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Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence, V&A Museum, South Kensington, London, 2 March – 22 September 2024. Fabrications, 1–6.

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June 21, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Chandigarh, Fry & Drew, Ghana, India, Tropical Architecture
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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.”

Michael Hirst and images of 1950s Tema
Site plan of KNUST campus by James Cubitt
Unity Hall, Kumasi, by John Owusu Addo

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/)

Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence at V&A reintroduces Indian and Ghanaian pioneers of the style

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March 21, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Chandigarh, Fry & Drew, Ghana, India, Tropical Architecture
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Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence at V&A reintroduces Indian and Ghanaian pioneers of the style

The Legislative Assembly/Chandigarh-Duncid and Independence Square in Ghana. Wikimedia Commons , CC BY
Adefolatomiwa Toye, University of Liverpool

The Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum showcases the legacy of tropical modernism in Ghana and India.

The architectural style was developed specifically for tropical climates, so its key design consideration was optimal ventilation and minimal solar heat gain. Elaborate building forms and abstract ornamentation later became characteristic of the style.

Although the movement began with colonial architects after the second world war, it was redefined by newly independent nations of the 20th century, who wanted to create an identity detached from their colonial past. The V&A exhibition spotlights India and Ghana’s nation-building projects following their independence from Britain in 1947 and 1957 respectively.

It begins with the early work of British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in Ghana. Until a few decades ago, European and colonial architects’ designs dominated the historical narrative of tropical modernism. This narrow viewpoint is currently contested and extensive research on post-independence architecture and non-European architects is being conducted.

The V&A exhibition attempts to redress this Euro-centric story. It centres around the lesser known architects whose input has been historically overlooked or erased. It celebrates their contributions to tropical modernism and the impact of independence projects on local architectural education.

The architecture of a new nation

Chandigarh, a planning project for Punjab’s new capital after India’s partition, is one of the architectural works featured in the exhibition. The city is a famous example of 20th-century modern architecture and urban planning. It was led by European architects Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew.

While the story of Chandigarh tends to be dominated by these architects (especially Le Corbusier) its creation included a budding team of Indian architects and artists, many of whom returned to India from overseas.

Works by these Indian architects are on display in the V&A show. There’s Eulie Chowdhury’s Chandigarh chair which was co-designed with Pierre Jenneret, Jeet Malhotra’s photographs of the city under construction and Giani Rattan Singh’s wooden model of the Legislative Assembly.

These architects were on the design team for the Capitol Complex, which comprised grand administrative buildings and monuments. The buildings were exposed concrete structures with sculpture-like forms and deep concrete louvres (slats that control sunlight entering a building).

Once dominated by British colonial architects, Ghana’s building industry expanded post-independence to include architects from Africa, the African diaspora, and Eastern Europe. Victor Adegbite, a Ghanaian architect, oversaw several public works as head of the country’s housing and construction corporations. He led the team for the building, popularly called Job 600, which was constructed to host the Organisation of African Unity Conference in 1965.

Nation-building programmes also acknowledged the importance of local expertise. This subsequently aided the development of local architectural practice and education. The Chandigarh College of Architecture opened in 1961 and more followed suit.

Ghana’s Africanisation policies (intended to increase the population of Africans in corporate and government positions) influenced the founding of the architecture department at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

The department began by recruiting educators from Britain and around the world. On display is a student-made geodesic dome (lightweight shell structure with load-bearing properties), which was constructed during a teaching programme with American designer Buckminster Fuller.

Among the staff were Ghanaian architects like John Owusu Addo – the first African head of department. He designed new buildings for the university most notably the Senior Staff Club and Unity student hall included in the exhibition. The hall’s nine-storey blocks combine exterior and interior corridors to improve indoor ventilation.

The many dimensions of tropical modernism

Exhibitions like this are important because they educate the public on the strides made by academic institutions and cultural organisations in rewriting the history of tropical modernism.

V&A’s collaboration with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and Chandigarh College of Architecture was integral to the exhibition. However, the show only briefly addresses the contemporary issues of conservation, sustainability and the alternative histories of the style.

Institutions and organisations are now pushing for the conservation of tropical modernism in Asia and Africa. Although monuments like Chandigarh Capitol Complex, have attained heritage status, many are in decline, repurposed or at risk of demolition.

In India for example, the Hall of Nations, a group of pyramidal exhibition halls, was demolished in 2017. Social media platforms like Postbox Ghana and international collaborations like Docomomo International and Shared Heritage Africa project centre the African experience in documenting and reviving public interest in tropical modernism.

Unlike the architects and the experts celebrated in this exhibition, construction labourers are not as visible in historical sources because they were often unrecorded. Oral history’s ability to fill this gap diminishes with time, but we have a duty to avoid repeating the same erasure and omissions of the past. The legacy of tropical modernism is incomplete without addressing the contributions made by both professionals and labourers alike.

Adefolatomiwa Toye, PhD Candidate, School of Architecture, University of Liverpool

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

V&A Tropical Modernism Exhibition: opening snaps

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March 1, 2024
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, India, Tropical Architecture
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We went to the Exhibition Preview at the V&A on Wednesday 20th February to see the opening of the Tropical Modernism exhibition – a full review is being prepared and we’ll share it shortly (currently under review elsewhere first…) – here’s just a few snaps from the evening…

It was an intriguing exhibition for TAG to visit – not least because most of the exhibits have already featured on this blog over the years. Perhaps the biggest privilege besides viewing all of the material was talking to Michael Hirst and discussing his work at Tema again. Some of Michael’s photographs are in the exhibition too. The first thing that stood out however, was the large queue to get in – it’s not often a private view has a long line outside…

Michael Hirst and his photographs of Tema from the late 1950s

Some of the other highlights include seeing the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome restored and delicately hung from the ceiling. The last time we saw it was abandoned in the loft of a workshop at KNUST.

Buckminster Fuller Dome: in storage, Kumasi
Dome restored and suspended from ceiling

There’s also some delightful perspective drawings by John Owusu Addo in the exhibition and a model of KNUST campus too. It was such a relief to see that these drawings are now being cared for. We produced some digital copies in 2016 and 2018 and hoping the share the full set of the precious drawings here soon.

drawings in the archive at KNUST
Model of the KNUST campus
John Owusu Addo drawing at the exhibition
Restored model exhibited at the V&A

About TAGOur model of the Accra Community Centre was included alongside several other models, including Giani Rattan Singh’s timber model of Corbusier’s Assembly Building in Chandigarh, and an outstanding model of the Pragati Maidan in Delhi, by architect Raj Rewal (and foolishly demolished in 2017).

Accra Community Centre model, by David Grant and Iain Jackson
Rattan Singh’s timber model of Corbusier’s Assembly Building
model of the Pragati Maidan in Delhi

It was great to see some of Pierre Jeanneret‘s furniture on display alongside the unexpected inclusion of Nek Chand‘s sculptures. It’s a curious exhibition pulling together a range of projects around Ghana and India, with snippets from Nigeria and elsewhere.

Jeanneret Furniture and Chandigarh section
Sculptures from Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh

Canadian Centre for Architecture: A Matter of Terms Article

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June 19, 2023
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Global Architecture, India, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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Jennifer Préfontaine, Michele Tenzon, Ewan Harrison, Iain Jackson, Claire Tunstall, and Rixt Woudstra discuss changing terms in archival descriptions

Republished from CCA website.

This is the first article in a series that considers reflections on the value of interpretation in combination with the technical practice of cataloguing, authored by CCA staff and invited scholars and introduced by Martien de Vletter. Here, we examine changing terminology. CCA cataloguer Jennifer Préfontaine considers context and the use of the term “peon” in cataloguing the Pierre Jeanneret fonds, and Michele Tenzon, Ewan Harrison, Iain Jackson, Claire Tunstall, and Rixt Woudstra sift through reworkings that were made in the development of the United Africa Company archives.

The Importance of Context

Jennifer Préfontaine weighs meaning and intent when cataloguing archival materials

Pierre Jeanneret, Plan for peons’ houses, Chandigarh, India. ARCH402343, Pierre Jeanneret fonds, CCA. Gift of Jacqueline Jeanneret © CCA.

During Sangeeta Bagga’s Find and Tell residency in June 2019, we—the cataloguers at the CCA—came across material using a word with which we were uncertain. A plan drawing, held in the Pierre Jeanneret fonds that Bagga was studying, labels “Peons’ Houses” as the title of a project in Chandigarh, from 1952.1 From definitions found in print and online dictionaries, we felt that “peon” could be understood as harmful in some contexts but neutral in others. A word can have different meanings, different geographies, and even different histories, in particular colonial histories. In cataloguing work, the choice of vocabulary has important implications in how researchers access and understand information. We needed to consider, is there a problem with the use of the word “peon” when identifying people?

We learned that the word “peon” has different meanings and origins depending on where and when the term is used. Among other definitions, it means a labourer or a non-specialized worker.2 In Latin America, especially in Mexico, a “peon” has additionally come to denote a labourer that has an obligation to work for their employer until their debt was paid off.3 This type of “labor practice”4 has served as the basis of what would become known as “peonage” in the period after the abolition of enslavement in the United States, where many African American freedmen and freedwomen with limited options were forced and bound into this system that maintained an involuntary servitude.5 6 It seems within this American context that the use of this word in cataloguing should be reassessed. However, comparatively, in South Asian countries, particularly in India and Sri Lanka, the word “peon,” brought by the Portuguese, historically meant a foot soldier or a police officer.7 These days, it refers, in an Indian context, to a messenger or attendant, especially in an office,8 designating the entry-level position in governmental and non-governmental organizations.9 10

Considering that the materials from the Pierre Jeanneret fonds that include the word “peon” in their descriptions are related to Chandigarh, would it be acceptable to use the term despite the negative connotation it bears in another context, especially the American one? Shall we use a different term, or keep this “contentious” word with the possible addition of a contextual note?

As the CCA is an international institution located in North America, we wonder if it is preferable to remove a word that is potentially harmful from our descriptions, even if it remains in use and seemingly appropriate in other cultural contexts. What about the research behaviour of our users? Experts on Chandigarh, particularly on Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s works, might be expecting the word “peon” and search for it in our catalogue. In order to understand the use of this term within the framework of the study of Indian architecture and society, we decided to reach out to experts of this field of research.

For Dr. Sangeeta Bagga,11 Principal at Chandigarh College of Architecture, Vikram Bhatt,12 author of Blueprint for a hack, Resorts of the Raj, and After the masters, and Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh,13 author of Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier and One Continuous Line, and editor of Rethinking Global Modernism, the word “peon” is an appropriate term used to designate an entry-level position at government levels in India. However, they point out that private corporations do not generally use the term anymore. Bhatt mentions that an equivalent word is “chaprasi,” and there might be other equivalent terms in other regions of India. Bagga argues that, although “office boy” is the term currently used in the private sector, “peon” still describes a position that allows people to work in dignity in a non-technical job, and people in India do not necessarily associate the word with a colonial background. It was institutionalized under the British period, but it still is in use today, without any negative connotations. Both Bhatt and Prakāsh acknowledge that while the term is still in use, it is not a word used in everyday conversation. To them, it could carry derogatory implications, depending on how it is used.

Bagga and Bhatt also mention that Chandigarh is a city that was laid down to a precise hierarchy initially with thirteen types of government housing in which the “peons” were at the lowest end.14 Bagga adds that with Jane Drew and Pierre Jeanneret’s work, it was the first time that the “peons” had planned housing accommodations.15 She underlines that the architectural drawings and other materials attest to this nomenclature; this type of housing was specifically called “peons’ houses,” as is depicted in the plan’s title. If the word is absent from the description, how would a researcher find it?

The titles for the photographs above are based on their respective inscriptions located on their verso. Pierre Jeanneret, View of houses for peons under construction, Sector 23, Chandigarh, India. ARCH402402, Pierre Jeanneret fonds, CCA. Gift of Jacqueline Jeanneret © CCA

We might not be able to dissociate the use of the word from the context in which it appears. Prakāsh recommends keeping the term with respect to the Pierre Jeanneret fonds, noting that there is not a “right” interpretation of a word, certainly not based on an “original” meaning. For Bhatt, for as long as there have been contacts between the Western and Eastern worlds, languages have mutually influenced each other. With this in mind, Bhatt said that he would not be hesitant to use this word, but cataloguers should certainly recognize the different contexts in which it is used.

The titles for the photographs above are based on their respective inscriptions located on their verso. Jeet Malhotra, View of houses for peons, Chandigarh, India, 1956-66. ARCH402374, Pierre Jeanneret fonds, CCA. Gift of Jacqueline Jeanneret © CCA

From these discussions, it seems apparent that the word “peon” carries different weights and meanings based on its context. All three experts recommend that we continue to use “peon” in our descriptions as part of the title field, and that we should add, if relevant, a contextual note explaining the word. As we recognize the importance of examining the changing meaning of words over time and context, especially when they are used in relation to how you refer to people directly, processes like this one, will help us set guidelines for more mindful descriptive work.

We would like to thank Sangeeta Bagga, Vikram Bhatt, and Vikramāditya Prakāsh for sharing their thoughts on this topic.


Reworking, Recaptioning, Moving Beyond

Michele Tenzon, Ewan Harrison, Iain Jackson, Claire Tunstall and Rixt Woudstra examine the Archives of the United Africa Company.

The Unilever Archives in Port Sunlight, United Kingdom, host a vast collection of items documenting the United Africa Company (UAC). A wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever, the UAC was a vast trading and manufacturing empire that itself in turn owned and managed numerous subsidiaries ranging from retail, textiles, timber, and raw material extraction mainly, but not exclusively in the British West African colonies. The scale of the UAC venture throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the company’s role in colonial exploitation, as well as its economic and political manoeuvring into the post-Independence period, render its archive both a problematic and rich repository to catalogue and analyse. Archives have been the subject of a body of theoretical writing from post-colonial perspectives. This has framed the archive as both a locus of power and a technology of domination in and of itself. As the archive of the largest British business in West Africa, and one deeply implicated in the colonial patterns of resource and capital extraction in the region, the UAC archive can equally be theorised in this way. Yet, the UAC archive is also punctuated by moments of hesitancy, contestation, and challenges to the UAC’s attempted hegemony.

The UAC produced an archive as a by-product of the everyday transactions of business in the African colonies: its reports, board minutes, marketing plans, press releases, and ledgers have subsequently been ordered, catalogued, and cared for by a team of curators and archivists. But the UAC also pursued archival impulses of its own: UAC staff collected maps, African artworks and ephemera, personal correspondence and memoirs, as well as taking, collating and cataloguing thousands of photographs between 1880 and 1980. This impulse to collect and catalogue the African world around it shows the UAC’s attempts to impose an archival logic on the diverse, even unwieldy, business empire that it controlled, or attempted to control.

For architectural historians, the photographic collection is of particular interest with its bias towards recording buildings, places, people, and special events. The vast amount of visual material was produced by employees working for different subsidiary companies, each with their own objectives, vantage points, and outlooks. The contributors and content are also diverse in their geographical reach and emphasis, with records spanning vast tracts of the African continent, as well as smaller forays into the Middle East, India, and the Americas. Overall, and in coherence with the nature of a corporation which was indeed multiple, internally diverse, and geographically spread out, the collection appears as a corpus of interrelated but distinct archives each with their own provenance, consistency, detail, and granularity of data.

Considerable effort and expense were devoted to producing and presenting this photographic material. Each subsidiary produced its own documentary evidence by developing a visual record or compendium of their businesses that sat alongside the accounting records and lists. In providing sound evidence that business activity was taking place, the photographic medium was particularly useful to the parent company. Taken with a specific agenda and focus, the photographs were processed and printed before being selected to feature in specially produced albums and often accompanied by printed captions or handwritten comments. In many cases, the photographs became a surrogate for travel as many of the directors and business managers had never visited Africa and had no first-hand conception of what their business interests and assets looked like.

The images demonstrated that stores had been built, that goods were properly stocked on the shelfs and that everything was ‘as promised’. It provided reassurance for owners and shareholders, but also became a form of advertisement as is reflected by the careful organisation of these documents in the archive’s Public Relations folders. Through the photographs, distance and geographical separation seemed less important as the visual evidence which they offered ultimately delivered a sense of proximity by bringing a particular version of Africa back to the European shareholders. Photographs were meant to create a familiarity which could justify the company’s overseas presence and show that a colonial territory was ripe for development, therefore reassuring investors as well as European staff.

Photographer Unknown. Kingsway store Freetown, Sierra Leone. Damage through riot – February 1955. UAC/1/11/9/44/129 © Unilever Art, Archives and Record Management.

Because of the peculiar role of the photographic documentation for UAC’s activities, the forms of their collecting, defining, and claiming, offers a vantage point from which we can see how the company viewed, perceived, and chose to record the African social and physical environment. The image library was not fixed – it was added over time, revisited and modified. Titles were remade, notes were added, reflecting not only the transformation of the built environment, such as the extension or refurbishment of the company’s premises, or the acquisition or selling of properties, but also the shifting political situation after elections, riots, or strikes and the resulting legitimacy challenges that the company faced.

Such reworking of the archive is especially evident in those sections of the archive in which photographs have been selected and mounted onto cards, as a compiled photography library arranged first by country, then by themes. This collection was compiled to assist the production of marketing reports, company magazines, newsletters, press releases, and advertisements. The production of these publications and public relations material required the finest images and a cataloguing system allowing them to be quickly located. The notes written on the cards indicate that the UAC staff exercised a control towards what was deemed appropriate and suitable for the company’s image.

‘No longer UAC. Now occupied by Agip Oil Co.’ UAC 1/11/10/1/1 © Unilever Art, Archives and Record Management.

On some of these cards the captions were edited replacing terms which were perceived as outdated or inappropriate. Hence, an image described as “Native workers” was subsequently crossed out and replaced with “African workers”, before being relabelled again as “Employees”. In other instances, “African huts” was replaced by “African homes”, and “European Housing” was renamed “Management Housing” to reflect the Africanisation process of the 1950s – the recruitment and promotion of African staff within the company – which the UAC had embraced as a strategy to repair its legitimacy during the decolonisation phase. Some other images, instead, were marked as ‘to-be-withdrawn’ because the signage of shops of factories employed colonial toponyms which, after independence and for obvious reasons, had become offensive for African audiences. Whereas an image of Ibadan showing a district of low-rise houses built with adobe bricks was deemed no longer usable as it probably conveyed an unwanted sense of precariousness to the public and especially to potential investors.

We don’t know who exactly was making these decisions and how frequently the images were reassessed and relabelled. Unlike the archiving process where archivists generate titles, here they formed part of an image library. However, the fact that the photographs, rather than being re-mounted onto new cards were instead amended by striking through older labels, suggests that perhaps this context was considered valuable, if outdated. Nonetheless, letting this meta-analysis of the archive and its shifting cataloguing and labelling strategy to emerge, required challenging the traditional way in which archives are experienced.

Moving beyond the catalogue

We rarely get to see the archive in the way that one can peruse the books of a library. Instead, we experience it with no direct access to the stores and therefore no opportunity to examine the collection in person. In most cases, files are brought to the researcher after consulting a catalogue, making requests and completing slips and are examined one file at a time. While there are obvious reasons for such restrictions which aim at ensuring the integrity and safety of the material, the necessity of surveillance imposes an examination of the material in extremely compartmentalised or limited ways.

In our research project ‘The Architecture of the United Africa Company: Building Mercantile West Africa’ we have questioned this approach and attempted a different procedure that granted the research team access to the archival storage spaces. ‘Open access’ to the collection has been granted to the research team which has enabled browsing and the ability to quickly sample a box or file without even removing it from its location in the storeroom. The research team has been given extensive training in basic archive procedures, manual handling and health and safety. Retrieval slips were still completed and utilised, but the physical act of obtaining the files and accessing the store rooms was granted to the research team enabling the archive team to focus on their day to day work. The ability to compare boxes, view multiple files, or simply randomly ‘dip’ into boxes has enabled a far greater appreciation of the entire UAC collection, has accelerated our ability to ‘get through the material’, and also reduced the labour for the archives team. Viewing all the photograph albums on the shelves and to see how one album compares in size and scale to the others as well as the ability to visualise the files and their arrangement has helped us to understand the business structure in ways that would not have been possible otherwise.

This procedure, which was made possible by the prolonged collaboration between the academic team and the archive’s management team, has enabled a different working method to emerge. If the re-captioning of UAC’s photographic collection testifies how European capitalism coped with political change and pragmatically adapted itself to the shifting paradigms in the decolonisation phase, acknowledging such additional layers require ‘moving beyond’ the catalogue. The stratification of meanings and orientations which took the form of an almost curatorial approach to the cataloguing of the photographs reveals the biases and the shifting sensitivities of the actors involved in the production and management of the archive. However, such a critical interpretation of descriptive practices requires questioning the traditional interface between archivist and researchers, ultimately allowing engagement with the archive as a complete and stratified entity.

Notes

1 The term “peon” is also found on other material from the Pierre Jeanneret fonds. 

2 The word has several meanings across times, languages, and cultures. Not all of them will be covered in this text. It also refers to the pawn in a chess game and to a low unit in some strategy computer games, for example. 

3 William Wirt Howe, “The Peonage Cases,” Columbia Law Review 4, No. 4 (April 1904): 279. 

4 Pete Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865-1900,” The Journal of American History 66, No. 1 (June 1979): 89. 

5 Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery,” 1979. 

6 Peonage is not exclusive to the United States. Various forms of “peonage” have existed or still exist across the world. 

7 Collins English Dictionary, s.v. “peon,” accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1981), s.v. “peon.” 

8 Collins English Dictionary, s.v. “peon.”  

9 “Peon Pay Scale, Pay Grade, Pay Matrix, Salary & Allowance After 7th Pay Commission,” 7th Pay Commission Info, accessed November 15, 2021, https://7thpaycommissioninfo.in/peon-pay-scale-grade-matrix-salary-allowance/#:~:text=Peon%20Pay%20Scale%20under%207th%20Pay%20Commission&text=That%20means%20the%20salary%20of,7000%2F%2D%20per%20month. 

10 Government of India, Ministry of Labour & Employment, Directorate General of Employment, National classification of occupations-2015 (Code Structure) I, (New Delhi: National Career Service, 2015), https://www.ncs.gov.in/Documents/National%20Classification%20of%20Occupations%20_Vol%20I-%202015.pdf. 

11 Dr. Sangeeta Bagga, Zoom meeting, November 19, 2021. 

12 Vikram Bhatt, Zoom meeting, November 25, 2021. 

13 Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh, Email exchanges, November 2021. 

14 At the request of Jane Beverly Drew, one of the three architects with Pierre Jeanneret and Edwin Maxwell Fry responsible for the design of most of the government housing, an additional fourteenth type, known as “cheap houses,” was designed by Drew for, the previously unaccounted for, government employees who were earning the lowest-wage. Kiran Joshi, Documenting Chandigarh: The Indian Architecture of Pierre Jeanneret, Edwin Maxwell Fry, Jane Beverly Drew (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd.; Chandigarh, India: Chandigarh College of Architecture, 1999), Volume 1, 43. Sarbjit Bahga and Surinder Bahga, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret: Footprints on the Sands of Indian Architecture (New Delhi, India: Galgotia Publishing Company, 2000), 131. 

15 Bagga also adds that this new housing typology for the “peons” continues to this day, with the same purpose, function, and responsibility of roles. 

Transnational Architecture Group is Ten Years Old

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March 12, 2023
Africa, AHUWA, British Colonial Architecture, Ghana, Heritage, Historiography, India, Middle East, Migration, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, transnational, Tropical Architecture, United Africa Company
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The Transnational Architecture Group is 10 year’s old this year. Thank you for supporting the blog and to all of our excellent contributors over the years for enriching the content and generously sharing their work. We’d also like to thank the communities in the places in which we work, the archivists and librarians for making material available to us and sharing their expertise, our respective institutions for supporting our research, and to the research funders who make travel, time, and resources available to us.

The blog started as a means to share our work-in-progress ideas and to promote events – and that is still at the core of what we do. We continue to add updates from our ventures into the archives, travel reports, and to share interesting events and innovative papers. These small reports and updates have compounded into something of a large resource and repository, and we’re delighted so many people have been able to make good use of (and to correct and expand upon) our work and attempts at writing these histories.

To celebrate the 10 year anniversary we held a small gathering at the Liverpool School of Architecture on Wednesday 8th March, curated and organised by Dr Alistair Cartwright. Our speakers were all PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, and research associates at the school. You may watch the proceedings here:

https://stream.liv.ac.uk/fkzj2h9j

The speakers and titles of the presentations are below, with timings if you’d like to skip to a particular talk:

Rixt Woudstra, “Sapele and Samreboi: Building Company Towns in British West Africa” 5:25

Excy Hansda, “Indigenous Modernities in the Twentieth Century Architecture of Bombay” 20:00

Adefola Toye, “Tropical Modernism in Nigeria’s First Universities: Accessing Sources Beyond the Archives.” 37:00

Ewan Harrison, “Planning for Post/Neo Coloniality: the Paramount Hotel in Freetown” 1:11

Iain Jackson, “Erhabor Emokae and the curious case of the UAC Mural: tropical modernism and decorative arts” 1:31

Daneel Starr, “How and why has the vernacular architecture and intangible cultural heritage of the Akha people changed in the face of globalization: Using the village of A Lu Lao Zhai, Xishuangbanna (sipsongpanna) China, as a case study.” 1:50

Paul Robinson, “Freetown, the UAC and urban design” 2:20

Alistair Cartwright, “Ecologies of Vulnerability: Post-Cyclone Reconstruction in Mauritius, c. 1945” 2:35

We also heard an excellent paper from Razan Simbawa, “The Effects of Demolish-based Urban Regeneration on Displaced Residents in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia” – which cannot be shared on the video recording at the moment.

Thank you again to all of the speakers for their wonderful talks, presentations, and work-in-progress. There was such variety and richness in the topics and methods, and at the same time numerous connections and cross-overs between the work.

Please do get in touch if you’d like to know more, or to share your work on the blog.

An update from the archives: “My dearest, darling Jane”: unfolding Fry and Drew Papers

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August 12, 2022
Fry & Drew, Ghana, Historiography, India, Tropical Architecture
1 Comment

Inês Nunes is a PhD student at University of Coimbra, Portugal and is investigating, “The Social Within the Tropical: Jane Drew and Minnette de Silva designing an inclusive modernism in the tropics”. Here’s an update on a recent visit to the RIBA archive.

“My dearest, darling Jane”: unfolding Fry and Drew Papers

In a conversational tone, Maxwell Fry addresses Jane Drew from the ‘remote’ mid-1940s Accra. “Darling Max”, she replicates. Their correspondence, a lively itinerary from West Africa, India, Iran, or Mauritius, belongs to a treasure chest named Fry and Drew Papers. It is accessible, along with unrivaled archival material, in the RIBA Architecture Study Rooms of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London).

Love notes handwritten on hotel letterheads, diaries displaying candid reflections about life, and memoirs manuscripted on paper bags are entangled with professional-wise material. Included are lectures and articles revealing narratives about architecture, extraordinarily illustrated with colourful drawings or sharp pencil sketches. Both are complemented by miscellaneous data: postcards, press cuttings, administrative files, address books… The characters gain life in every opened box. Their voices echo through calligraphies, signatures, ideas.

In its uniqueness, Fry and Drew Papers are an overwhelming resource regarding the life and work of both architects and an efficient record of the dynamic of their global scope partnership. Even so, it excels. Flexible and embracing enough to accommodate diverse interests and aims, unpublished personal letters, diaries, and autobiographies provide captivating details to any enthusiast – for instance, Fry’s diary was only made accessible in 2021. Furthermore, the archive is a source of knowledge about British historiography and significant architectural thematics: the MARS Group, the Modern Movement, Tropical Architecture, and Chandigarh are noteworthy.

Overall, the research was a privilege and the expectations were exceeded. My deep gratitude to Dr. Shireen Mahdavi for supporting this endeavour. The wealth of these primary sources allows an experience that couldn’t have been more rewarding. By immersing in Fry and Drew’s universe, how inspiring becomes their lifetime of respect and companionship, the robustness of their practice, and the profound vow to “produce towns and housing that will be loved, lived in and cared for” (Drew, F&D/27/2).

Seminar Report: Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City

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August 2, 2021
Africa, European Transnational, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Historiography, India, Middle East
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Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City

Hosted online across two days in March 2021, the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational and Liverpool School of Architecture’s “Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City” seminar investigated 20th century identities for postcolonial and post-independence cityscapes in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.

Convened by Iain Jackson, Professor at the Liverpool School of Architecture, Clara Kim, the Daskalopoulos Senior Curator for International Art at Tate Modern and Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator for International Art at Tate Modern; the seminar explored stories from these ‘highly charged moment[s] in the history of city making or shaping’.[1]

The seminar specifically positions cities as incubators for the generation of national identity and for ‘Modernity’. However, were individual cities sufficient for such grand objectives, or were they more isolated and fragmented sites for local, yet innovative gestures? Presenters demonstrated examples where both centralised urban contexts (including major urban planning initiatives and more piecemeal developments) and wider networks proved valuable in creating or indeed reasserting national and regional identities.

The destructive process of creating mid-century urban environments defined many global contexts. Whether in response to the need for new national identities in postcolonial contexts, reconstruction and housing following the devastating effects of war and a baby boom or strategies to address perceived ‘blight’ and urban flight, urban renewal, with its top-down, Bauhausian, car-focused, and federally funded backbone epitomised Modernity.

Some cities benefitted from a relatively early reconsideration of the blank slate approach to city planning. Lukasz Stanek described how Miastoprojekt, a Krakow-based state planning office of designers envisioned the future of post-revolutionary Baghdad through their experiences with reconstructing historic Warsaw after the Second World War.[2]

Using architectural and design services as a politically and financially motivated form of state aid during the Cold War, the Miastoprojekt plans rejected key aspects of Baghdad’s first modern city plan, including the demolition of the city’s Ottoman era historic and vernacular architecture, and tripling the size of the city at a local level without consideration for expansion through regional developments.[3]

Miastroprojekt’s legacy continued beyond the Baghdad planning commissions through design work and education with Polish and Czechoslovakian architects teaching Polish perspectives of Modernism in Iraqi universities. By the 1990s, with the fall of communism, Polish designers reversed Miastroprojekt’s strategy and were thinking Warsaw through Baghdad to revitalise their cities.

Big plans were not constrained to single urban environments. Fahran Karim’s ‘archaeology of the future’ presentation explored the role of a foreign designer in creating Pakistani nationalism; Greek architect and planner Constantinos Doxiaidis. Karim asks, “How do you represent a country without a past. Fractured geographically into East and West wings… 1000 miles of India between it?”[4]

Doxiaidis preferred stark Modernism, justified through statistical analysis and designed without classical Islamic aesthetic details. He utilised plan forms, practical details and building types that he believed (or presented) to be essentially Islamic.[5] Doxiaidis planned refugee settlements and Islamabad to include ’gossip squares’, souks, Dochala huts and central mosques.

Despite conducting ethnographic fieldwork and survey (aerial photography), Doxiaidis imported his understanding of Islamic community planning and architecture from his research in the middle east and projected the needs and traditions of widely dispersed refugees on narrow local contexts. Unsurprisingly, the communities adapted or removed many of Doxiaidis’ design features or simply did not use the spaces created for them, preferring to adapt their homes or build vernacular sites suited to their cultural preferences instead. While in practice, many of these adaptations and rejections were practical, Doxiadis’ technical expertise and foreign perspective failed to deliver built environments that suited and sustained the needs and preferences of Pakistan’s new citizens.[6]

Considering what was happening between East and West Pakistan, Ram Rahman shared a richly illustrated and personal view of the cultural and political context for his father Habib Rahman’s contributions to the ‘Nehruvian post-independence renaissance of Delhi.’

Habib Rahman, a young MIT-trained Bauhausian architect, was recruited by Nehru to work in Delhi, where he organised an international low-cost housing exhibition in 1954, including plans and a model for his own design for low-cost housing. Rahman’s house design was reproduced across India 100,000’s of times to address a critical housing shortage.

Rahman was a prolific designer and his work, including the World Health Organisation headquarters building of 1963 (demolished) and later designs for three monumental tombs epitomised Indian modernity.

Professional training and architectural education were key vectors for transnational exchange and development in postcolonial contexts. However, as Patrick Zamarian described in his presentation, the development of the Department of Tropical Architecture (DTA) at the Architectural Association (AA) in London was related as much to the independent administrative structure of the AA and its struggling economic position in the 1950’s as it was to meeting the challenges of Modern design in foreign contexts.

Zamarian recognised the problematic and homogenizing term ‘Tropical Architecture’ and then described the global networks of designers, patrons and educators who delivered training for a generation of British and international students, with a curriculum based on technological solutions for climatic design and a Modern design aesthetic that disregarded local aesthetic and cultural traditions.[7]

When the department visited Ghana, “these ideas for Tropical Architecture fell apart. [The curriculum] shifted from a generic science-based approach to a local and sensitive one, focused increasingly on housing, planning and eventually sustainable development.”[8]

Ola Uduku’s exploration of Modernist Lagos focused on the cumulative impacts of the DTA trained architects, engineers and Italian contractors who contributed to the rapid development of the marina district for independent Nigeria’s first capital city.[9] Although Lagos benefitted from major infrastructure improvements, the architecture described in Uduku’s presentation was piecemeal and demonstrated the evolution and intensification of development for the district from colonial centre to financial district.

Examples include Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew’s Co-operative Bank Lagos (1959) and the Architects Co-Partnership’s Bristol Hotel.[10] A Lagos building that encapsulated the international design collaborations for the time is the James Cubbitt and Partners’ Elder Dempster Lines building (1961), which introduced sleek modern lines, natural cross-ventilation, engineering innovations (pile foundations) contributed by Ove Arup and a distinctive funnel-shaped top structure alongside a notable collection of Nigerian artworks in the lobby. Nigerian designs for the time include Oluwole Olumuyiwa’s Crusader House (1955) and elegant villas outside Lagos by Obi Obembe Associates.

In other contexts, a national approach to recreating identity was accomplished through the redevelopment of pilgrimage networks and tourist destinations, including hotels and museums.

Talinn Grigor introduced the Society for National Heritage (SNH) and the role of the Shah’r in asserting the hegemony of the ruling class and Iranian elite (and recreating national identity) through the demolition and reconstruction of over 40 historic mausoleums to encourage secular and cultural tourism.[11] Examples include the mausoleums of Ferdawsi (1934) in Tus and Hafiz (1938) in Shiraz. Grigor argues that these new Modern mausoleums were integral to the creation of an aspirational middle-class culture in Iran, becoming a network for national tourism that remains today.

The Shah’r and the tremendous wealth generated by the Iranian oil industry funded the design and construction of avant-garde Modern environments and later more traditionally inspired art and architectural contexts, culminating in the uniquely Iranian expression of modernism inspired by traditional wind towers for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Kamran Diba, 1977).[12]

Lahbib el Moumni and Imad Dahmani’s presentation on post-independence Moroccan architecture included a second example of state-sponsored activities to promote tourism with Modern architecture. This was developed through hotels constructed outside urban centres in the country’s dramatic landscapes. Examples of exquisite and richly contextual forms from architects Abdeslem Faraoui and Patrice de Mazieres include the Hotel Les Gorges du Dadès (1974) and Hotel at Taliouine (1971-72) were shared, both to demonstrate the value of these sites and to explore the challenges of engaging communities with their recent past. [13]

The expressive and contextual Modernism of Morocco was certainly not isolated for post-colonial contexts. Amin Alsaden’s presentation demonstrates how urban renewal programmes in Baghdad in the 1950s created a sense of cultural and heritage loss, which predicated a culturally specific interpretation of Modern art and architecture for the city. He focused particularly on the work of architect Rifat Chadirji who merged globalism and regionalism in his designs.[14]

Alsaden described Rifat’s earliest buildings as somewhat derivative but noted that through the 1960’s his designs evolved to incorporate traditional shapes and plan forms, marrying social needs to social forms, and incorporating the narrow round arch form, in both elevation and plan.

Anna Tostoes’ presentation on the work of Amâncio (Pancho) Guedes in Mozambican cities clearly demonstrates how the architect’s designs coupled global technical, aesthetic, and cultural movements for the time with traditional and vernacular forms to create unique buildings for Maputo which continue to engage with local communities, including the Saipal Bakery (1954), Smiling Lion Building (1954-55) and the Abreu Santos and Rocha Building (1953-56).[15]

These Guedes landmarks remain relevant to 21st century contexts, but many other postcolonial buildings have been heavily altered or demolished. In my experience as a built heritage professional, architecture of the recent past, whether in postcolonial contexts, Europe, or the Americas is especially vulnerable to inappropriate alterations and loss.

Coupled with the experimental, academic, inefficient and sometimes foreign or dehumanising aspects of mid-century Modern architecture and urban renewal, it can be difficult ‘to love’ and costly to restore for sustainable 21st century purposes. Outside losses from the traumatic impact of military conflict or political maneuvering, it comes as no surprise that the architecture that has sustained and remains relevant to local communities is the architecture that originally engaged with its local context and traditions.

These landmark buildings need champions like Mémoire des Architectes Modernes Marocain’s (MAMMA) and DoCoMoMo to promote their value against ever greater development pressures. “Crucibles, Vectors and Catalysts” moved the discussion forward, but there are clearly collaborative opportunities for research and advocacy to be progressed.

Heather McGrath Alcock is PhD researcher at University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture studying the global development of planned company towns. Heather returned to academia after twenty years as a built heritage practitioner based in New York City and later London and the Wirral. Heather had the opportunity to work on landmarks of the Modern movement, including the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, a thematic survey of mid-century modern houses in New Canaan, Connecticut started by “the Harvard Five”, and the former Pan American Building at 200 Park Avenue, Manhattan.

References

Daechsel, Markus. 2011. ‘Seeing like an expert, failing like a state? Interpreting the fate of a satellite town in early post-colonial Pakistan.’ in Marcel Maussen, Veit Bader and Annelies Moors (eds.), Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance of Islam (Amsterdam University Press).

Talinn, Grigor. 2004. ‘Recultivating “Good Taste”: The Early Pahlavi Modernists and Their Society for National Heritage’, Iranian Studies, 37: 17-45.

Uduku, Ola. 2006. ‘Modernist architecture and ‘the tropical’ in West Africa: The tropical architecture movement in West Africa, 1948–1970’, Habitat International, 30: 396-411.

[1] Jackson, Ian. “Introductory remarks for Crucibles session” from “Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City”. Online. 2nd March 2021.

[2] In his presentation, “Rupture, Transition and Continuity in Baghdad’s Master Plans: From Minoprio to Miastoprojekt” on 2nd March 2021, Stanek noted that the Iraqi coup which toppled the monarchy in 1958 instigated a new era of collaboration with Eastern European architects and planners; networks established to “compete with and confront Western European and American hegemony to establish a new independent Iraq through its capital city Baghdad.”

[3] Baghdad’s first modern city plan was completed in 1956 by the British architect and town planner Sir Charles Anthony Minoprio, Hugh Spencley and Peter Macfarlane for the country’s Western aligned Hashemite monarchy.

[4] Karim, Fahran. “Archaeology of the Future: Constantinos Doxiaidis in East and West Pakistan”, from Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City seminar, Session 2, Vectors; 2nd March 2021.

[5] Ibid. According to Fahran Karim, Doxiaidis’ patron Ayub Khan “subscribed to a social theory of development but weakened democracy to validate his authoritarian rule because he felt that the poor, uneducated [masses] couldn’t participate in democracy.” 

[6] According to Markus Daechsel in his 2011 contribution ‘Seeing Like an Expert, Failing Like a State?

Interpreting the Fate of a Satellite Town in Early Post-Colonial Pakistan’, in Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance of Islam, ed. by Marcel Maussen, Veit Bader and Annelies Moors (Amsterdam University Press, 2011), p 159-160, there were many problems associated with the rapid and uneven development of the refugee settlements (lack of basic services (running water, electricity, sewers) and infrastructure (storm sewers), unfinished civil engineering works and the relatively poor refugee communities could not afford rents for the shop spaces, so were not used.

[7] Including Michael Pattrick, Director of the AA in the 1950’s who saw the new department as a way to improve the Association’s finances and academic standing, to Maxwell Fry who supervised the first few years of the department and then culminating in Otto H. Königsberger’s (1908 – 1999) leadership. From Zamarian, Patrick. “Global Perspectives and Private Concerns: The AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture”, from Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City. Online. 2nd March 2021. 

[8] Ibid. 

[9] Lagos was the original capital city for independent Nigeria. However, it is now the capital of Lagos State since the Nigerian capital city moved to Abuja in 1991.  

[10] Ola Uduku, ‘Modernist Architecture and ‘the Tropical’ in West Africa: The Tropical Architecture Movement in West Africa, 1948–1970’, Habitat International, 30 (2006), 399.

[11] In ‘Recultivating “Good Taste”: The Early Pahlavi Modernists and Their Society for National Heritage’, Iranian Studies (2004), Talinn Grigor noted that “For the modernists, therefore, the control over the physical and conceptual “heritage” enabled them to erase the immediate past to construct the “progressive” future. Destruction of building-as-representation [traditional sites of religious pilgrimage] proved central to the construction of the pending utopian future. Architecture was imperative to the success of the [Society for National Heritage] SNH’s modernizing agenda.”

[12] The Museum opened months before the revolution started which saw the monarchy overthrown and exiled from the country.

[13] While more ancient histories and built heritage are preserved and underpin 21st century cultural identity in Morocco, the architecture of the mid-twentieth century has been over-looked, inappropriately altered or destroyed. Mémoire des Architectes Modernes Marocain (MAMMA) was created in 2016 by young architects concerned with the loss of these sites. 

[14] Alsaden noted in his 9th March 2021 presentation “Syntheses Across Disciplines: Rifat Chadirji and Art-Architecture Liaisons in Modern Baghdad” for Crucibles, Vectors and Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City, Chadirji was part of the elite bohemian culture of Baghdad, which included artists and architects who were educated in Europe and America. Against the backdrop of political turmoil, they created a vibrant, creative society that embraced Modernism ‘as an act of rebellion against the legacy of British architects who had used Neo-classical designs with orientalist tropes’. 

[15] Tostoes, Ana. “Correspondences, Transfers and Memory: Maputo’s ’Age of Concrete’”, from Crucible, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning the Modern City seminar, Session 2, Vectors; 2nd March 2021.

Call for Papers from CAMEA Adelaide Congress 2021: Migrant Labour and Material Transfer: Politics of construction in the Indian Ocean Rim

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May 21, 2021
Australia, British Colonial Architecture, European Transnational, Global Architecture, Historiography, India, Migration
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This congress calls for papers that will examine the movement of people and things around and across the Indian Ocean Rim and reveal instances or patterns of transfer that may complicate assumed centre-periphery dynamics, or correspond more closely to the idea of South-South cooperation. It looks to engage new political framings like the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) or the Group of 77 (G77) and the resulting New International Economic Order (NIEO) that would reconfigure the transfer of construction materials and labour, and consequently architectural knowledge, across this region. But it also hopes to discuss the potentialities for greater solidarity that emerged from broader philosophical notions of ‘neutralism’ ‘human dignity’ and ‘justice’ and how these have affected the ethics of construction in the Global South. Finally, it is expected that all these considerations will find a place in the discussion of migrant populations and their negotiations with these constructed political and cultural categories, living across and beyond them in a constant state of liminality. 

Abstracts (300 words) for proposed papers are invited to be submitted to camea@adelaide.edu.au by 20th June 2021. Congress will meet on 7th-9th November 2021.

Please see the attached Call for Papers for further details:

camea-2021-cfp-iorDownload

On behalf of co-convenors: Peter Scriver, Katharine Bartsch and Amit Srivastava

Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning The Modern City 2nd March Part 1

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March 3, 2021
Africa, British Colonial Architecture, Conferences, Fry & Drew, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, India, MENA, Middle East, transnational, Tropical Architecture
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Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning The Modern City 2nd March Part 1

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/architecture/events/filmarchive/

Here are the recordings from the Crucibles, Vectors, Catalysts: Envisioning The Modern City, event from 2nd and 9th March 2021. Thank you to all of our excellent speakers, and for the interesting questions and discussions.

PROGRAMME: Session 1: Crucibles, 15:00-16:30 (UTC) Building the Modern City: Expressions of Identity, Change and Power, Moderated by Iain Jackson

This panel will explore state-sponsored programmes, planned cities and masterplans in cities such as Lagos, Tehran and Baghdad. It will examine architecture as expressions of nationalism and nationalist political agendas as well as its relationship to big business, corporations and mercantile ventures.

Speakers:
  • Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis)
    • Building a (Cosmopolitan) Modern Iran
  • Ola Uduku (Manchester School of Architecture)
    • Lagos International Metropolis: A city’s adventure in tropical architecture as an expression of dynamic modernism and growth in the mid 20th century
  • Lukasz Stanek (University of Manchester)
    • Rupture, Transition and Continuity in Baghdad’s Master Plans: From Minoprio to Miastoprojekt
Session 2: Vectors, 17:00-18:30 (UTC) Connecting the Modern City: Networks, Alliances and Knowledge Production; Moderated by Clara Kim

This panel will explore the practice of modern architecture through colonial-postcolonial networks and geopolitical alliances. It will explore cities in Mozambique within the context of other Lusophone countries, post-Partition East & West Pakistan, as well as the dissemination of knowledge and technical expertise through pedagogy.

Speakers:
  • Ana Tostões (University of Lisbon)
    • Correspondences, Transfers and Memory: Maputo’s “Age of Concrete”
  • Farhan Karim (University of Kansas)
    • Archaeology of the Future: Constantinos Doxiaidis in East and West Pakistan
  • Patrick Zamarian (University of Liverpool)
    • Global Perspectives and Private Concerns: The AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture
TUESDAY 9 MARCH Session 3: Catalysts, 15:00-16:30
  • Fragments of the Modern City: Memories, Echoes and Whispers Moderated by Osei Bonsu

This panel will explore the collaborations, connections and entanglements that developed between art and architecture during a dynamic period of building in Morocco, India and Iraq. It will examine the legacy and afterlives of these projects through the investigation of under-recognised figures and narratives in art and architecture.

Speakers:

  • Lahbib el Moumni & Imad Dahmani (founders of MAMMA, Mémoire des Architectes Modernes Marocain)
    • Initiatives toward saving modern heritage of Morocco
  • Ram Rahman (Photographer/Curator)
    • Building Modern Delhi, The Nehruvian Post-Independence Renaissance
  • Amin Alsaden (Independent Scholar)
    • Syntheses Across Disciplines: Rifat Chadirji and Art-Architecture Liaisons in Modern Baghdad

This event was organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational and Liverpool School of Architecture.

CRUCIBLES, VECTORS, CATALYSTS: ENVISIONING THE MODERN CITY

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February 16, 2021
Africa, Conferences, European Transnational, Fry & Drew, Ghana, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography, India, MENA, Middle East, South East Asia, transnational, Tropical Architecture
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Explore modern cities and architectural production in the blurred era of the independence and postcolonial period

Join us for three sessions which will bring together scholars, researchers and curators to explore architectural production in the blurred era of independence to the post-colonial period of the mid-20th century, focussing on cities in Africa, Middle East and South Asia. 

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/crucibles-vectors-catalysts-envisioning-the-modern-city-tickets-138966892717

Whether driven by socialist agendas (Nehruvian in India and Nkrumah in Ghana), monarchies (Pahlavis in Iran and Hashemite in Iraq), quasi colonial protectorates, or pan-continental aspirations, architecture (and especially Modernism) was a key apparatus for nation-building, for re-imagining identities and a means to project and invent a new image of the future. The seminar seeks to explore the use of architecture as both physical infrastructure and symbolic expression, as well as its vulnerability to the vicissitudes of changing politics and policies of the times.

The role of cities as crucibles, vectors and catalysts for developing new expressions of identity, change and power is key. Cities in this period saw the emergence of schools of thought, dynasties and collaborations were formed, networks and ideas were shared and publications were disseminated. While the desire of a newly independent nation was often to consolidate a single national collective identity, it was through the urban centres that strands of coherent, yet often multiple identities were formed. The role of figures such as Rifat Chadirji, Mohamed Makiya, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry were important as they often operated within multiple cities and cross-cultural contexts that spanned the colonial to postcolonial divide. 

These urban centres were either newly built, or they were remade and reimagined through city infrastructure, government buildings, universities, cultural institutions and national monuments. Architecture schools, state sponsored projects and external agencies feed into the discussion and warrant further exploration. The seminar explores the transnational connections, diverse political agendas and complex allegiances which informed architectural development in this period. 

Seminar convenors:

  • Iain Jackson, Professor of Architecture and Research Director, Liverpool School of Architecture
  • Clara Kim, The Daskalopoulos Senior Curator, International Art, Tate Modern
  • Nabila Abdel Nabi, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern

PROGRAMME
TUESDAY 2 MARCH

Session 1: Crucibles, 15:00-16:30 (UTC)

  • Building the Modern City: Expressions of Identity, Change and Power
    • Moderated by Iain Jackson

This panel will explore state-sponsored programmes, planned cities and masterplans in cities such as Lagos, Tehran and Baghdad. It will examine architecture as expressions of nationalism and nationalist political agendas as well as its relationship to big business, corporations and mercantile ventures.

Speakers:

  • Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis)
    • Building a (Cosmopolitan) Modern Iran
  • Ola Uduku (Manchester School of Architecture)
    • Lagos International Metropolis: A city’s adventure in tropical architecture as an expression of dynamic modernism and growth in the mid 20th century
  • Lukasz Stanek (University of Manchester)
    • Rupture, Transition and Continuity in Baghdad’s Master Plans: From Minoprio to Miastoprojekt

Session 2: Vectors, 17:00-18:30 (UTC)

  • Connecting the Modern City: Networks, Alliances and Knowledge Production
    • Moderated by Clara Kim

This panel will explore the practice of modern architecture through colonial-postcolonial networks and geopolitical alliances. It will explore cities in Mozambique within the context of other Lusophone countries, post-Partition East & West Pakistan, as well as the dissemination of knowledge and technical expertise through pedagogy.

Speakers:

  • Ana Tostões (University of Lisbon)
    • Correspondences, Transfers and Memory: Maputo’s “Age of Concrete”
  • Fahran Karim (University of Kansas)
    • Archaeology of the Future: Constantinos Doxiaidis in East and West Pakistan
  • Patrick Zamarian (University of Liverpool)
    • Global Perspectives and Private Concerns: The AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture

TUESDAY 9 MARCH

Session 3: Catalysts, 15:00-16:30 (UTC)

  • Fragments of the Modern City: Memories, Echoes and Whispers
    • Moderated by Nabila Abdel Nabi

This panel will explore the collaborations, connections and entanglements that developed between art and architecture during a dynamic period of building in Morocco, India and Iraq. It will examine the legacy and afterlives of these projects through the investigation of under-recognised figures and narratives in art and architecture.

Speakers:

  • Lahbib el Moumni & Imad Dahmani (founders of MAMMA, Mémoire des Architectes Modernes Marocain)
    • Initiatives toward saving modern heritage of Morocco
  • Ram Rahman (Photographer/Curator)
    • Building Modern Delhi, The Nehruvian Post-Independence Renaissance
  • Amin Alsaden (Independent Scholar)
    • Syntheses Across Disciplines: Rifat Chadirji and Art-Architecture Liaisons in Modern Baghdad

This event is organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational and Liverpool School of Architecture.