image for illustration: Old building of Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone by Jared & Melanie & Huxley Ponchot, CC BY 2.0
Dr Christopher Turner, curator of ‘Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence’, reports on the exhibition for the Commonwealth Heritage Forum (CHF).
Dr Christopher Turner writes for the Commonwealth Heritage Forum:
As with all exhibitions at the V&A, Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence was a long time in the works. The idea originated after a trip to Sri Lanka in 2018, where I toured Geoffrey Bawa and Minnette de Silva’s buildings and learned about the ways in which they rejected the veneer of modernism that had entered South Asia, when Tropical Modernism was a late colonial imposition, and proposed instead a critical regionalism. Both Bawa and de Silva were educated at the Architectural Association in London, where Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, the so-called inventors of Tropical Modernism, established a Department of Tropical Architecture in the early 1950s to teach British architects to work in the colonies. Jane Drew went on to collaborate with Bawa in Sri Lanka.
The exhibition looked at the invention of Tropical Modernism in West Africa and India against the political backdrop of the time – the boycotts, strikes and riots against colonial rule – to show the ways in which this late Imperial architecture was an instrument of power. The tropics covers some 40% of the earth and was a colonial definition, encompassing most of the dominions of the British Empire, and focusing on the places that Fry and Drew worked, and exploring the complicated legacy that they left, helped us limit the geographical scope of this project.
However, the real heroes of our exhibition are Nehru and Nkrumah, the first prime ministers of India (which gained Independence in 1947) and Ghana (which won its freedom in 1957). Tropical Modernism, a colonial invention, survived the transition to Independence and was appropriated and adapted by Nehru and Nkrumah as a tool of nation building, partly because it didn’t have religious or ethnic baggage as they sought to make new countries in arbitrary colonial borders. They saw it as progressive, scientific and optimistic, a style appropriate to their particular brands of socialism. We centred and celebrated a first generation of West African and Indian architects, and explore how they reacted to Tropical Modernism in different ways to create distinctive alternative modernisms more rooted in place.
Today, stripped of its colonial associations, Tropical Modernism is experiencing something of a modish revival as an exotic and escapist style popular in verdant luxury hotels, bars and concrete jungle houses. But it has a problematic history and, through an examination of the context of British imperialism and decolonial struggle, the exhibition sought to look at the history of Tropical Modernism before and after Independence, and show something of the politics behind the concrete.
Tropical Modernism was a climate responsive architecture – it sought to work with rather than against climate. We spoke to lots of contemporary architects in South Asia and West Africa who were looking anew at this history as they seek to make a more sustainable architecture, so lessons are to be learned from Tropical Modernism and it seems a good time to look back to look forward. As we face an era of climate change, it is important that Tropical Modernism’s scientifically informed principles of passive cooling are re-examined and reinvented for our age.
A review by Rowenna Malone, Heritage Consultant and CHF Trustee [said]
‘With eye-catching graphics and an imaginatively designed layout, the Tropical Modernism exhibition is full of interesting information and well curated compositions of architectural drawings, photographs, models and books to illustrate different parts of this complex story. The exhibition begins with British couple Fry and Drew, married during the Second World War whilst Fry was serving in Africa with the Army, who went out to West Africa in the 1940s to create a modern architectural style for the buildings across ‘the tropics’ (as defined by them) which could be used for the schools and institutions that the Colonial Office was funding to prepare Britain’s colonies for future independence.’
‘The exhibition then moves on to how the Tropical Modern style was reclaimed by the leaders of newly independent states, such as Nehru in India and Nkrumah in Ghana, to create new places and spaces that represented the new countries they were creating. The exhibition points out that Drew, Fry and other architects like them were agents of the colonial regime and, moreover, they paid no attention to local cultures, materials or techniques of building but sought to create a style that could be replicated in any of Britain’s tropical colonies. This elision of a supposedly monolithic colonial power and an architectural style that was derived from International Modernism is a little misleading. International Modernism had been conceived as a single style that could be built anywhere, whether France, Britain, America or Algeria. It arguably was much more monolithic in its approach than Britain was towards its empire. Tropical Modernism’s disregard for local culture came more from the architectural approach of International Modernism than from an imperialist outlook. These observations aside, it was fascinating to explore how the pre-independence version of Tropical Modernism was developed in response to the twin challenges of the tropical sun and the humidity and then how it was reimagined by both politicians and architects in the newly independent countries. The film at the end with contributions from architects who were part of the new wave in Ghana is particularly insightful.’
‘Tracing human interactions with the world’s most famous tropical timber species, The Social Life of Teak maps worlds revolving around teak forests, trees and wood. For centuries, massive quantities of teak trees have been extracted from the forests of South and Southeast Asia. Claimed by rulers, fought over and used to fund wars, Tectona grandis remains cherished and coveted. What gives teak such a powerful aura? How has it shaped people’s lives, driving fortunes and impacting futures? What has happened to the teak forests? What does their future look like? Through human transaction and exchange – our social lives – we attribute meaning and value to things. Exploring the significance of teak highlights processes of consumption and commodification, inviting questions about our relationship with nature and the politics of value.’
