The V&A's Tropical Modernism Exhibition: London's Big Story

# The V&A's Tropical Modernism Exhibition: London's Big Story *By TropMod Editorial* --- The Victoria and Albert Museum's "Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence" — which ran from 2 March to 22 September 2024 at the V&A South Kensington — was the most significant architectural exhibition in London in years, and arguably the most politically intelligent treatment of Modernism the museum has ever mounted. It reframed a century of building across the Global South not as a footnote to the European story but as a central chapter in its own right. The exhibition has now closed, but its arguments continue to resonate through architectural education, practice, and criticism. ## What the Exhibition Covered "Tropical Modernism" was structured in three movements. The first examined the colonial origins of the style in British West Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, whose work in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Nigeria established the prototype for what would become known as tropical architecture. Drawings, photographs, and correspondence from the period revealed the oddly intimate collaboration between architectural Modernism and colonial administration. Fry and Drew's schools, housing, and university buildings were simultaneously progressive in their climate response and conservative in their political function. The second section moved to India, examining the extraordinary project of Chandigarh — the new capital commissioned by Nehru, planned by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, with significant contributions from Fry, Drew, and an emerging generation of Indian architects. Models, drawings, and period photography showed the evolution of Le Corbusier's design language as it encountered Indian climate and culture: the deepening of sun-shading devices, the introduction of water as both aesthetic and cooling element, the negotiation between European monumentality and South Asian light. The third section — and this was the exhibition's real contribution — traced the post-independence transformation of tropical Modernism by architects from the newly independent nations. Here were the Ghanaians: John Owusu Addo, the first Ghanaian architect to head the Department of Architecture at KNUST in Kumasi; and the generation that followed. Here too were the Indians: Charles Correa, Balkrishna Doshi, Raj Rewal, all of whom took the modernist vocabulary and reshaped it around climate, craft, and cosmic geometry. The exhibition made clear that tropical Modernism did not end with independence. It began there. ## The Curatorial Approach The exhibition was curated by **Christopher Turner**, the V&A's Keeper of Art, Architecture, Photography and Design, and **Justine Sambrook**, an architectural historian and curator. It was developed in collaboration with the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture and grew from a smaller presentation at the Biennale's Ghanaian Pavilion. The curatorial stance was explicitly revisionist. Turner and Sambrook did not present tropical Modernism as a happy synthesis of European form and tropical climate. They foregrounded the uncomfortable questions: Was this architecture a tool of colonialism or a weapon against it? Did the use of local labour and materials constitute collaboration or exploitation? Could buildings designed by British architects for British administrators ever truly belong to the African nations that inherited them? The exhibition did not answer these questions definitively, and that was its strength. It presented evidence from multiple perspectives — colonial administrators' memoranda alongside Ghanaian architects' manifestos, Fry's optimistic letters alongside critical assessments from post-colonial scholars — and let the tensions remain visible. A vitrine containing Fry and Drew's *Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone* sat adjacent to a display of Kwame Nkrumah's speeches about architecture and national identity. The juxtaposition was eloquent without being polemical. The V&A Design Studio's exhibition architecture was itself a subtle argument. The first room was framed by a full-scale *brise-soleil* — the emblematic device of tropical Modernism — rendered in timber rather than concrete. It functioned simultaneously as display, wayfinding, and demonstration. Visitors walked through shade. Subsequent rooms used colour, material, and spatial compression and release to evoke the experience of moving through different climatic zones. This was exhibition design that embodied its subject rather than merely containing it. ## Key Works Featured The exhibition drew heavily on the V&A's architectural archives, supplemented by loans from the RIBA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and private collections. Among the most striking exhibits: **Chandigarh models and drawings.** The exhibition included original drawings by Le Corbusier and Jeanneret for the Capitol Complex, alongside Jeanneret's furniture designs — those elegant, understated *chandigarh* chairs in teak and cane that have become design-world fetishes. The models showed the High Court's layered facade, the Secretariat's rhythmic brise-soleil, the Assembly's hyperbolic cooling tower. These were displayed alongside photographs by **Lucien Hervé**, whose images of Chandigarh under construction defined the visual language through which the project was understood internationally. **Accra and Kumasi.** Drawings and period photographs of Fry and Drew's Ghanaian projects — the Mfantsipim School, the Opoku Ware School in Kumasi, the University of Ghana — showed buildings that were both competent and compromised. The formal language was unmistakably modernist: flat roofs, pilotis, ribbon windows. But the climate-control devices — deep verandahs, adjustable louvres, perforated screens — were additive rather than integral, bolted onto a temperate-zone aesthetic rather than reshaping it from within. **The independent generation.** The exhibition's most powerful material covered the post-independence architects. Correa's hand-drawn sketches for the Kanchanjunga Apartments showed a mind working through the problem of creating a vertical bungalow. Doshi's exquisite model of Sangath — those porcelain vaults emerging from the Ahmedabad earth — was one of the most beautiful objects in the show. These were not the works of Europeans adapting to the tropics. They were the works of architects for whom the tropics were home. ## Critical Reception Reviews were broadly positive, with some important reservations. *The Guardian* called it "a complex story of power, freedom, and concrete" and praised the exhibition's refusal of easy conclusions. *The Financial Times* described it as "a celebration of British Modernism developed for a late-imperial purpose," noting the strangeness of that project. *The New York Times* observed that the exhibition "charts how in newly independent countries, the style became a political as well as aesthetic statement." *The Architects' Journal* noted the elegance of the exhibition design while questioning whether the African section was sufficiently developed: "The Ghana story feels truncated. Where are the buildings of the 1970s and 1980s?" The most sustained critique came from scholars of African architecture, who noted that the exhibition — despite its revisionist intentions — still centred the British narrative. Fry and Drew occupied the first room. The Ghanaians appeared in the third. The implication, however unintentional, was that tropical Modernism began with the colonisers and was subsequently adopted by the colonised. Several critics argued that the exhibition could have opened with pre-colonial African building traditions and treated them as the true origin point, rather than positioning European modernism as the primary source. ## Why the Exhibition Matters The significance of "Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence" extends well beyond its four-month run. It represents a permanent shift in how architectural institutions treat the global history of Modernism. First, it established that Modernism is not a European invention that was exported to the colonies. The most sophisticated modernist buildings in the tropics were produced by architects who were born there, trained there, and worked there throughout their careers. The exhibition's inclusion of figures like Owusu Addo, Nwoko, and the Indian regionalists corrected a historiographical imbalance that had largely written them out of the international narrative. Second, it connected architectural form to political context in a manner that major museums rarely attempt. The link between Modernism and post-colonial nation-building is not incidental; it is constitutive. One cannot understand Chandigarh without understanding Nehru's vision of India, nor appreciate the Ghanaian commitment to modernist education buildings without understanding Nkrumah's Pan-African project. Architecture, the exhibition argued, is never merely about buildings. Third, it inserted climate into the centre of the architectural conversation in a way that feels increasingly urgent. The shading devices, ventilation strategies, and passive cooling techniques that the exhibition documented are not historical curiosities. They are templates for a low-carbon architecture that the world desperately needs to recover. In this sense, "Tropical Modernism" was not a history exhibition but a futures exhibition disguised as history. The V&A published an accompanying book, *Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence* (2024), edited by Turner, which extends the exhibition's arguments with scholarly essays and an expanded selection of images. It is an essential reference. The exhibition's ultimate legacy may be that it made a certain kind of architectural conversation possible in London — one that treats the buildings of Accra, Chandigarh, and Lagos with the same seriousness that the RIBA has traditionally reserved for the buildings of London, Paris, and New York. That is not a small achievement. It is, in its quiet way, a kind of decolonisation. --- *This article will appear in TropMod Quarterly, Issue 01, Spring 2026.*