LONDON, Mar 16: A new exhibition that opened at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London this month celebrates the architectural style of Tropical Modernism, associated with newly independent India’s first major building projects including the city of Chandigarh.
International modernism, associated with British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, was a colonial architecture developed against the background of anti-colonial struggle across India and West Africa. The crux of the style was adapting a modernist aesthetic that valued function over ornament to the hot, humid conditions of the region.
“We deliberately set out to complicate the history of Tropical Modernism by looking at the architecture against the anti-colonial struggle of the time, and by engaging with and centring South Asian and West African perspectives,” said Christopher Turner, the V&A’s Keeper of Art, Architecture, Photography & Design.
“The story of Tropical Modernism is one of colonialism and decolonisation, politics and power, defiance and independence; it is not just about the past, but also about the present and the future. The exhibition looks at the colonial origins of Tropical Modernism in British West Africa, and the survival of the style in the post-colonial period when it symbolised the independence and progressiveness of newly independent countries like India and Ghana,” he said.
Drew and Fry worked primarily in India and Ghana, as following independence Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah commissioned major new projects in this style. Tropical Modernism became a tool for nation-building and a symbol of their internationalism and progressiveness.
A new generation of national architects more sensitive to the local context gave birth to distinctive alternative modernisms and the exhibition seeks to spotlight these practitioners and the alternative modernisms they created.
Nehru’s declaration to build “temples of modern India” to unify and industrialise the country began with the construction of the city of Chandigarh as Independent India’s first large-scale modernist project in the 1950s. Drew and Fry famously enlisted Le Corbusier to design the city with young Indian architects such as Aditya Prakash and model makers Rattan Singh and Dhani Ram being recruited to acquire skills on the job.
“As we look to a new future in an era of climate change, might Tropical Modernism, which used the latest building and environmental science then available to passively cool buildings, serve as a useful guide,” questions Turner, the curator of the exhibition, which runs until September.
Through models, drawings, letters, photographs, film installations and archival ephemera documenting the key figures and moments of the Tropical Modernist movement, the aim is to highlight modernism’s wider role in narratives about decolonisation and the construction of national identity.
Looking into the future, the exhibition also raises the prospect of how the style’s basic principles of climate regulation through open facades facilitating cross-ventilation might find a place in today’s search for sustainable architectural solutions that fuse scientific approaches with local knowledge, culture and materials. (PTI)
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