Security Council.This latter project was funded by the German government, partly designed and built by Ethiopian contractors, and finished in 2016. 4With its rusticated stone cladding and slanted fac ¸ades, the building offers a striking contrast with the Chinese-built conference center.The formal contrast between the buildings suggests a geopolitical tension in the current direction of African development; but when situated in the longer architectural history of the site, this contrast belies historical continuities in the transnational architecture of African governance.
Understanding the AUCC as a technological vehicle designed to support a transnational system of rule provides new insight into historical and contemporary practices of governance in Africa.These practices have recently and increasingly come to rely on strategies advocating large-scale infrastructural interventions designed to promote trade and economic development such as the PRC's Belt and Road Initiative.Such infrastructures and their attendant forms of architecture constitute a mode of governance that exceeds the power of formal government. 5Governance thus raises questions about the political role of physical environments and designed objects, particularly given architecture's ability to organise and integrate materials, space, and subjects into a specific order or relationship perpetuated over time.Technical governance in this context serves as an analytical concept for understanding architecture as a form of politics by other means, both currently and in relation to the broader, historical discourse of practices of rule and "development" after World War Two.Informed by a larger body of work on techno-politics, 6 this analytical focus requires closer study of the building norms, standards, systems, and technologies, and the distinctive forms of expertise, knowledge, and language skills they require.Initiating and maintaining technical governance over time requires transfers that may operate relatively independently of the purview of the local or national state.Such governance works not merely through a building's design and completed construction, but also through the services and processes of management and repair they inevitably require after delivery.Technical maintenance is therefore an important component of governance, key to shaping relations between architecture and society.
The growing scholarship on maintenance in anthropology, geography, media studies, and science technology studies has argued for repair as a "corrective framework" that acknowledges marginalised, historically overlooked contributors to the production and upkeep of built environments in post-industrial environments in North America and Western Europe. 7At the same time, theories of maintenance have been relatively and somewhat incongruously slow to emerge in the field of architectural history, despite their obvious relevance to design and construction. 8Exploring maintenance both to contexts outside the west and with regard to architectural history is therefore important. 9his paper traces technical governance through the physical and organisational history of the OAU and AU since the former's founding in 1963.Such an African architectural history offers useful paradigms through which we may better understand how design, construction, and management help to establish, maintain, and transform broader sets of diplomatic, political, and economic ties in Africa-beyond the analytics of state-led decolonisation and Cold War geopolitics.
As "China's gift to Africa," the AUCC is situated in a longer history of architectural gifting as a form of diplomacy during the Cold War.These gifts mirrored but also differed from other socialist forms of aid as well as western-led development aid projects. 10Ayala Levin has shown how primarily Western European architects helped shape the modernisation of Addis Ababa under Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. 11aleria Verri Guzm an's study of China's involvement in building a national stadium in Costa Rica reveals a form of architectural gifting whose "complex political, financial and diplomatic operations demonstrate how PRC foreign-aid projects operate at national and transnational scales." 12Wei Chang and Charlie Xue, among others, have recently demonstrated how Chinese influence in Africa is exerted through building projects, in particular through the use of Chinese building codes, control of investment costs, design guidelines, and the opacity of the bid evaluation 13 Such scholarship suggests a need to expand the analysis of China's architectural gifting from an act of diplomatic symbolism to include its various financial, technical, and logistical dimensions and effects over time, particularly in relation to Africa and its shifting geopolitical orientation toward the PRC.
In pursuing these dimensions, our study of the AUCC, and the architectural history of the AU more broadly, shows how a range of diplomatic and political relationships are maintained architecturally, including through systems of maintenance and repair. 14These relationships are particularly important for a project that is as exemplary of "China in Africa" as is the headquarters of the AU.The success of this project depends both on a high symbolic degree of transnational visibility and on a more mundane level of technical performance, durability, and reliability.The PRC's continued managerial oversight over the project complicates its own claims of equitability and collaboration relative to its diplomatic partners in Africa and elsewhere.It also challenges standard narratives of South-South collaboration, which presume a shared position of alterity in relation to the North.
Focusing on material and technical agency is not to reinforce an inflated sense of architecture's historical importance, but rather to see it as participating in shaping political constraints and possibilities over time.Such a research agenda requires a combination of architectural, historical, and social scientific methods.As an interdisciplinary collective including an architectural and urban historian focusing on Europe-Africa relations (Kenny Cupers), an Ethiopian social anthropologist with expertise in governance and land issues (Girma Hundessa), and an expert on Chinese architectural history (Cole Roskam), we combined archival research, architectural analysis, expert interviews, and ethnographic observation.Our interviewees included AU building facilities managers, AU officials, local contractors, and construction-sector experts; we also corresponded with the AUCC's Chinese architect.Our ethnographic observation focused on the headquarters and its surrounding neighbourhood over several months in 2022.And our historical work included archival research at the Ethiopian national archives, as well as international and digital collections.
The article proceeds as follows.First, it offers a historical analysis of the institutional settings of the OAU around the time of its founding in 1963, showing how modernist architecture embodied new ambitions of Pan-African independence while reflecting the western dependencies and political conflicts that sullied these ambitions.From there, we examine how the recently finished Chinese-built master plan and conference complex and the German-designed Peace and Security Council building both depart from and perpetuate historical patterns of design, construction, organisation, and maintenance at the core of technical governance, bringing divergent approaches to international development into organisational alignment.

Pan-African Aspirations, Western Aided Architecture
The Organization of African Unity-the predecessor of the African Union-was formally established on May 25, 1963 in Addis Ababa.Thirty-two signatory governments participated in the founding three-day meeting, which took place in Africa Hall, the headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) that had opened in 1961 (fig.2).Upon the establishment of the UNECA in 1958, Emperor Haile Selassie had commissioned this complex to host the organisation's meetings and offices, and to serve as a venue for future African international conferences.The establishment of the UNECA and the OAU resulted from decades of struggle for African sovereignty.Political scientist Adom Getachew has recently shown how Pan-Africanism, born in Black Atlantic circuits of anticolonialism since the late nineteenth century, engendered a worldmaking project that cannot be reduced to the shift from an imperial world to a world of nations. 15ey political figures of African independence, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, understood their anticolonial nationalism only as a first step toward African unification.Despite disagreement on the form and speed by which such unification would be achieved, African independence leaders recognised the problematic nature of borders drawn by European empires and the need to rethink state sovereignty.Haile Selassie keenly recognised the importance of this historical moment for Ethiopia.Black internationalists had long celebrated Ethiopia as a bastion of African resistance against European colonialism, having twice successfully pushed back European colonisation.Haile Selassie harnessed these exceptionalist portrayals of Ethiopia for his ambitious project of imperial modernisation, attracting a slew of international organisations and embassies in Addis Ababa.
By the time the Italian architect Arturo Mezzedimi was commissioned to design Africa Hall, he had already become one of Haile Selassie's most favored architects. 16ezzedimi was the son of an Italian colonial settler in Asmara, which had become an important center of modern construction during the fascist occupation.As Ethiopia took control over Eritrea, as the UN had decided in 1950, Haile Selassie could draw from this settler colonial architectural and construction expertise to support his architectural projects in Addis. 17This included the Africa Hall, which was also imbued with an aspirational internationalism derived from western projects for intergovernmental organisations that had been built in the previous decades.To understand the functional requirements for this new type of facility, Mezzedimi personally visited the UN headquarters in New York, the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the Palais des Nations in Geneva and Strasbourg, and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. 18uilding on these precedents, Mezzidimi's design reiterated the centrality of the assembly hall with a domed volume connected to a taller office slab that provides its background.While this "great international organizing machine" would be quite simple and moderate in color, he envisioned the assembly hall volume to be "vibrating with gayer colors, freer and more open (the new creature, the assembly of the African people).All this was to be presented, obviously, with an outer sense of unity, and yet a hardly concealed desire to abandon oneself to a pulsating play of colours, vivid, vibrating: African!" 19 Like other European architects in independence-era Africa, Mezzedimi emphasised the importance of supposedly "African" forms but also understood himself as an instrument of the "penetration" of architectural modernism into Africa.As such, architectural modernism was to stand in the service of a new mode of governing Africa, despite its role in entrenching global racial hierarchies and dependencies.
Mezzedimi also understood that the building itself would actively shape the everyday work and social routines of the organisations it housed.During his observational studies of other aforementioned international organisations, for example, he came to realise that "the needs, habits and preferences of the delegates and office staff" were important considerations in the design of governance."Following them in their daily work, during their ordinary office routine, and in committees and meetings," noted Mezzedimi, enabled "clearing the way for technical solutions" related to the building's core mission.By shadowing UN and UNESCO employees in New York and Paris, Mezzedimi believed he could understand their work, which included "contacts in the lobbies, the bars, the restaurant and at delegation parties … their labours, their rest periods, their tensions, their behavior, everything." 20his knowledge informed his design of the Africa Hall, which he characterised as a series of "continuous spaces" and "internal zones of differing shape and height." 21The complex's main assembly hall was ultimately left partially open, allowing delegates to leave their seats without leaving the assembly space itself, which also included a balcony level that would be open to the public (fig.3).Exhibition halls further emphasised the aspiration to make the institution both public and a modern mechanism for continental-scale diplomatic negotiation.Mezzedimi's design thus transmitted ideals of African sovereignty but also of transparency in this new Pan-African unity.
Africa Hall would become best known as the "birthplace" of the OAU, symbolically amplifying such aspirations of African governance (fig.4). 22Importantly, however, the building was originally designed not for this organisation but for the UNECA.That the OAU would rely on the UNECA to facilitate its meetings reflects the limited funding at the organisation's disposal, as newly independent African nations could spare little of their national budgets.To a certain extent, Mezzedimi's work took this functional dependency into account."Extraterritoriality areas" were included at the junction of the building's two posterior wings and reserved for permanent Secretary of the UNECA staff.This zone also featured a doubling of service cores, including stairs, lifts, and toilets, to allow the organisation flexibility in accommodating both its permanent, localised staff and visiting delegations.A "self-governing [system] of zones" at the front of the building also helped to separate publicly accessible space from more restricted UNECA-specific areas. 23he building's technical construction and performance helped to enact a distinctive form of transnational governance in Addis.Construction was overseen by members of Ethiopia's Ministry of Public Works and Communications and the building's main contractor, who was also Italian.A range of materials and equipment, including aluminum casements, steel, flooring, elevators, and furniture, were sourced from companies based in Nairobi, Eritrea, West Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France. 24mid the Africa Hall's design, construction, and opening, Haile Selassie offered the OAU a prominent site in the center of the city, around the current Addis Ababa University, for the construction of its own headquarters. 25The heads of state, however, insisted that the organisation move into a completed building as soon as possible.The newly established organisation needed office accommodation  This Ethiopian "donation" illustrates, as we explore elsewhere, the fraught role of the African Union in human rights violations in post-colonial Africa as well as the darker side of Haile Selassie's imperial modernisation of the city. 26Yet the housing of the OAU in the police academy also further complicates the role of architecture in governing African unity, beyond the symbolic and technical functions of the Africa Hall.Following heated debates between different imperial government ministries and top officials during the 1960s, a decision was passed that the police academy building had to be funded by income generated from fines by people who had been punished for committing crimes.Additionally, the imperial government received about US$160,000 from the American Public Safety Program for the purchase of construction materials for the academy. 27or the design of the facility, Haile Selassie commissioned French architect Henri Chomette, one of the most prolific modern architects in sub-Saharan Africa in this period. 28However, little is known about his design for the police academy turned OAU headquarters. 29His design consisted of two simple rectangular buildings and a tower block, with a pavilion and dormitories somewhat at a distance from this composition (figs.5-7).Three main oblongs created a plaza-like public space in the middle of the compound.The curvilinear recreational pavilion stood in its own verdant landscape (fig.8).As in some of his other projects in the city, Chomette used a modular construction system with vertical elements of aggregate concrete with small, sharp stones, which give the fac ¸ade a fine brutalist expression.The architect also insisted on the use of such local building materials as part of his intention to create a distinctly "African" modernism (fig.9). 30onstruction of the Abba Dina Police College was completed in 1965, but the site served as a police campus for less than a year before the OAU officially inaugurated the building on October 6, 1965. 31By then, the OAU's office needs had further grown due to the addition of new member states, and its governing demands were prioritised over those of local police officers and leaders, much to their frustration. 32hough designed for the police academy, the building proved well suited for entertaining staff and visiting diplomats.The police academy dormitories were also retrofitted for the AU staff offices.The tower block came to house the seat of the leadership, and Chomette added a balcony on the fifth floor, perhaps to announce the location of the president's office to the surrounding area.It is otherwise unclear, however, whether Chomette designed any architectural elements specifically to be used by the OAU.
Several of our interlocutors understood Chomette's design to be more "African" than the current Chinese-designed conference center; some Ethiopians even portray Chomette as a "father of African modern architecture." 33That a white European architect can carry such a title suggests the endurance of colonial relations of power-from the height of the African independence era until today.Perhaps ironically, it was (and still is) the narrative of Ethiopian exceptionalism, so central to Haile Selassie's imperial modernisation, that separated Ethiopia's reliance on foreign aid and technical imports from the history of European colonialism in Africa.While architectural historian Leo Noyer-Duplaix has framed Chomette's design as exemplary of an African "critical regionalism," the building's western funding, construction, and design rather demonstrate Ethiopia's continued political and technical dependency on the west. 34Mezzedimi's Africa Hall was similarly reliant upon UN support and European equipment and material suppliers.These European architects represented technical knowledge from abroad, and equipment, material, and certain forms of technical expertise used for both buildings were largely imported from Europe.This was also generally true of construction projects designed or financed by Eastern European experts during the subsequent Dergue regime (1974-91).At the same time, however, this importation stimulated the development of Ethiopia's own construction industry and design sector.Despite the surging presence in recent years of international (and specifically Chinese) companies in infrastructure development, private and public sector construction is still largely in Ethiopian hands. 35hina's Gift to Africa" and Technical Governance African governance took on new architectural dimensions over the course of the 1990s and 2000s.Globalisation and the rise of distinctly transnational concerns-the end of the Cold War, economic liberalisation, environmental pollution, terrorism, and the AIDS epidemic, among others-triggered changes in presumed "loci of authority" and related capacities of governance.36 These global shifts may have been influential in OAU organisational reform initiated in 1999 in response to growing The OAU had grown significantly since its founding in 1963, from thirty-two signatory members to fifty-five nations-an expansion that presented numerous administrative and spatial challenges in need of an architectural resolution.To this end, the AU launched an architecture competition, yet one that seems to have gone by without significant attention in architectural circles at the time.37 The competition was won by Tom Ikimi Design Company, a Nigerian architecture office led by High Chief Tom Ikimi, a politician and architect with a long career in Nigerian government, as well as in the UN, ECOWAS, and the OAU.38 The developer of the conference center was Mohammed Hussain Al Amoudi, the Ethiopian-Saudi billionaire businessman, who also undertook the development of the AU Grand Hotel, part of the Chinese-led masterplan.39 The newly formed AU was officially inaugurated in Durban in July 2002, and the AU's new conference center a year later, with the attendance of Thabo Mbeki (then president of South Africa and chairperson of the AU) and Meles Zenawi (then prime minister of Ethiopia), and Amara Essy (then interim chairperson of the commission).Ikimi's design for the conference center was a monumental, symmetrical structure with a pyramidal roof (fig.10). Th roof was meant to symbolise the foundational importance of Egypt's ancient heritage for Africa.At the same time, the facility was designed to connect smoothly to the Chomette-designed facilities of the 1960s.A lowered courtyard resolves the topography of the site, a difference in height of several floors.At the back of the building is an entrance portico for dropping off visitors.The building features a main plenary room at its center, flanked by offices on either side.The building was meant to represent the AU's renewed ambitions of African economic integration and (after the Rwandan genocide) the abandonment of its longstanding policy of noninterference, though its limited capacity to sustain large-scale meetings and events arguably hampered these efforts.40 The building's completion ushered in a new era of AU governance-one shaped not only by the organisation's rhetoric of promoting democracy, human rights, and social justice, but also by a new range of financial and construction actors.Beginning in the 2000s, Africa experienced a continent-wide building boom coupled with a strong "Africa Rising" narrative that reverberated through renewed ambitions to reimagine both the architecture and bureaucracy of the AU.These influences diverged from the established western development models shaped by the IMF and World Bank, and were increasingly informed by China's global rise.They also led to calls for a necessary upgrade of the Ikimi-designed facilities less than ten years following their completion.
The AU's growing administrative needs aligned with China's own desire to expand its global engagement through development aid work in Africa, some of which dated back to the early 1960s. 41Economic liberalisation had transformed China's economic and ideological profile in the intervening forty years, but many of its aid-related connections retained a certain logistical and rhetorical value to Chinese officials seeking to frame their architectural and infrastructural work in Africa as emblematic of uniquely nonhierarchical knowledge exchange and mutually beneficial technical cooperation.Highlighting China's own shared experience with African countries regarding colonial exploitation was another, important element of these efforts, particularly as it served to distinguish China's efforts from more dissociated forms of top-down developmental assistance offered by the United States or the Soviet Union.
In 1999, these objectives took on a distinctly more aggressive tone through the Chinese government's initiation of a "going-out strategy," or zouchuqu zhanlue, to more actively encourage Chinese direct investment around the world.In 2006, at the first Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit and the third Ministerial Conference held in Beijing, then-President Hu Jintao announced eight aid projects designed to express the "consistent position" of the Chinese government in supporting African unity, self-improvement, and integration.One of these initiatives was China's design and construction of a new African Union headquarters. 42he new conference center and master plan by the Chinese government, presented to African leaders at the 2007 AU summit in Accra, Ghana, featured a particularly heavy-handed symbolism about African Unity.In keeping with its international profile, the project's final design was the result of a competitive, national tendering process; many of the submissions, inadvertently or not, deployed the same formal arrangement on display in Mezzidimi's 1961 Africa Hall, including a large, domed assembly hall complemented by a taller office slab.
The Tongji University Architectural Design Institute's scheme, led by the architect Ren Lizhi, was selected from more than forty design submissions.Representatives from China's Ministry of Commerce, the African Union Commission, and the Ethiopian Institute of Architects were responsible for the scheme's final support.The fifty-thousand-square-metre complex includes a 99.9-metre-tall, twenty-storey vertical tower, one 2,550-seat conference hall, two 650-seat meeting halls, four smaller conference rooms, and other event-related spaces (fig.11).The selected project's overarching theme, "China and Africa join hands to jointly promote the takeoff of the African continent," gestures toward an act of propulsive progress from which formal readings of the project as an interstellar vehicle may have derived, and much has been made regarding the building's iconic and indexical significance of Sino-African integration and partnership. 43he tower's height refers to the founding date of the AU on September 9, 1999, which made it the tallest building in the city at the time of its construction.The ellipsoidal form of the conference hall was designed to evoke a centripetal dynamic, which Ren and the project design team considered to be relevant to traditional African architectural culture and symbolic of the AU's organisational goals of cohesion, commonality, and unity.Project architects and scholars alike have attributed the AUCC's distinctive formal and aesthetic qualities to an aspirational "modernity," though the specific political and technical dimensions of these objectives, particularly in relation to the AU's organisational remit, remain unclear. 44hat has been made clear is the extent to which the complex was designed not merely to facilitate African intergovernmental meetings, but rather as a material and procedural showcase demonstrative of China's expertise and ability to organise, coordinate, and lead.Chief Architect Ren has stated that a consulting team consisting of architects, engineers, and officials from the African Union Commission and the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC) provided technical advice throughout the process, from tendering to the design phase.In addition, Ren and members of his design team purportedly traveled to Ethiopia "dozens of times" during the project's design and construction.Ren has also acknowledged the project's aims of "solving the problems" of the AU's "outdated and insufficient supporting facilities." 45More generally, foreign-and Chinese-language sources have noted China's capable coordination of a difficult project involving multiple stakeholders, and its ability to adapt and implement design adjustments quickly, and regardless of context. 46ncorporating sophisticated, energy-saving building technology adapted to local climatic conditions was another major design objective, intended to entwine local construction technologies and China's own imported energy-saving technical systems, thus highlighting both site specificity and the overall quality of Chinese design, construction, project management, and technological standards on a distinctly global stage. 47Built by approximately 1,200 Chinese and Ethiopian workers and completed in 2012, the complex's final cost totaled US$133 million, with all funding provided by the Chinese government.Chinese technicians controlled the construction process.Chinese-sponsored news articles have also stated that "more than 260 professional and technical workers have been trained and more than 2,000 jobs created" through the project, though some Ethiopian observers have expressed skepticism concerning the endeavour's long-term effects on Sino-Ethiopian technical collaboration or knowledge transfer. 48 closer look at the contributions made by the project's major builder, China State Construction Eighth Engineering Division Corporation, Ltd (CSCEC; Zhongguo jianzhu di ba gongchengju youxian gongsi), suggests the complex's value as a site from which Chinese companies could indeed promote their own expertise to both Chinese and international audiences.CSCEC deployed seven of its "major" new building technologies, fourteen "minor" new technologies, and eight other new technologies for the AUCC project, all of which were also being simultaneously promoted by the Ministry of Construction over the course of the building's construction (fig.12).These technologies included several different scaffolding systems, glass roofing and curtain wall technology, paneling, and systems monitoring and control hardware and software.High-precision automatic measurement and control monitoring, solar energy and building integration application technology, and general contracting management techniques were also highlighted. 49Nearly all the project's materials, too, were manufactured in and imported from China, including its steel, granite, marble, wood, aluminum, and glass, though some building products were also apparently selected on the basis of whether local distribution offices were available. 50pproximately ten years since the building's completion, public and scholarly attention continues to focus on its iconic significance as an embodiment of architectural aid from China, along with the claims of mutual benefit and cooperation at its symbolic core. 51However, such an emphasis obscures the extent to which the organisational framework and management of the facility's design and execution were unique.Fully funded and executed by Chinese representatives, the AUCC was very much what one Ethiopian engineer called "a very one-off project," in large part due to its importance as a showpiece of Chinese technical proficiency and logistical acumen. 52ttention paid to the AUCC's striking aesthetics also overshadows the complex's core function as a mechanism designed to facilitate diplomacy between African nations and in relation to Africa's position in the world now and in the future, with continued assistance from China's Ministry of Commerce.The AUCC enables hundreds of meetings annually among members of the African Union Summit, its Executive Council, the Pan-African Conference, and various ministerial-level meetings.It also hosts local, regional, and international events that arguably contribute to the development of local politics, economics, and culture and the city's overall reputation.
As a symbol of China's global influence and commitment to Africa, the project's imageability is an understandably important aspect of its overall legacy.That imageability, however, needs to be understood as dependent not merely upon the maintenance of the building's physical appearance for the sake of its own visibility, but also in relation to how the facility works and will continue to work over time.Technical proficiency and reliability remain essential to ensuring the building's practical use-value on a dayto-day basis, both to AU officials and to the Chinese government.Chinese representatives, for example, have argued that the technologies at work within the complex are both attuned to local climatic conditions and local forms of expertise in ways that render them sustainable over the long term.For example, it is estimated that more than seventy per cent of its rooms are adequately cooled without air-conditioning, and through the use of passive shading, natural ventilation, and controlled airflow design (fig.13).Solar energy facilities help to fuel ambient lighting and hot water for the adjacent park, while "durable and adaptable materials" and reliable, "daily maintenance management" are all intended to guarantee that the AU Conference Center remains technically functional today, more than one decade after its completion. 53he AU facilities management is aware that a building is an economic investment over time, as its costs include not just its planning and construction, but also its maintenance, upkeep, and repair over the years of its use.The Chinese state has committed to maintaining the complex over a period of ten years, free of charge, and this commitment is slated to be continued beyond 2022.Perhaps most importantly, there is a Chinese building facilities team on site, whose offices are directly abutting the conference center (fig.14).A current member of the AUCC maintenance team reports that the building's daily maintenance demands, including HVAC and sanitation facilities, are carried out by coordinated teams of Chinese technicians and local, AU-affiliated technical staff, with spare parts fully provided by China. 54he AU engineers and building managers with whom we spoke were impressed with China's professionalism and its efforts to satisfy the client.They generally appreciate the high standards of the design, and the continued commitment of the Chinese to maintain the building.They see Chinese-led development as a way for African societies to overcome political malaise, whether it is due to authoritarian and corrupt states or popular uprising.Those technicians with whom we spoke also understand very well that the Chinese "gift" to the AU is first and foremost China's "gateway to Africa": a showroom of Chinese possibilities that will convince African leaders of the benefits of Chinese partnership in construction and development, and thus facilitate the expansion of Chinese economic interests in Africa. 55et the effects of the AUCC as a Chinese gift exceed the realm of diplomacy and require us to situate the building complex as part of a broader technical transformation prompted by Chinese-led construction in Africa.This raises questions about the future of Chinese-led construction, not only of the AU headquarters, but also more generally.With much of the facility's technological trappings nevertheless dependent upon Chinese knowledge, a certain technical dependency on China is inevitable, along with questions as to the risks posed by such dependency over time.For example, perhaps the best-known equipment in the entire complex is its Chinasourced data servers, which became the object of suspicion in January 2017 when the Chinese government was allegedly found to be stealing confidential data from them.The AUCC has since replaced them with servers of their own. 56On the one hand, the project is most impactful because of the ways it displays a new degree of technical prowess in relation to the AU and as such serves to foster a new, more technical mode of governance across Africa.On the other hand, this model is very much reliant upon and largely enabled through China's beneficence, and ostensibly with China's participation.For all the technical capacity presented by Chinese-designed and financed architecture, it remains dependent upon power dynamics rooted in the delivery and management of foreign aid and architectural expertise that have arguably challenged the AU since its founding.In an interview, engineer Dr. Abraham Assefa emphasised that "it's very difficult to manage technology transfer with Chinese companies.The Chinese have managed to translate everything into their own language.So all of their drawings [and] communication is in Chinese, and the communication barrier is very high.Second, [these companies] are not oriented for technology transfer, they have a very strict command system." 57he question of technical dependency of the AUCC is also more broadly reflected in the Ethiopian construction industry at large, which is increasingly dominated by Chinese companies and materials.International companies have long maintained significant influence within the country's infrastructure development, yet the bulk of residential construction continues to be in the hands of Ethiopian designers, contractors, and consultants.However, the building materials and technologies they employ now come largely from China-a shift in the industry from approximately fifteen years ago, when a more significant amount of building material was sourced from the emirate of Dubai. 58This change does not necessarily create a direct dependency on China, however, since the brands and standards are international, even when produced in China. 59Moreover, access to cheaper Chinese-built equipment and advanced building technology has aided Ethiopian construction companies, such as Flintstone Engineering, in improving their overall building standards. 60All this raises questions about whether the AUCC's construction facilitated greater Chinese access to the Ethiopian building industry, and how changes in Africa's relationship to China may affect the ways in which such technologies are supplied and serviced, which may in turn influence the politics that support them.
Activities between the AU and China did seem to increase following the construction of the complex, though it is difficult to ascertain to what extent the existence of the building itself was instrumental in this regard.What is certain is that every African government official visiting the building is immersed in an experiential showcase of Chinese building excellence and has an embodied experience of what a Chinese-built modernity would be like.In the 2019 AUCC Annual Report, for example, China's role in promoting the African Union and improving its outreach in China was noted, with plans to open a new African Union representational office in Beijing that same year. 61e AU and the Transnational Scope of Technical Governance In Addis Ababa, the Chinese building contrasts markedly with the German-funded Peace and Security Council building, which was commissioned around the same time and finished in 2016.The building was named after Julius Nyerere, the first president of independent Tanzania.The process of naming the buildings in the AU compound has been carried out following the decision passed by the head of states of the AU, which meet once a year.The choice of naming after Nyerere symbolises the AU's history of post-independence ambition, but might recall Tanzania's history as a former German colony, or invoke the German government's own security agenda for development in Africa.
The Peace and Security Council Building project was part of the portfolio of the German government's GIZ (Gesellschaft f€ ur Internationale Zusammenarbeit), which spearheads German foreign development aid and technical cooperation programs (figs.15 and 16).The key stated aim was to realise a building according to "German standards" in Ethiopia."Because it is unfortunately not possible to find enough qualified engineers and workers in Ethiopia," GIZ project leader Manfred Off claimed, "we trained skilled workers with our instructors in order to realise the project." 62oreover, such a transfer of skill would encourage the use of climate-friendly and energy-efficient materials and technologies in the Ethiopian construction industry.
The schematic design was done in Germany by the architecture office Hascher Jehle, following a competition by GIZ in 2009.The architecture office was founded in 1993 and works almost exclusively within Germany with a mix of government and private projects and a strong focus on sustainable construction.The Peace and Security Building is one of only a few international projects in its portfolio."Stability and security, but also transparency and regional connectivity, as themes of the AU, guide the design," according to the GIZ website. 63This concept was translated into a monolithic building mass with a stone-clad exterior surface and horizontal slits of windows, and with an open courtyard that allows for interior transparencies and easy circulation across and between the building's five floors.Despite the German design, both the GIZ and the AU emphasise that this was a design-build project ultimately in the hands of an Ethiopian company.The GIZ awarded the project to a local construction company, Flintstone Engineering, back in 2008. 64Much smaller than the Chinese-designed conference center, the PSC building is a modest four storeys tall, with an atrium in the middle.While the building lacks the grand symbolic statement of the AUCC, it certainly is not devoid of symbolic representation.The building's ashlar sandstone fac ¸ade and irregular horizontal window strips suggest an affinity with natural geology and can be read as relying on a long history of colonial assumptions about "Africa" as being in closer proximity to the natural world.At the same time, the artisanal texture is off-set by a high-modernist eco-look that projects this idea of Africa into a sustainable high-tech future.The building's atrium is covered by a high-tech elastic membrane featuring solar panels in the form of the AU's logo, symbolically bringing together the project of Pan-African governance and sustainable development.
In addition to the building itself, the project includes a garden with indigenous plants and a water basin, which serves as the primary cooling device for the building.The GIZ website boasts: "The high tech roof consists of a highly transparent, heat-resistant material that allows UV rays to enter the building.Not only is the material self-cleaning, and not only does it have an unlimited service life, it is also elastic and tear-resistant." 65his also makes the roof earthquake proof.Yet the engineers we spoke to criticised this claim as fanciful and emphasised that the maintenance and repair of this high-tech roof would require it to be sent to Germany, there being no local company that can handle it-unlike much of the products used in the Chinese-built part of the complex, many of which are more standardised and globally available.
Six years after the building was inaugurated, it is possible to draw some initial insights about its lasting effects.According to Dr. Abraham Assefa: there was a fair amount of, you know, we wouldn't call it technology transfer, but there was a close working relationship.But they will be mistaken themselves, and we ourselves will also be mistaken, if we assume that any of those proposals has matured enough [to influence] the industry.An average construction industry expert would not know whether this technology was brought from Germany or from [somewhere else], and there aren't any kinds of examples that you can say, "Oh, this is a German technology," or "This technology was adopted for this [particular] project." 66intstone Founder and Chief Executive Officer Moges Tadese has described the construction process of the PSC building as "more organic" relative to the Chinesedesigned complex.The building's sandstone fac ¸ade, for example, was composed of individually extracted and cut blocks to approximate hand-crafted rather than automated industrial production.German concrete, woodworking, and textile professionals were flown to Addis Ababa on short-term consulting visits to conduct on-site inspections and provide training to Ethiopian workers.The involvement of skilled Ethiopian professionals was high, with numerous local contractors and subcontractors in electrical installation, plumbing, and mechanics hired during the construction process. 67Collectively, these qualities evoke the working dynamics and aesthetic expressions of Mezzedimi and Chomette's earlier efforts.
At the same time, however, Moges has also challenged presumptions that the equipment and technology used in the Chinese-and German-designed projects can be clearly defined or distinguished based on country of origin.For example, the German project began just as the Chinese complex was completed, and some of the same Chinese-sourced concrete batching and mixing equipment was used for both buildings, though the respective labour systems undergirding each project were different.It is also unclear whether German efforts to use the project to build Ethiopia's construction capacity have been effective or sustainable.Flintstone is currently building residential projects across Addis Ababa, but whether such work is demonstrative of knowledge and technology transfer, or if it evinces the kind of deliberate engagement with local materials and sustainable construction methods on display in the PSC project, remain open-ended questions.Moreover, Ethiopia's construction sector still predominantly operates with materials and equipment from China; cheap, accessible technology in contrast to the PSC's state-of-the-art sustainable elements, which do not fit easily into a more conventional construction project's budget. 68he Chinese and German involvement in the AUCC embody radically different approaches to both construction and development, while the continued reliance on Chinese-led maintenance and lack of technology transfer contrasts with the German ambition (but relatively low success) of capacity building toward sustainability in the Ethiopian construction sector.Their comparison reveals the perceived benefits and advantages of the PRC's distinctive model of technical governance: a centralized system organised around expertise and management that distinguishes the PRC not only from western models, but from those offered by Brazil, Russia, Turkey, India, and other countries that have become increasingly important partners in African development, including also of the AU. 69

Conclusion
In 1964, soon after the opening of the Africa Hall and amid Chomette's work in Addis Ababa, the American historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford expounded upon theoretical differences between so-called "authoritarian and democratic technics."Mumford argued that since the beginning of human civilisation, there existed two basic technologies: one authoritarian, and characterised as "system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable," and one democratic in nature: "man-centred, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable." 70Since then, scholars of architecture and technology have shown how Mumford's position on technology as possessive of discernible political ideologies was coloured by the deterministic, polarised ideologies of the Cold-War era, which influenced his analysis of cities and architecture. 71he architectural history of the OAU and AU tests Mumford's assertion and its underlying geopolitical dimensions, albeit in perhaps unexpected terms.Our research shows that in assessing the effects of architectural gifting as international diplomacy, political ideology offers limited insight.Architectural technology is informed, in many different ways, by the political and social relations in which it operates.At the same time, as the Africa Hall, the AUCC, and the PSC demonstrate, transnational architecture participates in its own, distinctly transnational form of governance.
Much of the western critique leveled against the AUCC project, and Chinese-led development and its architectural manifestations more broadly, slip into the wellworn ideological contours of Mumford's argument.This overlooks the extent to which foreign aid, regardless of its western or Chinese origins, its capitalistic or socialistic rhetoric, has done little to democratise African governance.In fact, much evidence suggests that the opposite is true.The radically different regimes of aid shaping Ethiopian history, from the United States-led aid during the rule of Haile Selassie to the Soviet aid during the Dergue regime and the increasingly Chinese-led regime of the past few decades, have in common that despite upheavals, they bolstered a highly centralized, authoritarian state. 72any African governments have publicly lauded China's architectural achievements in Africa on the terms of technical excellence set by China itself.China's rhetorical consistency has also incited and benefited from doubts among some African leaders about the nature and consequences of reliance upon distinctly westernsourced development aid, even as China's own perceived alternative paradigm comes with its own distinctive political dynamics and technical conditions.Indeed, China's projects have long been very much dependent upon Chinese designs, Chinese building materials, and Chinese technical expertise.This dependence has decentered the west and its patronising philosophy of development, though the shift toward China does little of course to dismantle the anti-democratic structures of previous transnational development regimes.In many respects, the AUCC suggests the emergence of a new regime rooted in the dynamics of technical governance, with new forms of expertise and authority, repair, and control.The social and political hierarchies of this regime will depend in part on the design, construction, and management of these projects, which include the technologies they depend upon, the maintenance they require, and the decision-making processes that surround them.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. First meeting of the Organization of African Unity, held at the UNECA's Africa Hall in 1963, with the Gion Hotel and Ethiopia Hotel used as facilities for dignitaries.Courtesy Ethiopia National Archives.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. First meeting of the Organization of African Unity, held at the UNECA's Africa Hall in 1963, with the Gion Hotel and Ethiopia Hotel used as facilities for dignitaries.Courtesy Ethiopia National Archives.

Figure 11 .
Figure 11.Site plan, African Union Conference Center and Office Complex, Addis Ababa, 2012.Drawn by Athena WT Yuen.

Figure 12 .
Figure 12.African Union Conference Centre and Office Complex under construction, 2010.Getty Images.

Figure 14 .
Figure 14.Office of the Chinese facilities management team on the site of the African Union Conference Center and Office Complex, 2022.Photograph by Kenny Cupers, 2022.