Scott House, Accra, by Kenneth Scott The public reception of Tropical Modernism calls for a wider study of West African architecture, during colonial rule as well as afterTropical Modernism: Architecture and IndependenceVictoria & Albert Museum, London, 2 March 22 September 2024Catalogue edited by Christopher Turner, V&A Publishing, 2024Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West AfricaVenice Architecture Biennale20 May 26 November 2023The first building that comes into frame in the film that closes the Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is Elmina Castle. The building is one of 29 forts and castles constructed by European colonists in Ghana hundreds of years ago and currently classified as national monuments. These buildings on the coasts of Africa were brutality made manifest. Many of them were constructed and expanded following violent attacks on local populaces, the burning down of their homes and the destruction of their religious icons. Elmina Castle, for instance, was constructed in 1482 with stone quarried from a rock venerated as the home of the god of the Benya river. The thick walls were painted white to set them apart from the reddish brown of the nearby architecture. Above all, they were eerie portals through which millions of shackled Africans would be forcibly transported to unknown places and never to return to the lands of their birth.The presence of these forts and castles changed much about the lands upon which they sat and this included the architecture. By the relatively subtle influences of wealth and social status, the architecture of West African coastal elites began to adapt to European architecture, which was perceived as superior. As a 1798 report from the committee of the Privy Council of England described it, they began to erect their houses in a comfortable and convenient manner. These newly westerneducated elites strove to build with stone rather than the earthen materials that were traditional, albeit adapting the forms to their cultural needs, and these materials eventually became aspirational markers of status and modernity.The Tropical Modernism project by Nana BiamahOfosu, Bushra Mohamed and Christopher Turner, with iterations presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023, at the V&A in London and in a recently published catalogue, is the latest in a series of projects aimed at bringing stories of architectural modernism in Africa to popular audiences in the west. These stories tend to be about the work of European architects practising on the African continent, in part because the dominant archival records available to researchers are about this work. The Tropical Modernism exhibitions and catalogue address this imbalance through the inclusion of the thoughts and work of architects such as John Owusu Addo, one of the few named and surviving African modernists from this golden era. Still, the British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry loom large in the narrative, and the Ghanaian part of the Tropical Modernism project the V&A exhibition and catalogue focus on both Ghana and India is framed around their prolific careers.An illustration by Gordon Cullen that accompanied the article African Experiment in AR May 1953, in which multiple projects by British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in West Africa were publishedCredit:Courtesy RIBA Collections / Gordon Cullen EstateThe long overdue public recognition of African and Africandescended modernists follows from a small but critical collection of academic scholarship which complicates and counters the standard Eurocentric narrative. Through work conducted by researchers including Ola Uduku, Hannah Le Roux, ukasz Stanek and Iain Jackson, practitioners such as John Owusu Addo, Max Bond, Theodore Clerk, Victor Adegbite, Alex Ekwueme and Frank Mbanefo have been introduced to the canon. Nonetheless, much more remains to be done, especially to bridge the gaps between nuanced academic work and that which makes its way into the popular discourse. The public reception of the V&A exhibition demonstrates that there is space for and interest in such stories.By the time Drew and Fry arrived in Accra in the early 1940s, building in earthen materials was marginalised. In discussing the early part of their practice in the then Gold Coast in the exhibition catalogue, Turner writes that the pair had prepared large, coloured relief plans to show their ideas to reform Accra but discovered that the Africans wanted concrete houses, like the Europeans, which used an expensive imported material, rather than the rammed earth ones proposed. That the Africans wanted concrete houses is not surprising knowing the history of architectural domination in the era of the construction of the European forts and castles, and their eventual association with status. Also captured on screen in the film on show at the V&A is the neoclassical building of the Supreme Court in Accra, built in 1929, as the official website proudly states, in solid concrete from its foundations to the third floor.The neoclassical Supreme Court in Accra, inaugurated by the colonial British administration in 1929, is made out of concreteCredit:Rob Atherton / AlamyYet this was not the only force that pushed cementitious materials to the forefront of desirable construction to the detriment of other materials. Towards the end of the 19th century, the British colonial government set out to gain more control over urban environments in the Gold Coast through the institution of the Towns Act and Town Councils. Fiercely resisted by Africans at first, as most things with colonial rule went, the regulations and bureaucracies eventually became established parts of life. Under them, building permits became a requirement for new construction and extensions, and the processes reinforced the imposition and influence of European building materials and styles. Building permit applications submitted to the Accra Town Council from the 1900s to 1920s would sometimes feature marginalia from clerks and other officials noting some key conditions for approving applications. Some of these were around setbacks, water tanks and roof gutters. Others were around materials a common refrain was that houses should be constructed with stone or brick (rather than swish, which was a catchall term used for all the earthen construction techniques), roofed with iron sheets, plastered and white or colour washed. The bureaucratic insistence, under British colonial rule, on building with stone and brick, plastering and painting, required the use of cement.This cement, along with other legally mandated building materials, was exported to the Gold Coast from Britain. As building permit regulations expanded and became more entrenched, the amount of cement and building material exports to the colony increased. In this there is evidence for direct economic benefit to Britain from changing rules and tastes around architecture in the Gold Coast. And along with requirements for new materials for Gold Coasters came the need for new construction technologies and different expertise in architecture and construction, contributing to what I describe as unformalisation the destruction and diminishing of Indigenous architecture and architects by the colonial state.These processes of unformalisation throw more light on the common assumption about the absence of Africans from the architecture profession in the region. It is stated in the catalogue that, as there were no formally qualified West African architects then available, Fry and Drew (from the mid 1940s) began to train a small African staff of six. But to accept that there were no formally qualified West African architects at the time requires a deliberately narrow definition of who counted as an architect and what counted as formal qualifications. Even using European standards, there were westerntrained professionals who had been practising architecture in the Gold Coast for decades. Some of these include C Annan Vanderpuye, the architect of the Adorso House Hotel in Accra; Charles Arthur Albert Barnes, the architect of the Anglican Trinity Cathedral, also in Accra; and Ebenezer Sackey, who the surveyor and biographer Charles Francis Hutchison credits for the building of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Cape Coast. The recent focus on modernism in Africa, welcome as it is, has also contributed to the sidelining of these architects and their work. It inadvertently reinforces widespread assumptions that there were no African architects and hardly any African architecture of note in the region before the modernists arrived.Black Star Square in Accra, completed in 1961, was designed by Victor Adegbite to celebrate Ghanas independenceCredit:Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonThe triumphs of mid20thcentury decolonisation across West Africa touched the built environment in uneven ways. On the one hand, there was a construction boom as part of nationbuilding projects, but on the other hand there was arguably not much anti or decoloniality in those buildings beyond the occasional presence of African architects such as Owusu Addo, Adegbite and Clerk, who strove to infuse their cultural knowledge into the projects they were involved in. On a material level, construction materials continued to be imported, sometimes from former colonising countries. With few ostensibly formally qualified building professionals in newly independent countries, expertise was sometimes imported as well.This dominance of Eurocentric approaches to architecture and construction and the (hi)stories told about it continues to this day, despite much recent work around dismantling the colonial foundations. Thus, unsurprisingly, about 80 years after Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry stated that the Africans to whom they presented their initial design proposals did not want to live in earthen houses, the architect Dibdo Francis Kr, reflecting on his work in Burkina Faso, writes that Africans have resorted to ways of building that were introduced to our continent when it was colonised. Concrete is viewed as modern, and clay dismissed as the poor mans material.Lead image: Scott House by tropical modernist architect Kenneth Scott. Scott was also the architect of a residence for president Kwame Nkrumah in AksomboCredit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London2024-10-30Reuben J BrownShare AR October 2024Buy Now