Miami in the USA, and the city of Napier, in New Zealand, are Asmara’s only rivals when it comes to Art Deco building.
The latter sits in the Hawke’s Bay wine region, and suffered a massive earthquake in 1931. (It killed 256 people, and is NZ’s worst natural disaster to date.) The earthquake and the fires that followed it destroyed most of the town, and it was rebuilt in the styles popular in the 1930s: Stripped Classical, Spanish Mission and Art Deco.
The New Zealand national tourist website is careful about what it says: “Nowhere else in the Southern Hemisphere has such a concentration of buildings in the styles of the 1930s.” That’s because Asmara rules the roost in the Northern Hemisphere. For those of us based in the UK, you just need to flick through Edward Denison’s masterpiece “Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City
” to find out more.
I’ve illustrated this post with a couple of photos of Napier for comparison.
