The major V&A exhibition, Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence opens this weekend from Saturday 2 March. Tropical Modernism was an architectural style developed in the hot, humid conditions of West Africa in the 1940s. Following independence, India and Ghana adopted the style as a symbol of modernity and progressiveness, distinct from colonial culture. The AA’s influential Department of Tropical Architecture formed in 1954 as part of this movement and began an outpost in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, a decade later.

AA Archive material from the AA Department of Tropical Architecture forms part of the V&A exhibition, including drawings, pamphlets and books, together with a large number of photographs which are featured in a film. A rare book from the AA Library is also exhibited; a 1964 edition of Tropical architecture in the dry and humid zones by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who originally gave the book to the AA Library.

In the late 1940s, British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry developed the tools of Tropical Modernism in West Africa, adapting a Modernist aesthetic that valued function over ornament to the hot, humid conditions of the region. Britain’s unique contribution to International Modernism was a colonial architecture, developed against the background of anti-colonial struggle.

This exhibition follows a five-year research partnership between the V&A and AA, which resulted in the 2024 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition, Tropical Modernism: Architecture and power in West Africa curated by Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed, who both teach at the school.

The exhibition Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence will run from 2 March 2024 – 22 September 2024. Tickets are available at vam.ac.uk

Image: The Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence exhibition. Image courtesy of the V&A Museum.