Tropical Architecture and the West Indies: from military advances and tropical medicine, to Robert Gardner-Medwin and the networks of tropical modernism

Abstract

The history of modern Tropical Architecture has largely focused on the region of West Africa, however this paper demonstrates that additional strains were being developed elsewhere, preceding the African examples. Indeed, Tropical Architecture, far from being a mid-twentieth century phenomenon, has a much longer history, stretching back into the colonial settlements of the eighteenth century and continued by the tropical medicine contributions of the early twentieth century, particularly in the British West Indies. This paper considers some of these early examples, before investigating the work produced by Robert Gardner-Medwin, along with his small team that included Leo De Syllas and Gordon Cullen, during the Second World War in the West Indies. Their work there as part of the ‘development and welfare’ programme was considered, ‘building research’, concerned with materials, pragmatic decisions and housing, and, whilst it was unacknowledged at the time, was clearly indebted to the earlier military and hygiene models. Nevertheless, the work they undertook was highly influential in the development of modern tropical architecture, and in particular the buildings that were later produced in West Africa: it helped to formalise this canon, and unified the previously fragmented and disparate out-workings of the Metropolis. Gardner-Medwin, therefore, can be considered an agent of Empire, a key-player in the extension of British architects operating as the knowledge makers, not only in the period of colonial rule, but crucially, afterwards. This is further manifest through his involvement in UN housing missions to South East Asia and his contribution to the Tropical Architecture Conference held at University College, London, in 1953.