Building a Colonial Technoscientifi c Network: tropical architecture, building science and the politics of decolonization

Abstract

The past few years have seen the emergence of an interesting body of new research on tropical architecture. This scholarship focuses mainly on the work of British architects in Africa during the mid-twentieth century. It examines a broad range of social, political, and cultural issues in the production of tropical architecture and engages in important debates on themes such as (post)colonialism and the politics of (de)colonization, and internationalization versus regionalism.1 The emergence of tropical architecture was linked to key fi gures such as Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Otto Koenigsberger, important metropolitan institutions such as the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association, and also landmark events such as the 1953 Conference on Tropical Architecture. There is no doubt that the best of this scholarship situates the production of tropical architecture in the context of complex socio-political relations between the metropole and the colonies, the British Empire and the postcolonial nations. It is, however, largely silent on the technoscientifi c dimensions of tropical architecture. This oversight is signifi cant given the technical nature of most of the discourses on tropical architecture in the mid-twentieth century.2