Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa

The Venice Biennale and the V&A present Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa. Organised in collaboration with the Architectural Association (AA), London, and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, this presentation critically reflects on the imperial history of Tropical Modernism through an analysis of the work of the Department of Tropical Architecture and 14 key projects. It explores the ways in which this distinctive architectural style was initially developed and employed as a tool to support colonial rule before being adapted by new African nations to promote the possibilities of a Pan-African future in the period that followed Ghana gaining independence in 1957.

Curated by Dr Christopher Turner (V&A), Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed (AA), the Venice presentation in the Applied Arts Pavilion is centred around a 35m-long brise soleil installation and multi-channel film featuring interviews with protagonists, experts and footage of remaining buildings. Interviewees include 94-year-old architect John Owusu-Addo and Samia Nkrumah, a politician and the daughter of Ghana’s first Prime Minister and President Kwame Nkrumah. The presentation also lays the groundwork for a larger exhibition scheduled to take place at the V&A in London in 2024.

The Department of Tropical Architecture
In the late 1940s, in the context of British West Africa, husband and wife architectural duo Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew developed the tools of Tropical Modernism, adapting an international modernist aesthetic to the hot and humid conditions of the continent. Their distinctive language of climate control, that made only superficial reference to the locality, was propagated through the Department of Tropical Architecture at the AA in London, where Fry was the programme’s first director. Here, they taught European architects to work in the colonies and trained a new generation of post-colonial architects.

Fry and Drew’s architectural innovations, appeared against the political background of decolonial struggle. The couple and their peers won commissions of a scale and quantity that architects in post-war Britain could only dream, and built numerous schools, universities, community centres and libraries. These commissions were paid for by the Colonial Welfare and Development Act’s 200 million GBP post-war programme to reform, rebuild and modernise the colonies—a cynical initiative designed to offset calls for independence, and to make the colonies better producers for the world market and better buyers for European goods.

The “winds of change”
This investment could not hold back the “winds of change” that blew across Africa as two-thirds of the continent won their freedom in the decade that followed Kwame Nkrumah becoming the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana in 1957. In Tropical Modernism, Nkrumah saw the possibility not only for nation-building, but an expression of his Pan-African ideology, commissioning architects from Eastern Europe to work alongside Ghanaian architects to create monumental structures that were intended as beacons of a free Africa.

In 1963, the Department of Tropical Studies was invited to form a partnership with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, where a first generation of qualified African architects including John Owusu-Addo and African American émigrés to Ghana like J. Max Bond Jr. also taught. Whereas Maxwell Fry had asserted that nothing could be learned from traditional African architecture, the School questioned the colonial assumptions of Tropical Modernism and inspired a new architecture that appreciated vernacular forms and looked to create a unique national or African style.

For further information or to request a curator led tour please contact Matthew Brown, matthew [​at​] sam-talbot.com.