Exciting news from the AA archives:

“Join us to celebrate the launch of a major digital platform which makes available over 4000 archival drawings, photographs and documents related to the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture (1954–71) – a programme attended by a generation of architects and planners who would help to shape practice across the Global South. The platform maps the careers, experiences and legacies of over 550 alumni, across 82 countries – foregrounding previously hidden histories and revealing the transnational relationships and networks of practices, institutions and government bodies which interacted with and informed the pedagogy of the Department.

This project was generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.”

More info: https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/public/whats-on/department-tropical-architecture-launch

An interesting image of the Dome being built in Kumasi from 1964 above – a number of these were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s (and one was shown at the V&A Tropical Modernism exhibition too). It reminded me of the photo taken by Michael Hirst (also an AA Department of Tropical Architecture graduate) of the dome built by Fuller in Accra…

Image courtesy of Michael Hirst, 1958, Buckminster Fuller Dome built in front of Accra’s Law Courts, Ghana.