30 Under 40: Architects Shaping the Tropical Future

# 30 Under 40: The New Generation Shaping Tropical Modernism *By TropMod Editorial* --- The history of Tropical Modernism is too often told as a closed chapter. Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. Niemeyer in Rio. Bawa at Lunuganga. These are the fixed stars in the constellation, and their brilliance is undisputed. But to fix the lens exclusively on the mid-century masters is to miss the most dynamic period in the style's history — the one unfolding right now. A generation born after 1985 is reshaping tropical architecture with a fluency that eluded their predecessors. They are digital natives who think in supply chains and embodied carbon. They deploy parametric tools and traditional brick bonds with equal authority. They have watched the glass tower consume the skylines of Lagos, Jakarta, and São Paulo, and they have come back with an architecture of timber screens, perforated laterite walls, floating roofs, and courtyards that breathe. They are not reviving Tropical Modernism. They are extending it into territories the mid-century generation never imagined. What follows is a survey of 30 architects under 40 — each born 1986 or later — whose work constitutes a plausible claim on the future of tropical practice. The selection is organised by geography, because climate is local and materials are local and the forces shaping a building in Salvador are not the same as those shaping one in Kigali or Ho Chi Minh City. But the common thread is unmistakable: an architecture that treats the tropics not as a problem to be mitigated but as a condition rich with possibility. --- ## Latin America Latin America's young practitioners inherit the most formidable modernist legacy on earth — Niemeyer, Reidy, Vilanova Artigas, Bo Bardi, Salmona, Barragán — and they carry it lightly. The best of them have absorbed the lessons of the Carioca and Paulista schools without becoming their prisoners, producing work that is at once tectonic and atmospheric, alert to both structural logic and sensory experience. --- ### 1. Danilo Terra (Brazil, b. 1987) — Terra e Tuma Arquitetos Associados, São Paulo Danilo Terra, together with Pedro Tuma and Fernanda Sakano, founded their São Paulo practice in 2009 while still at university. Their Matilde House (2015) in São Paulo's working-class Vila Matilde neighbourhood announced a rare combination of formal inventiveness and budgetary discipline: a narrow urban plot transformed into a luminous, vertically organised residence using exposed concrete block, steel mesh, and a planted courtyard that draws light into every level. Terra's work demonstrates that tropical modernism is not a luxury reserved for coastal weekend houses. It can operate — and must operate — at the scale of the everyday city. --- ### 2. Gabriela de Matos (Brazil, b. 1987) — Gabi de Matos Arquitetura, Salvador Gabriela de Matos has built a practice around the idea that Afro-Brazilian spatial traditions contain an overlooked archive of tropical intelligence. Her renovation of the Casa do Benin in Salvador's Pelourinho district combines contemporary gallery spaces with courtyard typologies and earth-based finishes derived from West African building traditions. De Matos was a co-curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, where she made the case for an architectural canon that includes terreiro spaces, Candomblé compounds, and quilombo settlements. Her built work translates that scholarly project into refined, climate-responsive architecture. --- ### 3. Loreta Castro Reguera (Mexico, b. 1988) — Taller Capital, Mexico City Loreta Castro Reguera, in partnership with José Pablo Ambrosi, directs Taller Capital, a practice that has become the leading voice in Mexican water urbanism. Their Represo de la Libertad (2022) in Tucson, Arizona, and the hydraulic park projects across Mexico City transform flood-control infrastructure into public amenity — retaining walls become amphitheatres, detention basins become playing fields. Castro's architecture treats water not as a threat to be expelled but as a resource to be choreographed, a position that becomes more urgent with every passing monsoon season in the tropical latitudes. --- ### 4. Ana Elvira Vélez (Colombia, b. 1987) — Oficina Informal, Medellín Ana Elvira Vélez co-founded Oficina Informal as a platform for what she calls *arquitectura de baja intensidad* — low-intensity architecture that favours incremental growth over heroic single gestures. Her Biblioteca Semillas (2023), a community library in Medellín's Comuna 13, uses rammed earth walls, a lightweight steel canopy, and passive ventilation shafts derived from traditional Antioquian coffee-drying structures. The library costs a fraction of municipal equivalents, runs without mechanical cooling, and has become a neighbourhood anchor. Vélez's work asks what happens when tropical modernism stops trying to be monumental. --- ### 5. Nicolás Campodonico (Argentina, b. 1986) — Nicolás Campodonico Arquitecto, Córdoba Argentina is not conventionally tropical, but its northern provinces — Misiones, Corrientes, Formosa — experience humid subtropical conditions that have generated a distinct regional architecture. Campodonico, born in Rosario and based in Córdoba, has spent a decade building in these territories. His Capilla San Bernardo (2015) at La Playosa replaced a rural chapel destroyed by a storm with a structure of recycled bricks and two massive inclined timber planes that frame the horizon and collect rainwater — a building that is at once archaic and utterly contemporary. His recent work in Misiones extends this language into the rainforest proper. --- ### 6. Catalina Patiño (Colombia, b. 1988) — Estación Terrena, Bogotá Patiño's practice operates at the threshold between building and landscape. Her Pabellón del Silencio (2022) in the Chocó rainforest — a remote pavilion for researchers studying amphibian populations — is constructed entirely from local *guadua* bamboo with a palm-thatch roof, raised on timber stilts above the forest floor. It is invisible from the river, self-ventilating, and designed to be dismantled leaving no trace. Patiño belongs to a generation of Colombian architects who have absorbed Rogelio Salmona's lessons about brick, water, and public space and redirected them toward ecological imperatives that Salmona never confronted. --- ## Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is the laboratory where Tropical Modernism's future is being tested most aggressively. Vietnam and Thailand, in particular, have produced a cohort of young architects building at extraordinary velocity in conditions of extreme urban density, and their work — inventive with humble materials, skilful with passive ventilation, and unafraid of formal daring — is redefining what tropical architecture can be. --- ### 7. Ngô Việt Khánh Duy (Vietnam, b. 1985) — 23o5Studio, Ho Chi Minh City Ngô Việt Khánh Duy founded 23o5Studio in 2016 and has since produced one of the most coherent bodies of domestic tropical work anywhere in Southeast Asia. His Longcave 2 (2019) and R07 House (2021) are studies in the vertical organisation of light, garden, and domestic life: narrow Ho Chi Minh City tube houses transformed by double-height voids, internal courtyards, and precisely positioned apertures that admit daylight while excluding the relentless equatorial heat. Duy's architecture pursues what he calls serenity, silence, and intimacy, and the results — rendered in exposed brick, raw concrete, and abundant planting — deliver all three qualities in buildings that rarely exceed 150 square metres. --- ### 8. Trần Ngô Chi Mai (Vietnam, b. 1991) — Limdim House Studio, Huế Mai founded Limdim House Studio in 2017 in Huế, the former imperial capital of central Vietnam, and her work draws deeply from the city's architectural traditions while refusing any hint of pastiche. Her Jalousie House (2020) and The Pi House (2022) deploy perforated timber screens, double-skin façades, and layered planting to create what Mai calls *the house that breathes*. Working at intimate scales — most projects are under 100 square metres — Mai has developed a language of domestic architecture that is simultaneously rooted in Hue's vernacular and legible to an international audience, earning her features in international publications and a growing following. --- ### 9. Patcharada Inplang (Thailand, b. 1990) — Sher Maker, Chiang Mai Inplang co-founded Sher Maker with Thongchai Chansamak in 2018, and the studio has rapidly become the most discussed young practice in northern Thailand. Their own Sher Maker Studio (2020) — built from reclaimed timber, corrugated sheet metal, and a parti of linked volumes under a continuous steel gable — established the aesthetic: artisanal, unhurried, materially direct. The Khiankhai Home and Studio (2021) and subsequent residential projects extend this logic into domestic work that treats craft process and material provenance as inseparable from architectural form. Inplang's Chiang Mai is not the air-conditioned hospitality monoculture of the Thai tourism industry; it is a city of makers, builders, and climate intelligence. --- ### 10. Realrich Sjarief (Indonesia, b. 1987) — RAW Architecture, Jakarta Sjarief established RAW Architecture after returning to Indonesia from Foster and Partners in London, bringing high-technical literacy into collision with the craft traditions of West Java. His Piyandeling Artisan Residence (2020) and Guha complex (ongoing) are constructed almost entirely from local bamboo, hand-pressed earth blocks, and locally fabricated steel. Each project functions as a living workshop: builders, apprentices, and craftspeople live and work on-site, producing what Sjarief calls *architectural literacy* — the transmission of building knowledge as a cultural project. Few architects anywhere are thinking as ambitiously about the relationship between construction craft and architectural form. --- ### 11. Melvin Keng (Singapore, b. 1989) — Kaizen Architecture, Singapore Keng founded Kaizen Architecture in 2018 with a brief to design houses that respond to Singapore's equatorial conditions — high humidity, year-round heat, monsoon rainfall — without resorting to sealed envelopes and round-the-clock air conditioning. His Stairway House (2022) and subsequent residential projects employ what Keng calls *thermal gradients*: layered spatial sequences that move from shaded outdoor courtyards through semi-conditioned transitional zones to fully cooled interiors, reducing overall mechanical load while vastly expanding the experiential range of the domestic interior. Keng was recognised in the URA's '20 Under 45' programme in 2026. --- ### 12. Abel Guang (Malaysia, b. 1990) — Domaine Architects, Kuala Lumpur Guang trained at the AA in London before returning to Kuala Lumpur, where he established Domaine Architects in 2018. His Courtyard House (2022) in Petaling Jaya reinterprets the traditional Malay *serambi* — the shaded transitional verandah — as a double-height garden court that organises the entire plan and provides passive cross-ventilation to every room. Guang's work represents a deliberate turn away from the increasingly generic glass-and-concrete residential typology that dominates Malaysian suburbia, toward an architecture that recovers the climatic intelligence embedded in the region's traditional building cultures. --- ## Africa Africa's young architects are building with materials and budgets that would seem impossibly constrained to their European counterparts, and the work that results is often more radical for it. The continent's tropical modernist heritage — Fry and Drew's university campuses, the independence-era buildings of Accra and Lagos — left a vocabulary of *brise-soleils*, breezeways, and deep overhangs. The best of the new generation have taken that vocabulary and fused it with computational design, community participation, and an urgent responsiveness to climate. --- ### 13. Sumayya Vally (South Africa, b. 1990) — Counterspace, Johannesburg Vally was 31 when she became the youngest architect ever commissioned for the Serpentine Pavilion (2021) in London, a commission that followed Zaha Hadid, Oscar Niemeyer, and Frank Gehry. Her Pavilion — a constellation of fragmented forms referencing gathering spaces from London's migrant communities — announced a practice that treats architecture as an act of cultural assembly. Based between Johannesburg and London, Counterspace has since delivered the Asiat-Darse pedestrian bridge in Brussels and is developing projects across Africa, the Gulf, and Europe. Vally's work insists that tropical modernism's most important legacy is not a formal vocabulary but a method: the adaptation of universal architectural language to particular cultural and climatic conditions. --- ### 14. Nickson Otieno (Kenya, b. 1988) — Niko Green, Nairobi Otieno is a registered architect and sustainability consultant whose Nairobi-based firm Niko Green has become the leading technical voice in East Africa's green building movement. His practice develops evidence-based decarbonisation roadmaps for the construction sector while delivering built projects that deploy passive ventilation, local stone, and earth-block construction to produce buildings that perform in Kenya's equatorial highland climate without mechanical cooling. Otieno's work on Kenya's Green Healthcare Guidelines — developing climate-responsive standards for hospital construction nationwide — extends tropical modernism's passive-design principles into policy at national scale. His approach treats sustainability not as a certification to be chased but as the irreducible baseline of competent tropical practice. --- ### 15. Tosin Oshinowo (Nigeria, b. 1987) — cmDesign Atelier, Lagos Oshinowo's practice navigates the full spectrum from high-end residential to humanitarian reconstruction. Her design for the Ngarannam community in Borno State, commissioned by the UN Development Programme, replaced a settlement destroyed by conflict with climate-responsive housing using locally produced stabilised earth blocks and metal sheet roofing with deep overhangs that recall the Fry and Drew buildings of 1950s West Africa — but updated, leaner, and built by the community itself. In Lagos, her residential projects adapt the principles of cross-ventilation and solar shading to the city's increasingly dense fabric. Oshinowo curated the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the first African woman to do so. --- ### 16. Kabage Karanja (Kenya, b. 1987) — Cave Bureau, Nairobi Karanja, together with Stella Mutegi, founded Cave Bureau in 2015 as an architectural research practice that excavates Kenyan building histories to generate contemporary form. Their Cow Corridor (2022) project maps the pre-colonial Maasai cattle routes that structured the landscape before Nairobi existed, proposing a network of civic spaces along these ancient paths. Their built work includes the entrance to the Nairobi Snake Park, a sinuous concrete grotto that channels visitors through a subterranean sequence while maintaining a naturally cooled interior. Karanja operates at the intersection of anthropology, ecology, and architecture — a position that generates buildings of unusual intellectual density. --- ### 17. Mphethi Morojele (South Africa, b. 1988) — MMA Design Studio, Johannesburg Morojele inherited a firm founded by his father but has steered it into entirely new territory. His University of the Free State residence halls (2022) in Bloemfontein deploy perforated brick screens — a contemporary reading of the *brise-soleil* — across long elevations, creating ventilated corridors that double as social spaces. His recent competition entry for the Pan-African Heritage Museum in Ghana proposes a building that is simultaneously landscape, monument, and climatic device: earth-bermed galleries, shaded walkways, and a roofscape that doubles as a public park. Morojele belongs to a generation of South African architects who see the country's built legacy not as a burden but as a foundation for transformation. --- ### 18. Nana Akua Oppong Birmeh (Ghana, b. 1986) — Arch Xenus, Accra Oppong Birmeh founded Arch Xenus in 2017 as one of the few female-led architecture practices in Ghana. Her Akwaaba House (2021) in Aburi deploys a double-roof system — a lightweight metal canopy suspended above a timber-trussed main roof — that creates a continuously ventilated attic cavity while protecting the living spaces from direct solar gain. The device is directly descended from the Fry and Drew tropical vocabulary but executed with a spatial generosity and material refinement that distinguishes Oppong Birmeh's work from mere historical quotation. Her current projects include a proposed reinterpretation of the traditional Ashanti compound house for contemporary urban sites. --- ## Caribbean and Central America The Caribbean has a rich but under-documented modernist tradition — the resort architecture of the 1950s, the civic buildings of the independence era — and a new generation is now producing work that engages seriously with climate vulnerability, hurricane resilience, and the region's layered cultural identity. --- ### 19. Alberto de Armas (Cuba, b. 1989) — de Armas Arquitectos, Havana De Armas operates within Cuba's extraordinary constraints — material scarcity, an embargo that complicates almost every supply chain — and has developed a practice organised around adaptive reuse. His renovation of the Fábrica de Arte Cubano (2016–ongoing) transformed a derelict cooking-oil factory into Havana's most dynamic cultural venue, preserving the industrial fabric while inserting new circulation, performance spaces, and passive ventilation devices. His residential work in Old Havana applies the same logic at domestic scale: tropical modernism stripped to its bones, achieved with whatever materials are available. --- ### 20. Ainsley Morris (Jamaica, b. 1988) — Studio Morris, Kingston Morris returned to Kingston after training at the Bartlett and working in London, founding Studio Morris in 2020. His MoBay Pavilion (2023) in Montego Bay is a coastal residence that treats the boundary between indoor and outdoor space as a gradient rather than a line: a sequence of shaded verandahs, louvred timber screens, and a floating roof that collects rainwater and channels it into a garden water feature. Morris has written extensively about the Jamaican verandah as a spatial type, arguing that its social significance — as a site of commerce, assembly, and community — is inseparable from its climatic function. --- ### 21. Gianni Botsford (Costa Rica, b. 1987) — Botsford Architects, San José/London Botsford operates a dual practice split between London and Costa Rica's Pacific coast, and it is in the latter context that his tropical modernism finds its fullest expression. His Casa Flotante (2022) in the Osa Peninsula is a timber-framed residence raised entirely on pilotis above the forest floor, its plan organised around a central courtyard that functions as a thermal chimney, drawing cooler air up from the shaded undercroft through the living spaces. The building's relationship to its site is so delicate that Botsford refers to it as a visitation rather than an occupation — a building designed to be lifted and removed with a single crane. --- ### 22. Lilliana Barahona (Panama, b. 1991) — Estudio Panamá, Panama City Barahona founded Estudio Panamá in 2019 after working with Tatiana Bilbao in Mexico City, and Bilbao's influence is visible in Barahona's preference for geometric clarity, local materials, and community engagement. Her Viviendas Sociales Panamá Norte (2023) is a prototype for low-cost tropical housing that uses concrete-block construction, deeply recessed windows, and cross-ventilated floor plans derived from the traditional Panamanian *casas de patio*. Barahona's work in Panama City's informal settlements operates at the frontline of climate adaptation — proving that tropical modernism can address not only the houses of the wealthy but the housing of the many. --- ## South Asia South Asia produced the richest individual practitioners of tropical modernism in the twentieth century — Bawa, Correa, Doshi, de Silva — and the question for the present generation is whether they can extend that legacy without being crushed by it. The answer, on present evidence, is yes. --- ### 23. Uvais Subu (India, b. 1989) — Tropical Architecture Bureau (TAB), Kerala Subu founded TAB with an explicit brief: to create a contemporary Indian practice that takes Geoffrey Bawa's synthesis of modernism and vernacular as a starting point rather than a destination. His TropiBox (2024) in Kochi is a compact urban residence that deploys a courtyard, a water garden, and layered planting to create a microclimate within the city — a building that is, in effect, a self-cooling machine. His Kerala residences are distributed across the state's malarial lowlands and monsoon-soaked hills, each calibrated to its specific microclimatic conditions while maintaining a consistent language of laterite walls, pitched timber roofs, and precisely framed landscape views. Subu was recognised as one of India's Top 50 Architects Under 40 in 2023. --- ### 24. Reny Lijo (India, b. 1986) — LIJO.RENY.architects, Thrissur Lijo and his partner Lijo Jos founded their Thrissur-based studio in 2005, and their slow, steady output has produced some of the most formally inventive tropical architecture in Kerala. The House That Rains Light (2020) and The Stoic Wall Residence (2024) are built around laterite stone, vaulted concrete roofs, and courtyard typologies that manage the extreme monsoon-season humidity while creating interiors of monastic calm. Their work has been featured internationally for its fusion of brutalist materiality with biophilic planting — a combination that sounds improbable but which, in their hands, produces buildings of genuine authority. --- ### 25. Palinda Kannangara (Sri Lanka, b. 1986) — Palinda Kannangara Architects, Colombo Kannangara worked with Geoffrey Bawa's firm before establishing his own practice, and the lineage is visible in his command of sequence, shadow, and the deliberate staging of views. His Frame House (2020) in Colombo is a study in the architectural section, with split levels, double-height voids, and apertures that work as a series of lenses, focusing attention on specific fragments of garden, sky, and water. Kannangara's work represents the most convincing continuation of Bawa's spatial logic by a Sri Lankan architect of the post-Bawa generation — which is to say, he has absorbed the master's lessons without becoming an imitator. --- ### 26. Saif Ul Haque (Bangladesh, b. 1986) — Saif Ul Haque Sthapati, Dhaka Bangladesh is among the most climate-vulnerable nations on earth, and Haque's practice has developed an architecture of amphibious resilience. His Arcadia Education Project (2017) in South Kanarchor is a school built on a floodplain that rises with the water — a bamboo and recycled-steel structure on floating drums that detaches from its moorings during the monsoon and settles back when the waters recede. His subsequent work extends these principles into residential and institutional typologies, developing an architecture that treats seasonal inundation not as a disaster but as a design parameter. In a warming world, Haque's work is less a regional curiosity than a global prototype. --- ## Pacific --- ### 27. Clare Cousins (Australia, b. 1986) — Clare Cousins Architects, Melbourne Cousins has built a practice in Melbourne that applies tropical principles — cross-ventilation, solar orientation, internal courtyards, thermal mass — to a subtropical city at the cool end of the tropical spectrum. Her Union House (2021) is a dense urban site transformed by a central garden court that functions as a climatic lung, drawing cooling breezes through the ground floor while flooding the interior with daylight. Cousins has been a consistent advocate for elevating Australian residential architecture beyond its addiction to oversized air-conditioned boxes, arguing for denser, greener, more passively conditioned housing in a country that will need every degree of cooling in the decades ahead. --- ### 28. Jade Kake (New Zealand, b. 1988) — Matakohe Architecture and Urbanism, Whangārei Kake's practice is grounded in the climatic and cultural conditions of Te Tai Tokerau — the subtropical north of Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work for Māori communities integrates mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge systems) with contemporary passive-design principles: orientation to prevailing winds, earth-sheltered volumes, timber rain screens that manage the region's intense humidity. Her Papakāinga (communal housing) projects apply these principles at settlement scale, producing housing that is at once culturally specific, climatically intelligent, and architecturally resolved. Kake represents a model of practice that European and American architects are only beginning to understand. --- ## US and Europe Working in the Tropics --- ### 29. Marielsa Castro (United States, b. 1988) — Studio Marielsa, Miami Castro has built her Miami practice around the proposition that South Florida is already tropical and that its architecture should behave accordingly. Her Coral House (2023) in Coconut Grove is a timber-framed residence that opens entirely to a planted courtyard, with a deep overhang that eliminates the need for mechanical shading and louvred panels that allow for variable degrees of enclosure and ventilation. Castro studied at the University of Miami before working in Singapore, where exposure to tropical Asian practice transformed her understanding of what Florida architecture could be. She has since become a leading voice in the movement to de-air-condition Miami. --- ### 30. Killian Doherty (Ireland, b. 1986) — Architectural Field Office, London/Kigali Doherty spent a decade in Rwanda working with MASS Design Group before establishing Architectural Field Office, which operates between London and East Africa. His work in Rwanda and Uganda applies European technical rigour to East African building economies — stabilised earth blocks, recycled materials, community construction — with results that have earned him a growing reputation. His proposed Kigali Artists' Residency (2024) is a cluster of earth-and-timber pavilions organised around a shared courtyard, each oriented to capture breezes from Lake Muhazi. Doherty's work reminds us that tropical modernism was always a hybrid of European expertise and local knowledge — and that the most interesting collaborations continue to emerge from that productive friction. --- ## Afterword The 30 architects profiled here share no single style, no manifesto, no allegiance to any particular school or lineage. What they share is a conviction that climate is not a constraint to be overcome but the starting condition of architecture — and that the tropics, far from being a zone of architectural disadvantage, are a zone of extraordinary architectural possibility. The mid-century generation invented the idea of a modern architecture adapted to the hot and humid zones. Their work was essential, but it was also limited — by the materials available to them, by the computational tools they lacked, by a political context that tied tropical modernism to the colonial state and the post-colonial developmental project. The present generation operates with far greater technical freedom and, one hopes, far greater political clarity. They understand that the most climate-responsive building on earth is worthless if it is inaccessible to the people who need it most. Tropical Modernism in 2026 is not a revival. It is a field in full flower, and these 30 figures represent its most vital emerging voices. The buildings they are producing — in brick, bamboo, laterite, and earth; under floating roofs and behind perforated screens; on floodplains and in dense urban quarters — are the best argument we have that architecture's future is not in sealed envelopes and mechanical conditioning but in the patient intelligence of buildings that work with their climate rather than against it. The mid-century masters gave us the foundation. The under-40 generation is building the house. --- *TropMod Editorial, 2026*