There is something intriguing about the term “tropical modernism.” It invokes paradisical lushness, remote islands, and foamy surf, a friendly wilderness with suave luxury and precision detailing. But the “tropical” isn’t a place as such – it’s an imagined geography, an artificial threshold, and constructed territory defined by the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Those celestial belts that wrap around the world stretching out from the equatorial waistline about 23.5 degrees north and south. It covers a vast territory, incorporating the Caribbean, Central America, and a large segment of South America, the majority of Africa, parts of the Middle East, three-quarters of India, most of Southeast Asia and the northern segment of Australia.
It’s a problematic term, if not lazy and arbitrary. It effortlessly homogenises people, culture, climates, altitudes, countries, and identities into a convenient catch-all term. The differences between these places far outnumber their commonalities, and yet we seem quite satisfied to lump them together as one – united by a shared humidity and common wet-bulb temperature reading. The tropics is hot and sometimes humid – relative to the temperate zones. It was a means for Europeans to describe those parts of the world that were somehow other, often colonised, different, and exotic. It aligned with late Victorian views of the world – the tropics was there to be tamed, turned into a vast imperial estate ripe for extraction and supplying the raw materials necessary for industrial advances. As Edward Said set out the opposing Orient and Occident, so too can we observe something similar with the Temperate and Tropical and special scientific enquiries were devoted to the tropics. For example, a specialised branch of medicine sought to cure “tropical diseases” and improve health conditions that decimated the colonial population and gave rise to the “white man’s grave” nomenclature of West Africa. Two schools of Tropical Medicine were established in England by 1899 endowed with funds and prizes from West African merchants. Tropical agriculture followed, tasked with creating botanical gardens such as Aburi, in Ghana, manned by a curator from Kew Gardens. There was a vested interest in these “tropical” institutions and their enquiries that would benefit trade, seek out new materials and products, and bolster the imperial vision.
Architecture, too, was part of the medical arsenal that could help fight disease and increase the comfort Europeans faced with these debilitating environs. A solution to the problem of “malarial miasmic gases” was to raise the ground floor of dwellings on stilts. The heat of the sun was mitigated through other design features such as the verandah whilst the jalousie screen increased cross ventilation. A design vocabulary, or as Jiat-Hwee Chang terms it, a “genealogy of tropical architecture” emerged that responded to the climate and saw much greater attention devoted to orientation, wind direction, and “healthy” sites.Footnote1 These designs developed in the Caribbean plantations, West African river stations, and the East Indian bungalows by traders, Royal Engineers, and missionaries. These structures were part of the colonial mission, and as ideas were exchanged and shared, a tropical lexicon emerged that was deemed applicable across all these territories. Just as a priest might be posted to a new mission station or an engineer sent from Georgetown to Jamestown, so too did this design technology and architectural language migrate and become ubiquitous as Anthony King demonstrated in his seminal Bungalow.Footnote2
Tropical architecture existed before the arrival of the “modern,” if anything it offered a syntax that was adopted by Modernist architects and the so-called “five points towards a new architecture” are a derivation of the tropical bungalow. Modernism claimed to reject historical precedent and to be universally applicable – it had a globalist ambition with little regard to context. But if Modernism was international, why did it need to be tempered for the tropical, and in what way? Climate was presented as the chief design generator, as if it was the only functionalist criteria to be addressed, ignoring sociological concerns, imperialism, land ownership, and labour – it was more straightforward to talk about the weather. The result was an architecture that attempted to create an inner sanctum of coolth and cross-ventilation, with the building acting as a veil between interior safety and comfort, and the diseased and overly heated discomfortable exterior – whilst “tropical architecture” replaced the less palatable term “colonial architecture.”
It’s at this point that the V&A picks up the story. It’s been an eagerly anticipated exhibition and the opening had a large queue gathered outside, in the rain, 30 minutes before the reveal. Glimpses of what to expect had been shown at the Venice Biennale, which premiered a specially produced film shown on a 12 m long curved screen. Two British architects, E. Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) and Jane B. Drew (1911–1996) are used as a thread or reinforcement bar, to connect the disparate and eclectic set of exhibits, and their projects in Ghana and India act as two poles about which other architects, authors, and artists are introduced. Fry developed some tropical experience following wartime service in “British West Africa,” soon joined by Drew, his wife, businesses partner, and flamboyant force behind the practice. Pre Fry, Drew ran a female-only practice, was a single mother, and possibly worked as an MI6 agent. Fry, more at home at the drawing board, was something of a UK Modernist pioneer and collaborated with Walter Gropius at Impington Village College, which served as a model for the 20 schools he and Drew went on to design in Ghana.
The exhibition includes photographs and drawings of these early projects that utilised local stone and timber, creating a rustic modernism in the remote Amedzofe hills, through to the more urbane Opoku Ware school in Kumasi, with its cast-concrete Asante stool-motif decoration. These schools were part of a post-war United Kingdom funded development drive, aimed to prepare the colony for political independence, but as Mark Crinson reminds us – this wasn’t a “neutral” architecture.Footnote3 Modernism may have imagined itself as a tabula rasa – but it was merely continuing a system that sustained existing material supply chains, contractors, and consultants. Kwame Nkrumah was quick to label this “Neo-Colonialism” as the large multinationals accelerated their grip on market share, continued their cartels, and benefited from development aid in this “Independence Boom.” Footnote4
The politics of architecture, aid, development, and how a former-colonial state is reimagined is a complex exhibition theme – it’s also clouded by the artistic expression and seductive qualities of this architecture. It’s quite possible for these buildings to say one thing through their concrete lace and sweeping cantilevered staircases, and yet to be undermining this vision through its finance, construction, and material supply infrastructure. It was something of a bind for Nkrumah as he sought to demonstrate change through the built environment. For example, he commissioned Tema, a new harbour town, to transition Ghana to a manufacturing and industrial base, but to do so relied almost entirely on former-colonial enterprise, loans, and to an extent control. British planner Alfred Alcock designed the plan, which was executed through the Tema Development Corporation by chief architect, Theodore Shealtiel Clerk (1909–1965) – Ghana’s only qualified African architect at the time. He was joined by a team from London’s Architectural Association’s newly established “Department of Tropical Architecture.”
The exhibition includes photographs taken of Tema by Michael Hirst, who documented the entire process as a 24-year-old, newly qualified architect charged with designing hundreds of new houses there. The inclusion of these private images in the exhibition reveals how little has been documented and preserved in more official collections. It was a difficult task for the curators to source original material – as not much survives if it was ever collated at all. The fragments that have endured, such as the beautiful drawings of Unity Hall, Kumasi, by John Owusu Addo (another graduate from the AA Tropical Department) are particularly fragile, and it’s remarkable that such important documents have not been preserved and exhibited before. Other artefacts were exhumed and restored for the exhibition, such as the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, salvaged from a university workshop in Kumasi and now suspended from the ceiling alongside a model of the campus, designed by Australian James Cubitt in 1951. Other than this model, it’s curious that Cubitt is absent – his one-time collaborator Kenneth “Winky” Scott (also from Australia) and designer of perhaps the most “tropical” of all tropical houses in Accra only receives a passing mention. It’s always difficult to decide what and who to include – and if major players in West Africa like Cubitt and Scott are on the margins, how much more the burgeoning West African architects?
John Owusu Addo features as mentioned, but the rest of the early 1950s cohorts struggle to be heard. There are some wonderful photographs of Victor Adegbite, brought back from the US by Nkrumah to design the Black Star Square homage to himself, and Max Bond’s seductive library at Bolgatanga. Others are included – but you’ve got to search for them – there’s an intriguing shot of an architect called John Noah (“an architect from Sierra Leone”) photographed with Fry – but who was he, and what else did he build? There are other questions more important than the biographical focus on individual architects, such as why the narrow focus on Ghana? Neighbouring giant Nigeria is largely absent despite its cache of tropical modernist architecture, not least the idiosyncratic Ibadan Dominican Chapel by 2023 Golden Lion award winner Demas Nwoko. There was scope here for more conversations between the likes of Hirst, Nwoko, and Addo – what we lack in ephemera could have come through lived testimony – and the film does address this, in part, with footage from Henry Wellington, Owusu Addo, and Ola Uduku amongst others.
The other focus of the exhibition is the Indian city of Chandigarh. Commissioned in the wake of India’s partition in 1948, the object was to create a Punjabi capital, but more than this, it was a symbolic vision for Jawaharlal Nehru’s new India. Like Nkrumah, Nehru was attempting to use architecture to forge a tangible manifestation of his political vision. These top-down projects gave the opportunity to produce grand statements as well as provide amenities such as housing, hospitals, schools – “unfettered by the past” as Nehru put it. Le Corbusier was, on Drew’s suggestion, appointed as master planner and architect of the “Capital Complex” a vast esplanade dotted with Corbusian objects, including “the Tower of Shadows” (a model of this delightful folly from the MoMa collection is included in the exhibition) devoted to casting shadows with the movement of the sun.Footnote5 It’s whimsical solar-fetishism. Corbusier’s cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Fry, and Drew were responsible for the rest of the city arranged as a grid of Sectors, with housing allocated to the new residents according to salary and civil service rank. Critics of the town are many, but it’s a place that warrants closer inspection and there is much to commend the Sector interior layouts with their generous parks, schools, local shops, and carefully designed housing. The grid layout is unforgiving, but on a scale that allows, even encourages, deviation and transgression. What the Modernist Masters overlooked (chaiwallahs, bike repairs, laundries, and so on) can now find a comfortable spot. Jeanneret even made the town his home, and set about creating a suite of affordable furniture with local carpenters and weavers – now controversially auctioned off at six-figure sums – there’s a few examples positioned on a podium so no one accidently sits on them.
Alongside photos of Le Corbusier posing with his Modulor Man (a Fibonacci-inspired proportioning device), are ceramic-clad statues by self-taught artist Nek Chand. Chand was employed to help build Chandigarh, but during the nights over the course of 50 years, he created his own illegal version of the city at the edge of Sector-1 using the remnants of villages destroyed to make way for the city. He was eventually discovered by the then Chief Architect Manmohan Nath Sharma, who was part of the original design team and worked with Fry and Drew on Sector-22. Rather than following the city Corbusian edicts, Sharma wisely told Chand to continue his art and his creation is now India’s second largest tourist attraction. Nek Chand’s “visionary environment” filled with waterfalls, palaces, and thousands of sculptures presents an alternative Chandigarh, before Corbusier, with fragments of a pre-modernist era proudly on display and revealing the heavy price that many paid for this vision of the future. Yet despite Nehru’s claims of being unfettered by history, Corbusier’s cosmic-brutalist-palaces invoke a ruined temple complex. They’re curious structures containing Corbusier’s hieroglyphics and a sense of a European overly enamoured by imagined Eastern mysticism. These works are included in the exhibition expressed through the refined timber models of Giani Rattan Singh.
Surprisingly, one of Corbusier’s disciples, Balkrishna Doshi, doesn’t feature in the exhibition – his work at Ahmedabad could have provided a foil to Corbusier’s heft (and opened up further dialogues with Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad and Dhaka; and Albert Mayer, who worked in India and Ghana). A welcome inclusion is a large model of the Pragati Maidan in Delhi, by architect Raj Rewal (sadly demolished in 2017).Footnote6 An example of post-Chandigarh Modernism produced 25 years after independence, the tessellating triangular pyramids show a new expressive (post?) Modernist vocabulary being pursued by the likes of Doshi, Charles Correa, and Rewal. But this is something different, and much later to the exhibition’s core and scope – there’s no real connection between Rewal and the Chandigarh project or design team. Rewal worked for Michel Écochard in the early 1960s and that could have prompted another strand on the Modernism of North and Francophone Africa (as researched by Tom Avermaete in the Casablanca Chandigarh project).Footnote7 It would have been more coherent to have Sri Lankans Geoffrey Bawa and Minnette de Silva in the exhibition – both of whom worked with Drew and like her studied at the AA. Other strands such as Manmohan Nath Sharma planning Nigeria’s new capital, Abuja, could also have helped connect both aspects of the exhibition and discussed the ongoing transnational networks that occurred post Fry and Drew.
Each section of the exhibition opens up these lines of enquires – it’s very much an exhibition that is setting out the premise and introducing the topic. It’s a primer and with such latitude that there’s bound to be an aspect that intrigues or provokes further reading and research by the visitor. It could have been more focused, but like Chandigarh it’s within these spaces and gaps that interesting and unexpected events and possibilities occur.
Notes
1. Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (London, New York: Routledge, 2016), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315712680
2. Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
3. Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).
4. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1966).
5. “Tower of Shadows, Chandigarh, India (Scale model).” MoMA, accessed April 2024, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/134288
6. Iain Jackson, “Delhi’s Pragati Maidan: Demolished.” Transnational Architecture Group, accessed April 2024, https://transnationalarchitecture.group/2017/04/25/delhis-pragati-maidan-demolished/
7. Tom Avermaete and Maristella Casciato, Casablanca Chandigarh: A Report on Modernization (Montréal, Québec, Canada: CCA, Canadian Centre for Architecture; Zūrich: Park Books, 2014).
This article was originally published here: Jackson, I. (2024). Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence, V&A Museum, South Kensington, London, 2 March – 22 September 2024. Fabrications, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2024.2348850
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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