ABSTRACT
The pathway presented earlier illustrates how appeals to modern heritage in Africa now amount to a significant anthropological problem. Starting from a diagnosis of how the issue of modern architectural heritage originally emerged as a problematized domain in the middle of the 19th century, I went on to show how, throughout the 20th century, modern architecture and heritage preservation simultaneously formed integral parts of a dominant apparatus of modernization until, by the beginning of the 21st century, the institutionalization of modern architectural heritage on the African continent came to reproblematize progressive modernity both as an epoch and as a culture within this apparatus. The actual urgency of this particular problematization of the modern becomes clearer reflecting back on the construction, deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of the Crystal Palace as a constitutive event.
