A rendering of Tower F – credit, PFO Africa
By New Years Eve, Africa will see the completion of the continent’s newest tallest building—and probably not where you’d expect.
Tour F will take the tallest tower title when its spire is installed, glowering 1,381 feet (421 meters) over the streets of Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast.
The 75-story supertall skyscraper has been designed to appear like a West African mask, but its functionality belies the pageantry of the faceted glass facade.
Containing 1.5 million square feet of space, Tour, or Tower F, will consolidate a number of government offices, freeing up real estate and buildings around the city while allowing department employees office-to-office and face-to-face coordination.
Its 16,000 glass panels mounted on the exterior shell have been glazed to reflect direct sunlight, reducing the need for air conditioning. At the summit, there is what has been dubbed the ‘lantern,’ an observation deck enclosed in glass, almost 100 feet high. It’s a public viewing platform that overlooks the city and the Ebrié lagoon that’s reachable by a panoramic elevator.
Tour F, was designed by the Lebanese-Ivorian architect Pierre Fakhoury and co-developed by the Ivorian Ministry of Construction, Housing and Urban Planning and local construction company PFO Africa.
Unstable, swampy ground made the foundational work especially important. Hundreds of steel piles had to be driven down some 200 feet into the Earth to find bedrock. Once completed, these supports were attached to a 30-feet-thick concrete slab—a combination necessary to support the building’s 170,000 tons of weight.
– credit, PFO Africa
Tour F takes its rather uninspired name from its origin story that began in 1970 when the government began construction on 5 towers to house various government offices. They were aptly named Towers A – E.
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Planning for Tour F began at that time, but never took shape due to successive waves of civil unrest, economic difficulties, and political upheaval. Today though, the country is the 3rd largest economy in ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) and the largest among the French-speaking members.
Oscar Holland, writing for CNN, opined that the heritage symbolism of the facade pales in comparison the symbolism of the building’s completion in the country. It’s a sign that the difficult decades are long behind her, that an African nation can indigenously produce monumental modern architecture, that West Africa is on the up and up, and the Ivory Coast is leading the way—not only with its skyscraper, but with a series of new infrastructure projects including a mass-transit system and an Abidjan to Lagos superhighway.
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Africans may look and notice that the tallest tower on the continent isn’t located among the 5 biggest economies—nor even among the 10 biggest. the Ivory Coast is indeed ranked 11th using a simple nominal GDP metric.
Tour F will dethrone the iconic Tower in the New Administrative Capital of Egypt, which is 400 m (1,292 ft) tall, thanks to its spire when it finishes later this year.
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