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Fry and Drew: Conference

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September 16, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 11

José Luís Possolo de Saldanha, ‘Luís Possolo – The Portuguese–speaking Architect at the 1st AA Course in Tropical Architecture’

Luís Gonzaga Pedroso Possolo (Lisbon, 1924) was the only Portuguese‐speaking architect at the 1954/55 first edition of the Architectural Association’s Course in Tropical Architecture, held under Maxwell Fry.

Possolo’s performance seems to have been of a high standard there. In his report for the Portuguese Overseas Affairs Undersecretary of State, he points out that from all 120 designs by the students in class, only seven were selected for an exhibition at the AA ‐ Possolo being the only one to have two designs shown.

The grading panel at the course was made of Fry, Jane Drew, and J. Mckay Spence (who was Deputy Director for the Department). All grading reports on Possolo’s designs are extant, as well as his AA Diploma and a number of interesting documents ‐ such as his letters to, and from, Fry, Drew, Drake & Lasdun, upon finishing his Course at the AA, that show he was close to being hired by the office. However, he chose instead to return to Portugal, where he worked at the Overseas Planning Office (Gabinete de Urbanização do Ultramar) and produced a number of fine designs for Portuguese Africa.

Possolo’s auspicious period at the GUU then led him to privately design a number of highly creative projects – two of which were particularly important in Mozambique and Angola’s development and modernisation: the buildings for the Cambambe Dam, in Angola, and the Nacala Cement Factory, a mile north of the Mozambican city and port of Nacala.

In Possolo’s papers, we also find sketches deriving from projects by Fry and Drew, and a number of black‐and‐white photographs of tropical architecture by British offices. These provide evidence of the young architect’s keenness in following tropical architecture along the guidelines of the AA course. This also clearly comes through in his own built projects for Africa.

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José Luís Possolo de Saldanha graduated in architecture at the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa Faculty of Architecture in 1990. He held a scholarship (1999–2002) from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian for his PhD, which he presented in 2003 at the University of Seville Superior Technical School of Architecture.

He has lectured in Architecture since 1996, and is an Assistant Professor with tenure in the Architecture and Urbanism Department at ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon), where he has been teaching since 2006. He is presently President of the Pedagogic Council of this Higher Education Institution for the 2013–2014 biennium.

José Luís Saldanha is a member of the Dinâmia-CET Research Centre at ISCTE-IUL and has presented papers and authored, or co-authored, articles, books and chapters of books on a wide range of architectural themes, such as landscape, building design and tropical architecture. He has also been active in designing architecture for private and institutional clients in continental and insular parts of Portugal.

Fry and Drew: Conference

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September 7, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 10

Rachel Lee, ‘Searching for the Social in the Tropical’

Tropical architecture was institutionalised as a professional field in the metropolis of mid-twentieth century London. Drawing on theories developed over two centuries by military and medical experts, and augmented by the experiences of modern architects and planners who had worked in Britain’s colonial territories, tropical architecture is generally understood as a climate-centric approach to building in the ‘tropics’.

This conception, however, may be too reductive. Several of the key protagonists involved in the institutionalisation of tropical architecture were not exclusively concerned with the climatic aspects of building in tropical regions. Perhaps in contrast to the hygiene engineers who preceded them, they shared a commitment to creating buildings that attempted to understand and respond to the social needs of the users e.g. in the West Indies Robert Gardner-Medwin endeavoured to create buildings that suited the social customs as well as the climatic conditions and the building materials; in Chandigarh Fry and Drew made social surveys, the results of which influenced the designs of buildings such as shops, houses and cinemas; and in 1950, as the Federal Republic of India’s Director of Housing, Otto Koenigsberger began conducting an extensive social survey of Delhi.

With a view to creating a more nuanced understanding of the history of tropical architecture, this paper will attempt to illuminate the role that social issues played in the development of the field. While taking into account recent scholarship that has highlighted tropical architecture’s inextricable links to decolonisation, it will address to what extent tropical architecture was stripped of social concerns and examine why, despite the more inclusive interests of some of the figures key to its development, it was reduced to a climate-based technoscientific field.

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Rachel Lee is a research associate at the Brandenburgische Technische Universitaet Cottbus and a lecturer at the Technische Universitaet Berlin, where she is currently completing her doctorate on Otto Koenigsberger’s works and networks in exile. She is also a member of MOD Institute – an urban research and design collective based in Bangalore and Berlin.

Fry and Drew: Conference

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September 3, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 9

Antony Moulis, ‘Designing with landform and climate: Fry and Drew’s contribution to the Chandigarh master plan’

In the book Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956) Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew strongly criticise both ‘Garden City’ and ‘grid-iron’ layouts as ‘unrealistic’ to housing and town planning in the tropical context. Key to their own planning precepts is a practical concern for the relationship of landform and climate – the prevention of erosion, the securing of road drainage and respect for the natural contours – leading to housing layouts subtly adjusted to the prevailing conditions. For Fry and Drew such an approach emerged productively from their work begun in the British government’s West African colonies in 1944 and continued at Chandigarh, India, between 1951 and 1954. Their specific critique of both Garden City and grid-iron forms – the prevailing planning approaches in mid-20th century modernism – could be viewed as a direct legacy of their experiences in Chandigarh, where the partners found themselves working within the constraints of the city’s famous master plan, drawn by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, which was broadly understood as a rational gridded revision of the original Garden City plan devised by the US planner Albert Mayer. Yet subtle adjustments of the city’s gridded layout to account for features of the land reveal the greater agency of Fry and Drew in the master plan’s formation and speak of their knowledge and experience of planning in the tropics already gained from their West African work up to 1950.

Based on research of the architects’ archives held by the RIBA and the V&A Museum, this paper gathers evidence of Fry and Drew’s contribution to the Chandigarh master plan, drawing upon testimony of both partners of events surrounding the master plan’s making in early 1951. By seeing Chandigarh’s overall layout in context with the architects’ own strategies for housing and town planning in the tropics published between 1947 and 1956 the paper will argue the key role of Fry and Drew in substantiating the Chandigarh master plan as more than simply an abstract conceptualisation of city form.

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Antony Moulis is Associate Professor and Director of Research in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research on practices of design in mid-twentieth century modern architecture includes archival research at the Fondation Le Corbusier, the Alvar Aalto Academy, and the Canadian Architectural Archives. His architectural writing for professional and academic journals appears in ARQ, AA Files, Architectural Theory Review, Architecture Australia, Monument, Architectural Review Australia, and The Journal of Architecture. He is currently a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery project on eminent Australian architect John Andrews, known for his work in North America in the 1960s and ‘70s, including Gund Hall at Harvard. Moulis co-convened the 2011 Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand, and was awarded Best Paper at the Society’s 2010 Conference for his research of the collaborative links between Jorn Utzon and Le Corbusier.

Fry and Drew: Conference

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August 27, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Keynote 3

Jiat-Hwee Chang, ‘Contextualizing Fry and Drew’s Tropical Architecture: Climate as Agency’

Influence acts in both directions. While Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were indeed influential figures in the fields of modern architecture, town planning and tropical architecture, they were undoubtedly also shaped by various forms of external influences. This paper will explore some of these influences on Fry and Drew. The focus of this paper is, however, not so much on the influence of personae – such as teachers, mentors, patrons, colleagues and friends of Fry and Drew – but with the conditions of possibility – specifically historical structure, socio-political conditions and technoscientific infrastructure – that shaped the ways Fry and Drew produced tropical architecture in Africa and Asia during the mid-twentieth century.

Through a close reading of two books by Fry and Drew – Village Housing in the Tropics (1947) and Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956) – this paper seeks to understand what were the influences on Fry and Drew’s discourse and practice of tropical architecture. Broadly speaking, this paper will explore two main forms of influence on Fry and Drew. One, it situates Fry and Drew’s tropical architecture in the longer genealogy of European, particularly British, buildings in the tropics. While Fry and Drew’s work in the tropics contributed to the institutionalisation of tropical architecture in the mid-twentieth century and was posited as something new and modern, this paper argues that their work was inextricably linked to prior colonial “tropical architecture” and, in particular, carried historically sedimented meanings of tropicality. Two, this paper locates the influences on Fry and Drew’s tropical architecture within the mid-twentieth century moment. Specifically, it shows how Fry and Drew’s tropical architecture was undergirded by the technoscientific infrastructure of building research in climatic design. This paper also argues that the socio-political conditions of decolonisation and development in the British Empire/Commonwealth facilitated Fry and Drew’s production of tropical architecture.

Drawing on the notion of what science studies scholars James Rodger Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic call “climate as agency” that translates matters of concern into matters of fact, this paper seeks to show that, common to the two aforementioned broad forms of influence, the tropical climate in tropical architecture was more than a statistical index of weather trends. Tropical climate was elevated as a prime consideration in the design and construction of tropical architecture because it was seen as an agency and a force that informed social habits, affected health, shaped socio-economic progress and determined the welfare of a territory’s population.

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Chang Jiat Hwee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He obtained his Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. His interdisciplinary research on (post)colonial architectural history and theory, and the socio-technical aspects of sustainability in the built environment have been published as various book chapters and journal articles. He is currently working on a book titled A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonialism, Ecology and Nature (to be published by Archi-text series, Routledge). He is the co-editor of Non West Modernist Past (2011) and a special issue of Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography on “tropical spatialities”(2011). He is also the author of two monographs on contemporary architecture in Singapore.

Fry and Drew: From the Archives

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August 23, 2013
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‘Aim for the moon’

Jane Drew

In about 1991, Jane Drew lectured to students at the Hull School of Architecture and advised them to ‘aim for the moon’. Drew gave a good overview of her life and career, showing images of her work at Chandigarh, Ibadan University and in Iran. During this period she was writing her biography, although never published, and similar ideas and themes are present in the lecture here: most notably, her willingness to work hard and make mistakes, and her (perceived) luck in becoming an architect. Of being a woman architect, she said: ‘I think its a bit like making a monkey draw. If a monkey can draw it’s wonderful. If a woman can do something well it’s … I think being a woman is really a help or has been, rather than otherwise.’

A transcript of the interview has been kindly sent in by Malcolm Dickson and can be downloaded here: Drew Lecture at Hull, c1991

Fry and Drew: Conference

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August 19, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 8

Daniel A. Barber, ‘Designing with Climate in the Suburb: Olgyay and Olgyay and the American Influence of Fry and Drew’

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were exploring methods for building in the tropical climates of West Africa, interest in architecture and climate was also the concern of many practitioners in the Americas. Richard Neutra’s commissions in Puerto Rico, for example, involved school designs with induced ventilation; design innovations across Brazil and South America developed dynamic shading systems; in the US, the American Institute of Architects collaborated with House Beautiful to produce a series of articles on “Climate Control” and a handbook for architects.

This presentation will briefly summarize this American interest, and then focus on the work of Victor and Aladar Olgyay, twin Hungarian émigrés working at MIT and Princeton in the period. Committed Corbusians, the Olgyay’s met Fry in London in 1936, soon after he completed his Sun House, and were inspired by his use of the materials and methods of modernism towards a more refined relationship to climate. The Olgyay’s books Solar Control and Shading Devices (1957) and Design with Climate (1963) codified and popularized the global climatic discourse. They also present an early attempt to place these interests in historical perspective.

Whereas Fry and Drew developed their strategies in the context of the economic development goals of Britain’s former colonies, the Olgyay’s focused on the American suburb. The second part of the presentation will focus on the challenges they faced. In addition questions of orientation, materials, and building shape, developing means by which architects could engage scientific analyses of climate were paramount, as they allowed for a generalized method for designing subdivisions according to regional differences. Their method for climatic subdivision design was briefly influential, before the affordability of HVAC rendered their analyses mute – a historical consequence, as the presentation will conclude, that has ramifications for the present.

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Daniel A. Barber is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the Associate Chair of the Department of Architecture. His research looks at the role of architectural technologies in the infrastructural and territorial transformations of the immediate post-World War II period in the United States. His current book project is titled A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War.

Barber’s essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Grey Room, The Journal of Architecture, Design Philosophy Papers, thresholds, and DASH; he has also published articles in numerous edited volumes. An essay is forthcoming in Technology and Culture.

Barber received a PhD from Columbia University, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University Center for the Environment. He has held visiting positions at Oberlin College, Barnard College, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Fry and Drew: Conference

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August 8, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Keynote 2

Elizabeth Darling, ‘The Conditions for an Architecture for To-day: A discussion of the inter-war architectural scene in England’

Taking its cue from the title of a 1938 lecture by Wells Coates, this paper considers the conditions that created the generation of architects in inter-war England that included Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Its ultimate concern is to offer some conclusions about how such conditions shaped Fry and Drew’s desire to transform space and society in particular, and, at a broader level, the nature of English modernism as a whole.

The paper will explore several conditions in order to achieve this goal. Chief among them are the educational contexts in which Drew and Fry studied, and hence what this might tell us about the modernisms they would practise. Among the earliest of the generation of women to train professionally, Drew attended the Architectural Association at a time when it was just beginning its shift towards a more avowedly ‘modern’ stance. Fry, by contrast, was a product of the Liverpool Beaux-Arts system that the AA would eschew not long after Drew graduated.  Important too, were the intellectual milieux which the pair inhabited, and their friendship networks. This is evident in the comradeship of Coates and Fry, an alliance forged following their first meeting some time in 1923-4. Out of this emerged a commitment to training themselves in modern culture and to make connections with allied avant-garde groups, a strategy which allowed them to become the natural leaders of an institutionalising English modern movement. Drew, likewise, shared a network of progressive friends – such as the Communist architect Justin Blanco White –an engagement particularly with modern art, and an equal skill at organisation and propagandising, something which did much to keep the movement alive during the war years.

Referencing other collaborations, and key inter-war architectural projects, particularly by Fry, the paper concludes its concern to contextualise the English side of Drew and Fry’s modernism.

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Elizabeth Darling works on 20th century British architectural history with a particular interest in inter-war modernism, social housing, and gender. She has published on the nature of authorship in the design process; the innovative practices of the inter-war voluntary housing sector, the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby and the relationship between citizenship and the reform of domestic space in inter-war Britain. Her book, on British architectural modernism, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction, was published by Routledge in early 2007 while an edited volume (with Lesley Whitworth), Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870-1950 was published by Ashgate in autumn 2007. Her research focuses on three main areas: the link between urban renewal and social (especially child welfare) reform in the slums of Edinburgh in the early 20th century; the arena in which progressive ideas about design and space were developed and disseminated in 1920s Britain, and an in-depth study of the work and life of the architect-engineer Wells Wintemute Coates, which research is supported by funding from the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art and the RIBA Research Trust. She is most recently the author of Wells Coates, published by the RIBA in collaboration with the 20th Century Society & English Heritage (2012).

Tropical Architecture: Current Research

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August 2, 2013
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Village Housing in the Tropics: With Special Reference to West Africa

The seminal book on Tropical Architecture by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry has been republished by Routledge 66 years after its first edition was bravely produced by Lund Humpries.

villagehousing

The slender volume loaded with Fry’s cartoons and sketches became an instant hit, with its engaging insights and empirical findings.  It was not aimed at the specialist or technician, rather the generalist and interested reader looking for quick tips to solve familiar problems. The book gives pragmatic advice on the siting of villages, housing orientation and matters relating to sanitation and health. Although the content was far from novel or radical, it presented previously dry and mundane material in a manner that was easy to understand, and encouraged greater attention to be given to the everyday housing problems of West Africa.

The book was used by Fry and Drew as a promotional tool,  they included a copy along with their CV’s when applying to be considered for the University of Ibadan project and it almost certainly influenced their consideration for Chandigarh. It set them apart from others working in tropical regions,  and with its emphasis on village housing firmly aligned them with the Colonial Office’s desire to promote ‘Development and Welfare’.

It almost goes without saying, but the publication was a product of its time and formed part of the colonial enterprise. Within the front and back endpapers of the book a map of the world is coloured to highlight Britain’s Colonial territories, highlighting where the book’s advice could be dispensed and treating all ‘tropical’ territories as one and the same irrespective of their specific contexts and climatic variations.

Available to purchase here: Village Housing in the Tropics: With Special Reference to West Africa (Studies in International Planning History)

Fry and Drew: Conference

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July 24, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 7

Viviana d’Auria, ‘“The most difficult architecture to create”:  Fry, Drew & Partners’ contested legacies and the vicissitudes of low-cost housing design in (post)colonial Ghana’.

As has been well documented, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were intensely involved in British West Africa. From their Accra-based office, they designed the cornerstones of late colonial welfare development, ranging from hospitals to universities. Explorations of their West African work however, have neglected housing design, including the ways in which it confronted colonial antecedents and how expatriate practitioners and local professionals confronted its legacy. This disregard is all the more challenging seen the weight it had for Fry and Drew themselves, as well as its overall significance for general post-war technical assistance.

Indeed, in the case of housing conception too, the partnership’s work was envisaged at a time of confidence in the reconciliation of modernism and development within the walls of a low-income dwelling. Freshly-arrived in Chandigarh after several years spent in West Africa, Fry and Drew were important contributors at the United Nations Housing Seminar in New Delhi in 1953. At the event, their efforts not only earned them recognition with the prize-winning conception of House 23, but was also the topic of Fry and Drew’s paper, who underscored how low-cost dwellings were “of all architecture the most difficult to create”.

On such premises, this contribution focuses on pre-Chandigarh housing design in Ghana. By looking at cases from the Accra-Tema Metropolitan Area, it wishes to comment more particularly on how the partnership was concerned with indigenous dwelling cultures. It then reflects on how this centre of attention was (or not) picked up by international technical assistance and local government planning in the following decades. The notion of ‘growing’ and ‘extendable’ housing, in addition to gender-based typologies will be inquired into by means of selected cases such as the Jamestown slum clearance scheme, the work of the Tema Development Corporation and of the International Co-operative Housing Development Association.

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Viviana d’Auria is Lecturer in Human Settlements in Development at the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning (University of Leuven) and NWO Rubicon fellow at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies (University of Amsterdam). Her dissertation Developing Urbanism in Development: Five Episodes in the Making of the Volta River Project in (Post-)colonial Ghana 1945-76 (KU Leuven, 2012) explored the contribution of transnational technical assistance projects to the epistemology of (post-)colonial urbanism through the particular case of the Volta River Project. Critical spatial analyses of modern dwelling environments and their lived-in ‘hereafter’ are an integral part of her research within a more general interest in modern urbanism in non-Western contexts. On this note, Viviana’s post-doctoral inquiry is comparatively exploring home space in Greater Accra and Lima by focusing on the socio-spatial history of modern ‘incremental’ neighbourhoods such as Tema Manhean and Villa El Salvador.

Fry and Drew: Conference

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July 20, 2013
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‘The Influence of Fry and Drew’ Conference, Abstract 6

Barnabas Calder, ‘Cohabitation or collaboration? Drake and Lasdun of Fry Drew Drake and Lasdun’.

After the termination of Berthold Lubetkin’s Tecton partnership in 1949 two of the partners, Lindsay Drake and Denys Lasdun, accepted an offer from Fry and Drew of a new partnership. This lasted until the retirement of Drake in 1959, at which Lasdun left too to establish Denys Lasdun & Partners.

Drake & Lasdun seem to have maintained a considerable level of autonomy within the partnership, publishing their work separately, invariably as ‘Drake and Lasdun of Fry Drew Drake and Lasdun’. Letters from the time reveal that Lasdun actively resisted closer architectural involvement with Fry and Drew, and he always maintained later that the relationship was purely an office-share for reasons of expedience. Yet a publication of Drake and Lasdun’s work in Architectural Design, February 1958, includes projects which were never again acknowledged by Lasdun, and which, in stylistic terms, look much closer to the oeuvre of Fry and Drew.

The decade-long existence of Fry Drew Drake and Lasdun was a productive one for both sides of the partnership. A number of the buildings of this period for which Lasdun led the design process have been continuously recognised since as amongst the most original and interesting buildings of British modernism – Bethnal Green “Cluster Block” social housing exhibited at CIAM, Hallfield School, and the outline design phases of the Royal College of Physicians and a block of luxury flats in St James’s Place.

This paper will explore the dynamics of the partnership, drawing on interviews with surviving assistants in Fry Drew Drake and Lasdun, and on the limited archival evidence, to investigate how Drake & Lasdun operated within the shared offices, and whether the cohabitation had any influence on the architectural output of the partners.

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Barnabas Calder is Lecturer in Architecture at the Liverpool School of Architecture. His research centres on the architecture of Denys Lasdun, about whose National Theatre he wrote his PhD, before spending two years cataloguing much of Lasdun’s archive at the RIBA. He is currently researching and writing a complete works of Lasdun funded by the Graham Foundation, to be published as a web resource by the RIBA. Lasdun Online will be composed of illustrated discursive entries on each of Lasdun’s projects, accompanied by thematic essays on aspects of Lasdun’s practice and its context.

Barnabas is also writing a book on British Brutalism for William Heinemann, and a single-volume story of architecture for Penguin. His other research interests include Cedric Price, on whom he curated an exhibition at the Lighthouse, Glasgow, in 2011 and the Bartlett, London, 2012.