Small peek at vast continent

CAMBRIDGE -- The show of photos of African cities, now at Harvard, is visually stunning and worth a visit, even though you may feel, in the end, that it's a little shallow in content.

David Adjaye, who was born in Tanzania, is a prize-winning architect in London. Besides designing buildings, such as the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, he takes a passionate interest in the cities of his native Africa. It's an interest he pursues with a camera.

The walls of the huge gallery on the ground floor of Gund Hall, home of the Harvard Design School, are covered with what must be hundreds (I didn't count) of color photographs. All are the same size, about 6-by-9 inches, and all are arranged in grids. They tell the story of 10 cities, each of which is the capital of an African country.

As an American you may feel embarrassed, because if you're like me, you may not even have heard of some of the cities, at least not under their present names. Yet the cities are immense. Abidjan, the former capital of Ivory Coast, has almost three and a half million people. Bamako, in Mali, has a million and three quarters. Even Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso, tops a million.

Faced with such a vast aggregation of people living in places scattered the length of a continent, Adjaye doesn't try to tell us a coherent story. He just shoots whatever interests him. Says the show's catalog , "Adjaye's visits to African cities are . . . voyages of personal discovery . . . . His intention is to make a visual record of the city as he encounters it."

As you zoom in on each image, one at a time, the show stops feeling like an oversize tapestry. Almost every image proves interesting. Adjaye's an architect, of course, and he loves to see buildings with designs that express some clash of cultures, some Western idea, perhaps, that's been adapted to local conditions in an unpredictable way. You notice, too, the proliferation of sun-shading devices of all kinds, from sidewalk arcades to umbrella roofs that float in the air above buildings. He's equally interested in people, but he always shows them in a social and physical setting, never in close-up portraits that would frame them off from the places they occupy.

Adjaye doesn't seem to have any political ax to grind. In that regard, the photos are deeply innocent. None has a caption. It's up to you to see what you see and draw your conclusions. The only words on the walls are a few lines of facts about each city, and a block paragraph on the history of the country of which it's the capital. These paragraphs are summaries so brief they're useless; you won't remember one from another. A little more information would have been welcome in this otherwise fascinating show.

Harvard hasn't always done Adjaye justice. All words are presented in white letters on black grounds, always a guarantee that they'll be hard to read, especially for anyone over 20. Many of the photos are hung too high, and to make things worse, the lighting is placed so that it reflects annoyingly off these higher photos.

If you go, don't miss the much smaller exhibition in a corner of the gallery. Called "Desert Ecotourism," it's on view through the end of April and is about how even the harshest deserts are now becoming attractions for tourists. It talks about how tourism can damage the ecology of such places, and it presents three tourist camps, or tourist lodges, in Egypt , each of which attempts to solve that problem.

One consists mostly of tents, so as to disturb the land as little as possible. Another was created by restoring the ruins of an abandoned village. A third has walls of stone two feet thick, so that -- like vernacular desert dwellings -- the walls absorb the sun during the hot day and radiate it out during the chilly night, thus maintaining a nearly constant indoor temperature. One tourist lodge contains a camel school, helping camels and their Bedouin masters relearn skills they knew before the arrival of motor vehicles.

These new-style camps, we are told, seek to "capitalize on natural and cultural assets while ensuring their preservation." Not a bad idea.

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.