Tropical Modernism
Following on from their introduction to Modernism last term, members of the Year 10 Athenaeum recently explored a particular feature of that movement – Tropical Modernism. Inspired by the recent exhibition on this theme at the V&A museum, French and German teacher Ms Keim delivered a presentation about it to these students.
The Tropical Modernism movement illustrates the danger of locating Modernism too narrowly either geographically in Europe and America or chronologically in the 1920s and 30s. Modernist ideas were exported to Ghana in the 1940s by British architects who showed little regard for or recognition of existing practices in the field of architecture. They adopted a colonialist approach to their export of modernist European designs to Ghana. These modernist ideas in architecture centred on the notion of form following function and so great emphasis was placed on the amount of light and air in buildings and how temperature was regulated in hot climates. Designs incorporated stylised versions of some indigenous motifs. The British architects called this new modernist style “Tropical Modernism”.
Ghana achieved independence in 1957, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to do so, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. What would be the response to the Modernist architecture that existed, a visible monument to colonial domination? Interestingly there was not a wholesale abandonment of the style. Nkrumah saw in “Tropical Modernism” a unique architectural style Ghana could use for nation-building, and local architects continued to design buildings following the principles of form following function and featuring motifs of indigenous design.
The presentation added a great deal to the students’ understanding of modernism and much beyond.
