Landing Architecture

Abstract

This chapter looks at an ignored dimension of modern architectural history, how architecture participates in framing the legal and epistemological contours of land. Stressing that changing the meaning of land has been one of the critical roles played by modern architecture in colonial and decolonizing contexts, the chapter looks at a series of village design and planning proposals by British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in West Africa, particularly their schemes for the new town of Tema, near Accra. Rather than analyzing these projects primarily through the lens of cultural identity, as is often done, the chapter locates the role they play in consolidating patriarchal and generational structures of property ownership mobilized by the colonial doctrine of Indirect Rule. By situating the typologies of design proposed by Fry and Drew in relation to a series of colonial land reform legislations since the late nineteenth century, the chapter offers a new way of understanding “tropical architecture” and the role it has played in extending the legacies of colonial control into the postcolonial era.