Introduction -‘Tropicality-in-motion’: Situating tropical architecture (original) (raw)

2011, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

One of the most fascinating aspects of tropical architecture is its material diversity and semantic density, that is, the different forms of built environment labelled as 'tropical' and the meanings these spaces potentially carry. The current diversity and density of tropical architecture contrasts with what it was during its 'founding moment'. Tropical architecture was institutionalized in the mid-twentieth century with the establishment of educational and research units such as the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association in London and the Tropical Building Division at the Building Research Station in Garston, UK, the publication of key texts such as Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew's (1964) Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones, and the completion of built exemplars in places such as Chandigarh and Ibadan (Wakely, 1983; Le Roux, 2003; Chang, 2010a). At its inception, tropical architecture was conceived as a 'dialect' of the so-called international style modern architecture adapted to the tropical climate, or what Fry (1959: 8) regarded as the 'determining factor of architecture', by incorporating 'passive cooling' strategies of cross-ventilation and sun-shading to ensure comfort and by specifying construction material that would resist fungal growth and corrosion caused by humidity (see also Atkinson, 1950; Koenigsberger et al., 1974). In other words, tropical architecture was, in the mid-twentieth century, primarily constructed as a technical discourse by its metropolitan protagonists such as Fry and Drew, Otto Koenigsberger and George Atkinson. From the late 1970s onwards, the discourse and practice of tropical architecture began to lose its relevance due to the onslaught of various social, cultural and economic factors. Chief amongst these was the widespread availability of cheap energy and the increasing reliance on mechanical airconditioning to achieve thermal comfort (Cox, 2010). However, as energy profligate cooling displaced low energy modes of 'passive cooling', tropical architecture was reincarnated as various forms of regionalist architecture in the 1980s (Yeang, 1987; Tay, 1989; Powell & Tay, 1997). Its discourse was rearticulated as a sociocultural one that responded to the purported homogenization brought about by globalization on the one hand, and neocolonial western cultural hegemony on the other (Kusno, 2000: 190-204; Tzonis et al., 2001; Chang, 2010b). This rearticulation was accompanied by a proliferation in tropical architecture's manifold forms, many of which no longer derived from the international style. While the climatic responsive passive cooling strategies of tropical architecture have been imbued with sociocultural significance in recent discourse, tropical architecture itself was ultimately reduced to a hotchpotch of formulaic architectural aesthetics. Thus, in the wake of tropical architecture's diverse formats, architects and critics have sought to uncover its essence by debating what tropical architecture ought to be, more specifically, which architectural aesthetics had to be embraced (e.g. Chan, 2001; Tay, 2001). Not unlike the mid-twentieth century technical discourse of tropical architecture that played down the politics of decolonization which shaped its production (