The Revolution Will Be Stopped Halfway: Oscar Niemeyer in Algeria

Of all of the Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer's many built works, his Algerian projects are among the least well known. Beginning in 1968, Algeria's President Houari Boumediene commissioned Niemeyer to build two universities and an Olympic sports hall, as well as a series of large-scale, never-realized projects across Algeria, in an attempt to forge a modernist, independent nation. In 2013, Jason Oddy produced an in-depth photographic survey of these buildings as they exist in Algeria today. The Revolution Will Be Stopped Halfway collects those images alongside archival documents and Oddy's further research into Niemeyer's Algerian work in order to explore the revolutionary politics that inspired and formed these buildings.


About the Author

Jason Oddy is a writer and artist whose work focuses on the politics of place. His photographic investigations of the Pentagon, ex-Soviet sanatoria, and Guantanamo Bay have been published and exhibited internationally, including at the Photographers' Gallery (London), Paris Photo, the Milan Triennale, Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, and the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Marseilles. Oddy's first book, Notes du désert (Grasset, 2017) explores America's post-9/11 anti-terror training grounds.

Samia Henni is an assistant professor of the history of architecture and urban development at Cornell University. She is the author of the award-winning book Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag, 2017), the editor of gta papers 2: War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018), and the curator of "Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria," which has been shown on three continents. She has taught at Princeton University, ETH Zurich, and Geneva University of Art and Design. She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture from ETH Zurich (with distinction).