Sammy Baloji

The Tower - Concrete Utopia / TheTower, 7th street, Quartier industriel, municipality of Limete. Kinshasa

Part-skyscraper, part-pyramid, part-citadel, this unfinished and ragged twelve-story building stands, incongruously, among the industrial environment of Limete. Towering above this desultory landscape and defying gravitational laws and urban zoning rules, this uncommon architectural proposition forms one of the strangest and most enigmatic landmarks of the city. A giant question mark, it begs for profound reflection on the nature of the city, the heritage of its colonial modernist architecture, the dystopian nature of its infrastructure, and the capacity for utopian urban dreams and lines of flight that it nonetheless continues to generate. The proud owner and (together with his wife) the sole inhabitant of the Tower is a medical doctor who specializes in “aeronautic and spatial medicine.” In 2003, the “Docteur” (as everybody calls him) bought a small plot of 13 square meters. Assisted by two architects, he set out to build a four-story building, but well before reaching that level, the doctor fired the architects and from there, without a clear plan, became his own architect— the norm rather than the exception in Kinshasa. Somewhere along the line, however, the doctor got carried away by his love for and preoccupation with the skies, and soon that which had started as a modest and more regular housing construction evolved into an increasingly megalomaniacal vertical proposition, reaching ever higher into the sky, and eating up ever more cement and concrete. Sacrificing his own finances, health, and peace of mind to realize his “vision,” the doctor thus gradually lost control of the building site. The Tower took over and started to impose its own unstoppable logic, building itself to its logical conclusion, while the doctor became the Tower’s hostage, its visionary martyr.