Tropical Hot Dog Night:Tropical Modernism @ the V&A.

Tropical Modernism! I like tropical things (most of them, not so keen on mosquitos) and I like modern things (again, not all modern things) so surely I'd like something called Tropical Modernism - which was the title of the show I attended with my friend Mark at the V&A on Friday. I'm also interested, and have been for a long time, in architecture so discovering the show is about tropical and modernist architecture I thought it'd be right up my street.

 Gordon Cullen - Illustration from The Architectural Review (1953)

Which it was. Not only did it look at the history of modernist architecture in, specifically, India and Ghana, but it also looked at the independence movement in those countries, Pan-Africanism, and the Non-Aligned Movement. There were nods to Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller as well as highlife music. The exhibition hit a lot of the right notes for me.

My only, very minor, complaint is that the show could have branched out to show other tropical countries that embraced modernist architecture. Some of Oscar Niemeyer's work in Brazil would have been nice. But there was a lot of stuff there anyway and, as with any show relating to architecture, much of it was in the form of models and diagrams. It's not that easy to bundle up the Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh and rebuild it in South Kensington.

The concept of 'Tropical Modernism' began as a British colonial diktat in the 1940s and 50s. Part of the thinking was that if the colonies were given bright and shiny new buildings and public infrastructure they'd quieten down their calls for independence. That, quite obviously, didn't happen. Modernist architecture hadn't really taken off - bar a few notable exceptions - in Britain itself so the architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry saw opportunities in West Africa and India and developed a distinctive style of modernist architecture that would work in hot and humid climates.

Where the story gets more interesting is when independence comes to India and Ghana (then the Gold Coast) under Jawaharlal Nehru and Kwame Nkrumah. The colonial architecture was repurposed and adapted and became signifiers of their countries progressive, up to a point, aspirations. Local architects were nurtured in both India and Ghana and tasked with creating modernist buildings and projects but with a distinctly local style.

Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry on their wedding day (1942)

Edward McKnight Kauffer - MARS Group New Architecture exhibition poster (1938)

Drew and Fry were members of the MARS (Modern Architecture Research Group) Group and that was part of the broader International Congress of Modern Architecture which had been set up by Le Corbusier. They had radical plans for redesigning cities but their plan for an almost total conversion of London obviously never got off the ground.

Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder, suggested this was because England was an "inartistic country". Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis took a different approach and suggested modernist architecture was unpopular in Britain because it was "cod-liver oil to the sweet Anglo-Saxon palette". As it dawned on him he was backing the wrong horse in the UK, Gropius (who had arrived in Britain in 1934 to escape the Nazis) moved to America in 1937. Though, with Maxwell Fry, he was responsible for Cambridgeshire's Impington College during his brief time in the UK. There's a house in Chelsea too. They're both still there if you want to go and have a look.

Village College, Impington, UK (1939)

Jane Drew didn't give up as easily as Gropius. She set up her own all-female practice and participated in the V&A's Britain Can Make It exhibition in 1945, as well as designing part of the site of 1951's Festival of Britain celebrating British industry, art, design, and science and intending to lift the spirits of a country still enduring post-war austerity.

At this time her husband, Fry, was stationed in the Gold Coast. She soon joined him and they advised the British colonial government on town planning. Their designs were innovative and became known as Tropical Modernism and started to appear in Gambia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone as well as Ghana/the Gold Coast. By 1965 all four of these countries had gained their freedom and independence.

Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry - The four countries of British West Africa from Village Housing in the Tropics (1947)

Maxwell Fry had been given a government handbook that reassured him, and its other readers, that West Africa was no longer the "white man's grave" and that malaria was now treatable. However, it didn't stop the British colonial powers from segregating themselves from the local population for fear of contacting infectious diseases. Or possibly down to plain old fashioned racism.

Drew and Fry actively dismissed local building traditions and did not employ any African architects. A 1955 book, Britain's Purpose in Africa by Kenneth Bradley, warned that these nations were not ready for independence and suggested the belief that self-government is better than good government was a dangerous half-truth. Britain believed that building new schools in Ibadan would quieten down these ungrateful would be usurpers. Spoiler alert:it didn't.

Britain's Purpose in Africa (1955)

Patrick Wakely - Design for a University College in Dar-Es-Salaam in Tanzania, fifth year thesis project (1962-63)

Ashanti stool (early 20th century)

Things changed - slowly. In 1954, the Nigerian student Adedokun Adeyemi complained that the training he'd received at London's Department of Tropical Architecture was inadequate and left him unprepared for work in West Africa. Within a few years most of its students were from the now independent former colonies but there was still a western bias in place. Not least in the fact that the different cultures of Western Africa were being treated as one homogenous whole.

The modernist art aesthetic of the early 20th century had heavily borrowed from African art. Not least the likes of Picasso and Eduardo Paolozzi who taught alongside Drew and Fry at the Department of Tropical Architecture. Paolozzi used African masks but stripped them of their cultural and ritual significance. For him, it seems. these things just looked cool.

In Western Africa, and in India, things were changing. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first Prime Minister, took inspiration from the Indian anti-colonial activists Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and implemented his own Positive Action campaign. Between 1957 and 1967, two thirds of the countries of Africa won their freedom from the European colonial powers.

Ghana and India became founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement and adapted a policy of neutralism. They along, with huge numbers of other nation states from across Africa, Asia, and Latin America would refuse to take sides in the Cold War between the USA and the USSR. They would also support freedom struggles from other countries still under the grip of colonialism.

Nehru and Gandhi (1940s)

Unknown photographer - Mahatma Gandhi during the Salt March (1930)

Unknown artist - Portrait of Nehru, Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel (about 1948)

Demonstration against the handling of the Gold Coast riots, Trafalgar Square (1948)

Unknown photographer - The British colonial secretariat (1940-50)

 

John Harrison - Community Centre, Accra (about 1953)

In Accra, Ghana's capital, a community centre (designed by Drew and Fry) was built by the United Africa Company to restore their reputation after being accused of price fixing. Rioters burned down their headquarters in 1948. A mural on the building's side, by the Ghanaian artist Kofi Antubam, included a phrase in the Ga language which translated as "it is good we live together as friends and one people". When Nkrumah took over, Antubam became the country's state artist.

Ghana, it seems, was too small for Nkrumah. In 1958, Accra hosted the first Pan-African gathering where Nkrumah argued for a Pan-African federation and popular slogans included "Hands off Africa", "Down with Imperialism and Colonialism", and "Africa Must Be Free". In some ways, it seems that Nkrumah envisioned a United States of Africa.

Much of the early criticism of Nkrumah revolves around the idea that he was a "good African" but a "bad Ghanaian"! In India, the violent partition (that resulted in an estimated one million deaths) of the Punjab had ended up with Lahore becoming part of Pakistan so the Indian Punjab needed a new capital. Nehru planned for the city of Chandigarh to be built and become that capital and, as he perceived modernism to be an international style with no colonial baggage, no lesser a name than Le Corbusier - along with the seemingly ubiquitous Drew and Fry, was employed, along with local Indian architects, to work on it. Nehru was, in his words, building "temples of Modern India".

Before Chandigarh, no other modernist city anywhere in the world had been built from scratch. Its architecture was very much a reaction against New Delhi which had been built, mostly by Edwin Lutyens, to represent imperial power. Nehru said Chandigarh would be "unfettered by the traditions of the past" and that it would be "an expression of the nation's faith in the future".

Nehru insisted Le Corbusier employ Indian staff when working on Chandigarh and that the site should act as a "living school" for Indian architects and builders. A short film shows us that health and safety priorities were not high on the agenda back then. There's not a hard hat in sight.

Le Corbusier insisted on a strict grid for Chandigarh and put his main focus on the prestigious Capital Complex buildings leaving much of the rest of the city to Drew, Fry, and Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier's often unsung cousin.

Pierre Jeanneret - Le Corbusier in Chandigarh with the plan of the city and a model of the Modular Man, his universal system of proportion (1951)

Pierre Jeanneret - Office armchair (about 1955)

Gian Rattan Singh - Scale model of the Tower of Shadows, Chandigarh (1957)

Aditya Prakash - Axonometric section for Tagore Theatre (about 1960)

Aditya Prakash had trained in London and Delhi and he joined the Chandigarh team in 1952, working on housing and a hospital. He had mixed feelings about Le Corbusier who he said treated the Indians like "uninitiated children" but also giving him credit for helping them to realise their own country.

Prakash developed his own take on modernism and in 1961 completed the Tagore Theatre in Chandigarh, celebrating the centenary of the birth of the Bengali poet and playwright Rabindranath Tagore. With its impressive acoustics and clear sightlines, it was a huge success.

Other Indian architects and designers, like Habib Rahman (who had trained in America under Walter Gropius) and Nek Chand, got involved. Rahman designed a memorial to Gandhi near Kolkota (then Calcutta) and Chand created a "secret kingdom" of over two thousand sculptures which was hidden in a forest near the centre of Chandigarh. Chand wasn't a fan of Le Corbusier and considered his work to be a critique of Le Corbusier's modernist grid.

Nek Chand - Rock Garden sculptures (1960-90)

Marjorie Shoosmith - Sir Edwin Lutyens and his team presenting a model of the Viceroy's House to the Viceroy (1931)

Promotional poster for the film Tere Ghar Ke Samne ('In Front of Your House') (1963)

Nehru's passion for modernism found its way into Indian popular culture. Vijay Anand's 1963 film Tere Ghar Ke Samne tells the story of an architect who returns to India from America and builds identical modernist houses for two feuding neighbours. Unsurprisingly, Chandigarh featured in the film.

Achyut Kavinde was another who'd trained under Walter Gropius. He returned to India in 1947 and by the 1960s was designing buildings like the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh that took Gropius and the Bauhaus school as their starting point but expanded to become almost miniature cities and incorporated more local architectural styles. Not least in dealing with the climate. Kanpur gets very very hot. It's actually 42 degrees there now as I write this.

Randhir Singh - Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (2021)

Kayinde was at the forefront of a new generation of architects and architecture schools that soon began to emerge across India looking to foster a distinct and specific Indian modernism. A National Institute of Design was established in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad following recommendations from American designers Charles and Ray Eames, the architect Balkrishna Doshi (who'd worked in Paris with Le Corbusier) supervised his former boss's buildings being constructed in that same city but later came to see the buildings as being "foreign and out of milieu" and moved his energies towards his students who he got to conduct studies of rural villages and India's architectural heritage in looking for solutions to climate and housing concerns.

Doshi's campus included open spaces for teaching and aimed for a non-hierarchical atmosphere whereas Le Corbusier's parts of Chandigarh discouraged mixed income neighbourhoods. Doshi wanted to celebrate India's vitality and bring people together. A street view of his Aranya Housing plans gives us an idea of what Doshi was hoping to achieve.

Aditya Prakash was also displeased with some of Le Corbusier's ideas - again. Prakash didn't like that Le Corbusier banned cows (in India!) and informal markets and considered his design to be "a place for gods to play, it's not for humans". He developed his own design for a 'linear city' with green spaces (good) and elevated roads (not so good, put the cars underground in a tunnel and leave the city for pedestrians, cyclists, and electric trains).

Balkrishna Doshi - Street view of Aranya Housing (about 1989)

 Aditya Prakash - Sketch perspective for Linear City, Chandigarh (about 1975)

When Nehru died in 1964, modernist architecture didn't stop in India but lived on in large scale, expressive, constructions. The architect Raj Rewai, in 1972, completed a vast complex of pavilions in New Delhi to celebrate 25 years of independence. The truncated pyramid which was part of the complex was the world's largest concrete 'spaceframe' and was inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller (who would go on to lecture students in Ghana). They were opened by Nehru's daughter and then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

In recent years, however, the rise of Narendra Modi and his aggressive Hindu nationalism has seen India turn its back on the ideas of being a progressive and modern society. Rewai's pavilion was demolished in 2017 and replaced with a corporate campus. Nationalists and populists, despite arguing to the contrary, rarely care about the artistic legacy of the countries they seek to lead.

Two interior views of the Hall of Nations (1970-74)

Model of the Nehru Pavilion (1971)

In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah was inviting Ghanaian architects back from America to work in Ghana but he was also becoming ever more focused on the Pan-African movement. For Nkrumah, the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless linked to a 'total liberation' of Africa.

To celebrate the African, or Ghanaian, culture he was so proud of he wore traditional Ghanaian dress on the world stage, set up an architectural school for local architects, and oversaw a visit to Accra by Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. It was hoped that Ali would make Ghana his permanent home and he was even presented with four plots of land to use if he wished to do that. Which, it seems, he didn't.

Kwame Nkrumah on the cover of Drum magazine (1957)

Article about Muhammed Ali's African tour from Ebony magazine (1964)

Commemorative cloth designed for Ghana's Independence Day celebrations (1967)

Nkrumah commissioned the building of Black Star Square, a parade ground built in Africa on former colonial playing fields, and called up a local architect, Victor Adegbite, to head up the project. New schools and hospitals were constructed and a manufacturing city, Tema, was built - modelled on Chandigarh which handily pulls the two parts of the exhibition together.

Heading up the architectural team behind Tema was Theodore Shealtiel Clerk, another Ghanaian architect who had trained in Edinburgh. Clerk was, at that time, the country's only professionally qualified architect so it's maybe less of a surprise than it should be that British architects should be involved in the design - including our old friend Jane Drew.

Despite relying on former colonially and paternalistic minded experts, Nkrumah continued elsewhere in his mission to decolonise Ghana. He commissioned the National Museum of Ghana to display the country's artistic heritage and he promoted highlife music from the likes of E.T.Mensah. He even published multiple books. For example 1968's The Spectre of Black Power.

Michael Hirst - CEO House, Tema, designed by Jane Drew (1950-59)

Members of the Professional Uhuru Dance Band wearing fugu, a traditional smock from northern Ghana (1963)

Kwame Nkrumah - The Spectre of Black Power (1968)

E.T.Mensah and his Tempos Band (1969)

James Barnor - A shop assistant at the Sick-Hagemeyer store, Accra (1971)

KNUST students - Geodesic dome from KNUST (about 1964)

MDM Props Ltd (after an original by Nicola Cataudella) - Statue of Kwame Nkrumah (2023, original - 1958)

Ultimately, Nkrumah's plans were too ambitious and the power, like so many before and after him, went to his head. He was deposed during a coup in 1966 and statues like the original of the one above were pulled down and the arms pulled off. 

Nkrumah had overseen bold and progressive projects in Ghana, as Nehru had done in India, and later mistakes and abuses of power (imprisoning political opponents without trail, declaring Ghana a one-party state) perhaps shouldn't completely ruin that legacy. There's an interesting film that ends the exhibition and also some open ended questions about the future of Tropical Modernism. It would be great to think this style of architecture can continue, prosper, and develop in new directions and I don't see any reason why it can't. If the likes of Nkrumah and Nehru could wrest it, and adapt it, from the blueprints they were given by their colonial rulers then why can't contemporary architects and designers move it in yet another new and interesting direction? Time will tell but, for me, this was a highly enjoyable and educational exhibition.

Thanks to Mark for joining me at this enjoyable, and illuminating, show and for a very pleasurable debrief in The Anglesea Arms afterwards.