Abstract
Oil was an essential aspect of transformations to modern architecture—vicissitudes of programmatic, material, and formal approaches can be mapped according to the increase in oil availability. Oil is also essential to understanding the postcolonial: systems of extraction, processing, and distribution were a central part of both governing strategies and the terms of resistance as colonies gained independence. Oil corporations played a large role in maintaining economic and social structure. More generally, global and postcolonial debates, in literature and in the lived political world, revolve, in part, around the inequities the oil economy ushered in. The chapter focuses on the British Petroleum House in Lagos, Nigeria, designed by Fry, Drew, Drake and Lasdun and completed in 1960. Discussion of the building centers on the letters of Jane Drew, in Lagos for the building’s opening in October 1960, when Nigeria became independent. Drew was proud of the building but aware of its role in increasing exploitation; her concerns allow for a nuanced reflection on the positioning of architecture, oil, and the global postcolonial subject.
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