Brutalism in Mozambique

Mozambique holds a significant share of Africa's late colonial modern architecture, built when Portuguese architects and engineers worked in Lourenço Marques, today Maputo, from the 1950s to independence in 1975. They adapted concrete modernism to the tropics with shading screens, open ground floors and expressive structure. Nuno Craveiro Lopes designed the Igreja de Santo António da Polana (1962), whose folded concrete crown makes it one of the most striking modern churches on the continent. Maputo's concrete heritage remains largely intact and increasingly studied.