Africa's "Miami" boasts Art Deco trove

By Andrew Cawthorne

ASMARA (Reuters) - When Italian architect Giuseppe Pettazzi inaugurated Eritrea's plane-shaped "Fiat Tagliero" service station in 1938, he stunned onlookers by pulling out a gun.

There, the story behind Africa's finest piece of Futurist architecture goes hazy.

In one version, Pettazzi stood defiantly on one of his 18-metre (59 ft) concrete "wings" -- used as decorative shades for cars entering the garage -- and threatened to kill himself should the structure collapse as wooden supports were pulled away.

In another, the excitable architect held the gun to the head of a disbelieving builder, who had hesitated to pull away the struts for fear the long slabs would tumble down.

Either way, the wings stayed up, nobody was shot, and Pettazzi's design skills were vindicated.

Seven decades on, this extraordinary piece of Italian Art Deco, which resembles a plane at takeoff, is still standing in Asmara, the central capital of this former Italian colony.

The "Fiat Tagliero", named for the car firm and the old gas station's owner, is one of 400 buildings that make the remote Eritrean capital one of the world's most fascinating centers for Art Deco and other architectural styles.

One of a tiny number of books on the subject -- "Africa's Secret Modernist City" by three Asmara-based writers -- calls Asmara "the Miami of Africa" in reference to the U.S. city's fame for Art Deco, a design in the Modernism trend known for stylish geometric shapes, bold curves and soft colors.

"The Italians felt they would be here for hundreds of years, so they built and built, and left us this remarkable legacy," said Samson Haile Theophilos, who has written about Eritrean architecture, as he purred lovingly over the Fiat building.

"But I want to stress the workers, skilled and unskilled, were all Eritrean, so we consider this architecture ours."

Asmara's Art Deco boom came during 1935-41, the last six years of Italian colonial rule of the vast Horn of Africa region then known as Abyssinia.

ITALY'S "URBAN UTOPIA"

Unrestrained by European norms, and confident they were laying foundations for the continued expansion of their African colony, Italian architects turned Asmara into an experiment.

A 1937 garage looks like the bottom of a ship with porthole windows. The distinctive "Bar Zilli" imitates a 1930s radio set with windows like tuning knobs. Office blocks are modeled on space rockets.

"Desperate to build quickly, the colonial government of the time allowed radical architectural experimentation that would not have found favor in the more conservative European environment," says "Africa's Secret Modernist City".