Between true believers and operational experts: UNESCO architects and school building in postcolonial Africahttps://biblio.ugent.be/publication/4194347http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-41943472014De Raedt, KimFollowing decolonisation in the late 1950s, Cold War competitiveness and economic globalisation prompted old and new foreign powers to invest in the development of Africa. Through building and urban planning, they sought to transmit their specific models of modernisation to the continent. Architects from divergent contexts and backgrounds embraced this opportunity to transfer their expertise to Africa, in particular through development aid organisations. This paper will shed light on the expert(ise)s that were exported to, and generated within, Africa in the 1960s and 70s through one particular international aid agency, namely UNESCO. The focus will be on the organisation's activity in the field of school building, a crucial sector of development in Africa following the independence of former colonies across the continent. Through this agency, a transnational network of expert-architects with highly divergent backgrounds was generated. By taking UNESCO as a starting point, we identify a number of such globally operating architects that had a crucial impact on the design and construction of educational facilities, but remain unstudied to date. Through an analysis of their work the paper reveals the design knowledge that was generated and the building expertise that circulated through UNESCO in Africa, while simultaneously untangling the complex networks and mechanisms behind this unique architecture production.Arts and Architecturedevelopment aidnetworkglobal expertAfricaschool buildingarchitectureUNESCOengjournalArticleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersionJOURNAL OF ARCHITECTUREhttp://archive.ugent.be/oai/oai:archive.ugent.be:41943472013-12-03T14:21:13Zhttp://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/