La Pyramide and Plateau Modernism

La Pyramide, the stepped concrete office and market building designed by the Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri and completed in the 1970s, stands on Rue du Commerce in the commercial core of Le Plateau among the towers of the 1970s and 1980s building boom, and the surrounding blocks hold the densest concentration of late-modernist West African architecture in Abidjan. The building's stepped, inverted-pyramid form reads best from street level looking up along Rue du Commerce, where the terraced facade creates a strong graphic frame against the sky; the narrow street canyon means direct sun only reaches the pavement for limited windows each day. Early morning, between 07:30 and 09:30, brings raking light down the street before the heat builds, catching the terraces in strong side shadow; in the late afternoon, from 17:00 to 18:00, the sun swings around to light the west-facing surfaces of neighbouring towers directly. August to November gives the cleanest, most contrasty light on the concrete surfaces; the December-January harmattan haze dulls the greys and the June rains streak the facades. Rue du Commerce is a working business street, busy with pedestrians and traffic through the working day, so a tripod is impractical at ground level and a handheld approach with a wide or tilt-shift lens is the norm; there is no fee to photograph from the public street. Several buildings in the surrounding Plateau blocks are government property, and photographing entrances, security posts or guarded facades directly can draw the attention of building security, so photography is best kept to public street-level views of the architecture rather than close approaches to guarded buildings.