Asmara's architectural heritage as a bricolage: The case of St. Mary's Orthodox Cathedral

Asmara's modernist heritage, adjudged by UNESCO to possess "outstanding value to humanity", combines the architectural practices of locals and former "colonizers", and embodies Eritrea's modernist encounters. In 2017 Asmara was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List under Criteria 2 and 4 and remains Africa's only explicitly modernist site. Employing the concept of bricolage to examine some of Asmara's most notable buildings, this paper questions UNESCO's rejection of Eritrea's claim to Criterion 3, which was intended to acknowledge the essential contribution of indigenous labour and cultural traditions in the creation and articulation of modernism in Asmara. The work focusses on the pre-eminent example of St. Mary's Orthodox Cathedral, a building with deep symbolic meaning and material and constructional histories of both Eritrean and Italian architecture. Finally, its bricolages contributed significantly to the production of a unique modernist language that defines Asmara's claims to modernism, a modernism not of Europe, but of Africa.