“Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence,” Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2024

In 1946, four years after they married, British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry founded Fry, Drew and Partners, one of the most influential architectural firms of the 20th century. At its helm, the duo engineered and oversaw modernist architectural projects in Britain and its colonies, most of which were on the precipice of attaining independence. Within a decade, Fry, Drew and Partners were responsible for some of the most canonical examples of a style termed Tropical Modernism, seen in their buildings for the University of Ibadan in Nigeria (finished in 1949) and Mfantsipim School in Ghana (finished in 1958). This style – characterized by modular features and ornamental climate regulation designs that sought to integrate the built and natural environments – was later embraced by Ghana’s and India’s first prime ministers, Kwame Nkrumah and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Drew and Fry’s legacy and its wide-reaching significance form the starting point of “Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence,” an exhibition currently on view at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. In it, Tropical Modernism is defined as a colonial export, in which the UK government attempted to undermine rising anti-colonial sentiment through infrastructural investment. But as the exhibition argues, it was later co-opted by postcolonial governments in Ghana and India into a visual metalanguage of post­independence optimism. The exhibition treats this architectural transition from colonialism to independence as though it were nearly seamless, weaving a narrative that renders an accessible and engaging glimpse into how architecture in the era of decolonization concretized notions of citizenship and progress. It also underscores how specters of colonialism persisted amid the reverie of postindependence nationhood and, in some cases, came to shape its fate.

Curated by Christopher Turner, “Tropical Modernism” is divided into four main sections that build to a three-channel, 28-minute film focusing exclusively on Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy and architecture’s role in Ghanaian independence, which was first shown at last year’s Venice Archi­tecture Biennale. The film, directed by Turner, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, and Bushra Mohamed, considers how Nkrumah and Ghana’s first government sought to transform Tropical Modernism’s colonial legacy through the construction of buildings that were symbols both of national pride and of international, cosmopolitan, Pan-African affinities. The film forms the cornerstone of the exhibition: its echoes and soundtrack are heard throughout the space. As if to balance the film’s focus on Ghana, more of the exhibition’s physical material is focused on India – namely, the canonical example of Le Corbusier’s development of Chandigarh, presented alongside satellite examples of buildings by Indian architects who trained with Drew and Fry.

“Tropical Modernism” oscillates between the two national studies, but it does not put them in much dialogue. At several moments, it is unclear why exactly Ghana and India are paired together beyond the colonial actors who linked them, though there are gestures toward their connections after imperialism’s nominal end. India’s 1947 independence came a decade before Ghana’s, and tactics of civil disobedience helped inspire Nkrumah’s Positive Action campaign, which consisted of nonviolent protests, strikes, and anti-colonial civilian education. This connection was further strengthened through both countries’ founding roles in the Non-Aligned Movement, established in 1961. Non-Aligned nations sought to build power across the Third World by refusing to be strong-armed into the Cold War’s bipolar hegemonies, and Ghana’s government was particularly instrumental in fostering connections between this movement and Pan-Africanism.

In the exhibition, the case studies of ­Tropical Modernist buildings are fleshed out through sketches, planning notes, models, and ephemera revealing the interface of architecture, design, and mass communications. There are also archival photographs (including a particularly striking one of Nehru and Nkrumah in deep conversation at the British Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in 1960); pamphlets from the All-African People’s Conference; vintage copies of important texts, such as Nkrumah’s Consciencism (1964); and even postcards sent by Drew and Fry to each other and to family back in the United Kingdom.

The exhibition’s second and largest room, “Temples of Modern India,” homes in on ­Chandigarh, which was the first Modernist city in the world built from the ground up, intended to serve as the administrative capital of ­Punjab following the violence of Partition. Nehru sought out Drew and Fry, who in turn invoked Le Corbusier. Alongside models and sketches, the room includes fine photography and a painting by the modern artist Satish Gujral intended to feature in Le Corbusier’s new Government Museum. The 1952 work, Mourning En Masse, from Gujral’s Partition series, pays clear homage to his time spent apprenticing with Diego Rivera. A group of masked figures are cloaked in veils that cover their eyes; their mouths are contorted into grimaces; they grasp their heads in sorrow. Their collective suffering is visible through their common gestures, their bodies rendered almost serially. Nehru viewed the clean modularity of architectural modernism as a radical break with the past and its fraught associations with colonialism and mass death, and it is easy to see how Gujral’s emphasis on unity in collectivity meshes with the ethos underlying the entire planned city.

“Tropical Modernism” mentions that ­Nehru encouraged the enlisting of Indian architects – both within the nation and abroad – to foster indigenous talent. While some names are ­mentioned (such as Jeet Malhotra, A. R. ­Prabhawalkar, and B. P. Mathur), there is little mention of who exactly they were or what they achieved. This is emblematic of a broader problem within the exhibition: the question of labor is largely missing. Who constructed these buildings, and under what conditions? In one rare but memorable moment attempting an answer, Jane Drew is quoted in a wall text: “We found in India that it was cheaper to use 700 people to excavate rather than to employ a machine! Le Corbusier’s High Court and Secretariat were built with the aid of donkeys, men, women and children.”

In this sense, the racist, paternalist underpinnings to Tropical Modernism are clear. Aditya Prakash, a renowned Indian modernist architect who built Chandigarh’s Tagore Theatre (a hulking, cubed structure built with acoustic enhancement and clear viewing in mind) remembered Le Corbusier treating the Indian architects “like uninitiated children.” Fry’s ink sketches of him and Drew betray orientalist fantasies – flanked by camels and robust, turban-clad men; riding elephants under a blaring sun.

Despite the bias of the architects, it is only truly possible to appraise the success of buildings by engaging the people for whom they served. Architecture, after all, is never static; space is always co-constituted with the bodies of those who inhabit it. This is what Frantz Fanon reminded us in The Wretched of the Earth (1961): colonialism engendered a reorientation of space, and the colonizer molded the colony into “a world with no space,” segregated the architecture of the colony so that “the ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, ‘the others.’” [1] Decolonization was about not just building a new world but creating a new system of belonging.

“Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence,” Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2024

In the film on Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy and architecture’s role in Ghanaian independence, we get some sense of how everyday people engaged with the buildings. A group of schoolchildren sing in the airy auditorium of Mfantsipim School; scholars read in the brise-soleil-shaded rooms of the George Padmore Library (named for the Black American Pan-Africanist and Nkrumah’s dear friend). The film describes Nkrumah as “a good African but a very poor Ghanaian,” and it posits his downfall – a 1966 coup two years after his declaration of Ghana as a one-party state – as the beginning of the end of Tropical Modernism, which largely died out in the 1970s because of advances in air-conditioning technology. But other, less-accounted-for threads led to this decline, too: corruption, difficulties with funding state investment, and new forms of imperialism propagated through transnational systems that forced dependency. The exhibition pays insufficient attention to these points or to the economic base in which Tropical Modernist architecture came to fruition. Though it attempts to frame the style’s trajectory as one of postcolonial reappropriation, there is also little context given on India’s or Ghana’s drive for economic independence or on the funding required to implement grand architectural plans.

Perhaps that isn’t what the show was trying to do – it is about a particular aesthetic, one might argue. Yet all aesthetics have material stakes. Though the exhibition admits that Tropical Modernism was a colonial import, and the “tropics” a construction of the colonial imagination, it chooses to essentially rehash both anyway, and in a largely celebratory key. That might create a comprehensible viewing experience, but situating such disparate architectural visions horizontally, connected only through aesthetics, misguides viewers away from the material base of what reappropriation really is. “Tropical Modernism” joins a litany of recent exhibitions on “global modernisms,” many of which come to similar conclusions about lost utopias and moments of revolutionary optimism that ultimately failed. And it offers viewers a glimpse into important material, much of which is visually and aesthetically satisfying. But without meaningful meditation on either the aesthetic’s “reappropriation” or ultimate failure, it lets down work brimming with lessons for our future.

“Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence,” ­Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 2–September 22, 2024.

Nicole-Ann Lobo is a joint PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Image credits: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London