The Promise of the Past

Built Environment: On the occasion of the ‘Tropical Modernism’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Derin Fadina examines the architectural movement’s exclusionary narratives

- Derin Fadina

THE MODERNIST MOVEMENT that swept through Europe and North America, dominating architectural design for most of the 20th century, eventually made its way to the Global South. Formally adapted to suit the hot and humid climate of these regions, tropical modernism emerged as a term in the 1950s to define and unify buildings designed by European architects working in these non-Western sites. The leading practitioners of the movement were British architects Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who designed buildings throughout the so-called tropics of South Asia and West Africa.

Given that these projects were variously commissioned, procured and funded along colonial networks, it is difficult to divorce them from notions of coloniality, even as they were built in post- independence nations. Underpinning them is a form of soft power – an exertion of influence on people’s cultural, rather than political, lives – described by sociologist John Tomlinson in Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (1991) as ‘the exercise of domination in cultural relationships in which the values, practices and meanings of a powerful foreign culture are imposed upon one or more native cultures’.