Firms working everywhere from China to Saudi Arabia have to navigate the often grandiose ambitions of authoritarian regimes. With the Sipopo Congress Center, Murat Tabanlıoğlu says his Istanbul-based firm used the challenge to design “a showcase” for Equatorial Guinea as an opportunity to promote peace and development across Africa. A glass box wrapped in a geometric painted aluminum screen, the project was built in 2011 to house meetings of the Assembly of the African Union, an annual gathering of heads of state from the organization's 54 member countries. Equatorial Guinea's long-ruling leader, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, had been struck two years earlier by the luminous hall that Tabanlıoğlu Architects designed for Tripoli, Libya, when it hosted the Assembly, and he asked the firm to create a similarly impressive structure for the Union's meetings in his country. (The Tripoli building survived the revolution that toppled Muammar Gaddafi, though work stopped on a nearby conference center there by Zaha Hadid.)
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