Tropical Modernism: Architecture & Independence – the rise and fall of unique design

A white and orange house in the European modernist style

British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry brought European modernism to India and Ghana

(Image credit: The Victoria and Albert Museum)

published 22 March 2024

"My childhood in Hong Kong was shaped by a particular style of building," said Calvin Po in The Spectator: market halls with brise-soleils – slatted screens – shielding us from the midday glare; housing-block stairwells with perforated blockwork "letting in dappled light and breeze"; classrooms accessed from open-air decks, with high clerestory windows "cross-ventilating the stale, sticky air". Known as "tropical modernism", this style was pioneered by the British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, who took the experimental principles of European modernism and adapted them to municipal buildings across the late British empire. They also helped to plan the new city at Chandigarh, in independent India. This V&A exhibition is a bold attempt "to re-evaluate their legacy" in these countries, bringing together photography, films, models and other archival materials to chart the rise and eventual fall of tropical modernism. It is a "nuanced" and scholarly event that avoids knee-jerk judgements on colonialism.

Drew and Fry were an "earnest" married couple who described themselves as "potty types", said Rowan Moore in The Observer. Their prewar attempts to introduce modernism to Britain were met with indifference, but in Ghana and India, they were able to realise their ideas "with a scale and confidence hard to find in Europe". They didn't really "engage with local traditions": at most, they added traditional Ashanti patterns into their concrete creations. Nevertheless, the show neatly demonstrates how tropical modernism became a style "intimately connected to postcolonial independence and nation-building", said Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. Newly independent nations valued modernism's connotations of internationalism, and saw it as a means to establish a visual identity for themselves.

On independence in 1957, Ghana's President Nkrumah established a school to train local architects in both modernist techniques and Ghanaian tradition, said Pamela Buxton in the RIBA Journal. US-trained Victor Adegbite turned a colonial playing field into the Black Star Square parade ground, while local alumni such as John Owusu Addo helped forge a national vernacular. In India, too, PM Jawaharlal Nehru was keen "for local architects to develop an Indian modernism as part of a new national identity". Indian architects studied the work of Fry, Drew and their fellow-traveller Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, and created their own style. With the proliferation of air-conditioning, however, many modernist designs became redundant, and much was demolished. It is only now that we are beginning to realise how ingeniously these buildings "worked with the climate rather than against it". For those seeking a sustainable architecture, this show provides "a useful reference point".