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

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.     

The networks of tropical architecture

The concept of tropical architecture is one that was constructed in the 1950s to link the work of modernist practitioners in a number of locations outside the West. Tropical architecture has been represented as a form of critical regionalism, in that it offers a language based in the conditions of the non-western world. While this may be true of the movement in the Americas, in the case of the British colonies of West Africa tropical architecture was located within the networks of modernist and colonial culture as much as it was place bound. Tropical architecture was established in the metropolitan architectural circles of the 1950s through the use of the term in books and journals, a conference and a course of specialisation in London. These forms of support assisted architects to create modern architecture in far-flung sites, under difficult conditions. Despite this enmeshment of the peripheral sites of practice with the colonial metropolis through communications, tropical architecture was seen as something other than colonial architecture. The changing political and economic opportunities at the end of the colonial period prompted architects to develop a post-colonial identity for architecture, which was done through the representation of their approach as one that could transcend national boundaries. Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zones , by Fry and Drew explicitly offers support for an imaginary architect who comes from a generic tropical zone. The influence of the metropolis on the culture of tropical architecture remained significant, even after independence. While the consistency of approaches that marked the work of the 1950s has been replaced by a multiplicity of attitudes to design, the contemporary literature, curricula and research on African architecture share an emphasis on its climatic conditions. This content, in turn, ties the approach to authoritative sources in the West, giving it an identity that links the local and the global in complex and interdependent ways.     

The networks of tropical architecture

The concept of tropical architecture is one that was constructed in the 1950s to link the work of modernist practitioners in a number of locations outside the West. Tropical architecture has been represented as a form of critical regionalism, in that it offers a language based in the conditions of the non-western world. While this may be true of the movement in the Americas, in the case of the British colonies of West Africa tropical architecture was located within the networks of modernist and colonial culture as much as it was place bound.

Tropical architecture was established in the metropolitan architectural circles of the 1950s through the use of the term in books and journals, a conference and a course of specialisation in London. These forms of support assisted architects to create modern architecture in far-flung sites, under difficult conditions. Despite this enmeshment of the peripheral sites of practice with the colonial metropolis through communications, tropical architecture was seen as something other than colonial architecture. The changing political and economic opportunities at the end of the colonial period prompted architects to develop a post-colonial identity for architecture, which was done through the representation of their approach as one that could transcend national boundaries. Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zones , by Fry and Drew explicitly offers support for an imaginary architect who comes from a generic tropical zone.

The influence of the metropolis on the culture of tropical architecture remained significant, even after independence. While the consistency of approaches that marked the work of the 1950s has been replaced by a multiplicity of attitudes to design, the contemporary literature, curricula and research on African architecture share an emphasis on its climatic conditions. This content, in turn, ties the approach to authoritative sources in the West, giving it an identity that links the local and the global in complex and interdependent ways.     

The ecology of under‐development in tropical Africa

The countries of tropical Africa are committed to the role of producers of raw materials which are exported and consumed by the industrial nations. The economy of each African country centres around the production and export of one or two raw materials and the amount exported is in many cases regulated by international agreement and by fluctuations in world demand. Tropical Africa is at present undergoing a population explosion unprecedented in human history, the people are among the poorest in the world, and there seems no prospect of significant economic improvement. This predicament is essentially an economic continuation of the policies of the former colonial powers and if Africa is to avoid disaster, let alone enjoy the development it hopes for, considerable changes of attitude are necessary. The possibility of de‐development by the industrial nations to an extent which would allow the African nations to export finished products rather than raw materials should be seriously explored, and at the same time it is urgent that the rate of population growth, at present probably in excess of 3% per year in many areas, should be slowed down.     

An ‘ordinary modernist’? Empire and nation in Ariel Kahane’s large-scale planning

ABSTRACT

The article explores mid-twentieth century professional transnationalism by highlighting the crucial role of lesser-known planners – ‘ordinary modernists’ – in disseminating, negotiating, and ultimately shaping the modern built environment. It focuses on the work of Ariel Kahane (1907–1986), a mostly unknown German-Jewish senior planning officer under both the British Mandate and on the Israeli ‘New Towns’ team of early statehood. It examines Kahane’s critique of British imperial planning’s betrayal of the emancipatory values of large-scale planning, and shows how, while drawing on planning innovations from the British metropole, he produced his own, self-contradictory, planning vision. Kahane’s planning ideas advanced notions of Jewish exclusiveness, an orientation expressed ever more explicitly after 1948, when he became a high-ranking planning officer in Israel. His work as a senior state planner illuminates aspects of continuity across the divide of 1948, which is typically viewed as a moment of rupture with respect to Israeli state planning and the formation of ethno-spatial structures.     

New plans for housing in urban Kenya, 1939–63

Until about 1939, guided by a policy of trusteeship, the colonial government in Kenya limited the number of Africans in urban areas. As elsewhere in East and Central Africa, employers and municipalities were supposed to provide only ‘bachelor’ housing for unaccompanied African men. After 1939, encouraged by London, the Kenyan government began to promote a policy of development which implied urbanization. The permanent presence of Africans in towns was accepted, as was the growing responsibility of municipalities for the provision of housing for families as well as for bachelors. Municipalities began to plan for new types of housing, with more community facilities in new types of neighbourhood layouts. From the early 1940s, a wave of construction created many thousands of new dwellings in all major urban areas, but only a minority were designed for families. Many women and children were accommodated in ‘bachelor’ housing where they were compensated through rental subsidies. Although Kenya’s housing initiatives in the late colonial period did not satisfy all of the rapidly growing urban needs, they were a substantial achievement.     

Town planning in the Dutch Indies

Three hundred years of colonialism have left Indonesia with a distinctly Dutch heritage. In the major Indonesian towns and cities old Dutch neighbourhoods can still be recognized. On their arrival, the Dutch imposed a settlement pattern copied from their own towns; for example, Batavia — nowadays Jakarta — was modeled after Amsterdam. Eventually, modern techniques like building lines and zoning were introduced. In many Indonesian towns colonial building ordinances still apply, whilst the colonial Town Planning Act has never been repealed.

This article gives an overview of Dutch influence on Indonesian towns from the arrival of the Dutch in Indonesia until the declaration of Indonesian independence in August 1945 and the difficult years following until 1949. It shows that town planning in Indonesia went through several stages. In the seventeenth century the Dutch applied renaissance town planning concepts copied from their own towns. Later on, Dutch and Indonesian culture intermingled: the ‘Indische’ culture emerged. The ‘Indische’ culture emerged. The ‘Indische’ town was better adapted to the tropical climate than towns solely based on Dutch examples. In modern times, Western culture has been reasserted. After 1870, the liberalization of the economy led to a rapid growth of the Indonesian towns. Modern planning techniques were introduced to cope with the increasing complexity of urban life.     

建筑领域形态研究的开端

这篇文章回顾了18世纪末法国理性主义建筑革命背景之下,作为四位大师之一的迪朗的研究工作,强调了他为建立一套建筑学的科学体系而作的努力：通过对其研究内容的先进性和局限性的分析,讨论了他的工作同建筑领域形态研究之间的关系。     

阚铎与中国营造学社

阚铎是中国近代建筑史上一个重要的人物,曾是中国营造学社早期的主要成员之一,为中国营造学社以及中国建筑历史文献的整理研究做出了巨大的贡献。他所整理的古籍至今仍是建筑、园林行业研究的重要文献。然而,由于其后来投身伪满,走到了国家和民族的对立面,成为了历史罪人,因此他的名字在各类文献中基本是一笔带过,无法还原其为中国传统建筑研究所做的工作。该文梳理各种文献资料,试图完整地论述其在营造学社期间所做的工作,及对中国传统建筑与园林的意义。     

Living in the periphery: provinciality and domestic space in colonial Bengal

This article focuses in detail on the domestic architecture of Indian town-dwellers within the context of provincial urbanisation in British colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century. It maps out the complex development of house-forms in provincial towns particularly in relation to rural-urban mobility and new social relationships brought about by the establishment of colonial governmental infrastructure in interior areas of the Bengal Province. Positing these domestic forms to be as important as the much-studied ‘bungalow’ in terms of typological complexity as well as the range of social, political and economic processes that they represented, the article foregrounds them as being significant spatial models of colonial urban domesticity and modernity. It analyses the development of residential architecture in the light of the varied perceptions of provincial towns held by different constituencies among the urban population—such as European officers or Bengali rural immigrants—from a range of socio-economic classes. It argues that urban-rural mobility and the nature of changing but continuing connections between rural and urban locations created an incrementally growing provincial urban domestic architecture characterised by malleable notions of work, home and leisure spaces. This produced a typological flexibility and specific articulations of public and private domains within residential premises.

The chief purpose of the paper is threefold: first, to make a case for Indian agency in the co-production of colonial architecture and urbanism; second, to argue the role of provincial spatial cultures and house forms as key bearers of colonial modernity; third, to explore colonial architectural history through on-ground mapping of everyday domestic spaces of individual families and varied social groups.     

Abadan: planning and architecture under the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company

Industry and urbanization were brought to south-west Iran when large quantities of oil were struck there in the early years of this century. This paper explores the development of Abadan from these beginnings to the 1950s, and particularly the housing and planning forms adopted by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its architect James M. Wilson. Abadan was in effect a colonial company town whose early development combined spacious bungalow compounds for British expatriate workers, barracklike lines of huts for labour recruited locally and from India, and a rapidly overcrowded ‘native town’ under local municipal control. The Company used Wilson’s expertise in an attempt to answer the physical problems created by the growth of Abadan between the wars and to deflect pressure exerted both by Iranian nationalists and the British government. In the garden suburb of Bawarda he created a model solution that used planning and housing form to represent ethnic and social harmony under the discreet paternal benevolence of the Company. This, however, was inappropriate to Abadan’s problems and quickly eclipsed by the political events that led to the Company’s expulsion in 1951.     

Names,norms and forms: French and indigenous toponyms in early colonial Dakar,Senegal

Research on street naming systems in general and on colonial street names in particular is not abundant. This article examines the French colonial policy regarding street names in Dakar, as well as the accompanying colonial terminology that was applied in Dakar’s quarters. With occasional references to the pre‐colonial and the post‐colonial periods, the main focus of this article is on street names in early colonial Dakar, as they were designated by the preliminary master plan of Pinet‐Laprade in the 1860s. While residential segregation was never a stated policy on the part of the colonial authorities there, who formally fostered assimilation, it will be shown that toponyms had a key role in the alienation of the indigenous population in the city centre. As Dakar’s city centre was considered ‘European’ and a chief lieu de colonisation in West Africa, its colonial urban toponyms reflected an official memory that excluded African histories and identities. Using original historical evidence, alternative naming systems of reference to certain urban areas on the part of the Dakarois will be discussed – systems that sometimes challenged and sometimes supplemented their French counterparts.     

British home owners and housing change in rural France

Drawing on a survey of 406 home owners in France, expansion in British property ownership is shown to have increased the rural housing stock and to have improved rural housing quality. In all, 30 per cent of British home owners in France have added at least one dwelling to the housing stock, mostly by restoring a derelict property or bringing an unwanted farm building into residential use. Amongst other property owners, 55 per cent have undertaken significant renovations (extensions, major structural work, etc.), so more than two‐thirds of all British buyers have helped raise the quality of the rural housing stock. This has had little effect on house prices, partly because there is little French demand for the properties Britons buy. Given that British buyers are also reluctant to acquire homes from other Britons, a semi‐autonomous housing market is being created in which resales are difficult. This tendency is weakening slightly now, but British owners who wish to sell continue to rely on France being used as an extension of ‘British’ rural housing markets, wherein they can acquire a rural ‘dream’ home that is not only unaffordable but also unattainable in Britain.     

Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998): a Japanese planner devoted to historic cities in the Middle East and North Africa

Gyoji Banshoya (1930–1998) was a Japanese urban planner whose life-work was urban planning in the Middle East and North Africa. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of his work, which still remains unknown. His early masterpiece, the ‘Square House’, shows how he was influenced by Kiyoshi Seike to apply historic spatial composition to realize width and convertibility in low-cost housing. Following this, Banshoya studied under the supervision of Gerald Hanning and George Candilis at Ateliers de Bâtisseurs in Paris, and went to Algiers to engage in the study of ‘evolutionary habitat’. As a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) expert, he began working with Michel Ecochard in 1962 in Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo. They were responsible for the elaboration of master plans for these three cities, and that of Damascus still remains as a legally active master plan today. Coupled with the Syrian political struggle since the 1980s, there has been some reaction against their modernist policies. However, the case is made for a detailed examination of Banshoya's work, and re-evaluation of its legacy for the urban planning history of the Middle East and North Africa.     

Charles Jencks and the historiography of Post-Modernism

The history of Post-Modern Architecture was to a large extent tied to the name of Charles Jencks, who played an operative role in promoting the movement, much like his predecessor Sigfried Giedion had done for Modern Architecture in the 1930s. Like Giedion, Jencks was a prolific writer and a protagonist of a radical change in the direction of architecture. In the thirty-five year period from the appearance of his first book in 1971, Jencks published more than twenty four works, not counting the ones he edited or co-edited. And like Giedion, Jencks also attempted to reach a synthesis of opposites, by including disparate examples within his original ‘canon’, extending it in its last revision to include works by Eisenman and Tschumi, as Giedion had done by the inclusion of Aalto and Utzon in his later editions of Space, Time and Architecture. This paper will discuss Jencks's historiography of Post-Modernism by looking at the seminal texts that he wrote from 1970 until 2007, beginning with Architecture 2000 and ending with Critical Modernism. The main focus of this article is critically to examine his major work, the Language of Post Modernism, and to trace its evolution as a means of evaluating his contribution to the development of this movement, as well as to architectural historiography.     

热带园林的基本概念与研究意义

热带园林是一种基于气候带资源特征的地带适宜性园林形式,也是现代园林景观营造中生态与人文和谐共存的典型文化载体之一.对热带园林基本概念、发展特点及景观特色的学术研究,有利于构建源于自然的"地带园林学"理论体系,开拓中国岭南园林与世界同气候带园林文化交流研究新领域.     

波尔图学派传承与发展的脉络研究——从塔沃拉到德莫拉

葡萄牙建筑师艾德瓦尔多.苏托.德莫拉获得了2011年普里兹克建筑奖,其老师阿尔瓦罗·西扎则于1992年获此奖项,而西扎本人亦受波尔图学派引领者费尔南多·塔沃拉影响,这三人反映了波尔图学派的各个发展时期。该文从葡萄牙的传统建筑历史和20世纪葡萄牙现代建筑思潮的演变出发,通过分析波尔图学派主要引领者塔沃拉的早期本土化探索和继承者西扎、德莫拉延续影响而又发展的建筑思想及其内在价值取向,指出其中传承与发展的脉络。     

A.W.N.普金的两种功能主义

普金是19世纪初英国哥特复兴运动的重要代表,他的功能主义理论被视为现代主义理论的先驱之一.本文深入剖析了他两部著作--<对比>与<尖式或基督教建筑的真实原则>的差异,揭示出普金论述中两种不同的功能主义:总体功能主义与本质功能主义.并经过进一步分析,指出了本质功能主义的缺陷以及总体功能主义作为建筑理论基础的合理性.     

近代厦门英租界的城市发展和西方建筑传播

1843年厦门开埠后，厦门英租界较早开辟，并先于鼓浪屿公共租界成为当时新的城市商业中心。厦门英租界的建设和发展，打破了以厦门老城区为中心的传统格局，城市由此开始向厦门岛西南滨水地带延伸发展。外人在厦门英租界建造的殖民式建筑，也成为19世纪下半叶西方建筑在厦门早期传播的重要部分之一。     

现代主义对英国园林的影响浅析

英国园林历史悠久,对世界园林的发展产生了重要影响,其现代主义园林发展脉络的梳理亟待研究。以时间为线索,以代表性人物和具有影响力的事件为切入点,梳理英国现代主义园林发展的主要历史时期(1925-1980),并以二战和1980年为分界线,研究了各个时期的英国现代主义园林发展的特征,以及工艺美术运动、英国节、新城镇运动等事件所产生的影响。最后总结出现代主义对英国园林影响程度以及原因。