My childhood in Hong Kong was shaped by a particular style of building: market halls with brise-soleils sheltering us from the glare; housing-block stairwells with perforated blockwork letting in dappled light and breeze; classrooms accessed from open-air decks, with clerestory windows cross-ventilating the stale, sticky air.

In this sub-tropical ex-British colony, these features defined its mid-century municipal buildings. While the investment in public amenities has since been portrayed as ‘pacification’ to shore up consent for British rule, it also undeniably nurtured – in the wake of a ravaging Japanese occupation – the explosion of Hong Kong’s middle class. This included my parents, who were raised, schooled and housed in such postwar colonial architecture. I only later realised that it had a shared global lineage – and a name: tropical modernism.

Architects had opportunities in West Africa they would never have had in England

It was pioneered by the British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry who adapted modernism to some of these hotter climates. The Colonial Office’s substantial postwar investments allowed Drew and Fry to experiment with significant commissions in West Africa that defined their reputations, and propagated their approaches across the British Empire and beyond. This month, the V&A has launched an exhibition to re-evaluate their legacy in West Africa and India.

The show reflects a post-imperial push across the cultural scene. Last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, for example, was centred on ‘decolonisation and decarbonisation’ under the curation of Lesley Lokko, the Scottish-Ghanaian architectural educator and airport novelist who has been given an OBE and a RIBA Gold Medal for being a ‘fierce champion of equity and inclusion’. The Tropical Modernism exhibition is an expansion of the V&A’s display from that Biennale.

Unsurprisingly, the wall text highlights the ‘deeply ingrained preconceptions’ and ‘paternalistic approach’ of British administrators. A letter from Fry to Drew (partners in both practice and marriage) is on display, with charming sketches and tender exchanges about their West African projects and marital life. Next to it, Fry is called out for declaring: ‘The English have a grand job to do for the world. Never grander than at this time, even if it is the last and final grandeur’.

But unlike the pious yet perfunctory condemnations of imperial history by the likes of the National Trust and Tate Britain, the V&A’s reassessment of the Empire’s later architecture is creditably nuanced. The unearthing of an eclectic assortment of artefacts is clearly the outcome of a long, multi-institutional collaboration centred on proper research. It’s at times demanding to piece together, but it reflects the history’s complexity.

The library veranda of the University College Ibadan, built between 1949-60 and designed by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Credit: Riba

Instead of seeing Drew and Fry summarily charged for their complicity in colonialism, we are offered space to ruminate on how much agency architects have within their own briefs. The answer: in England not so much; in Africa a lot more. ‘They had opportunities in West Africa they would never have had in England,’ says Christopher Turner, the exhibition’s lead curator, suggesting expediency was the spur. ‘They had no rules and regulations, and very little oversight.’

Yet Turner also acknowledges that when they exercised this freedom, ‘their intentions were good. They thought they were helping West Africans prepare for independence, even if there was a Churchillian undertone of “not quite ready yet”.’ Their design of Nigeria’s first university, University College Ibadan, built 1949-1960, was, they believed, the best illustration of their theories. Photographs show a deft combination of shading and ventilation techniques to provide cool, comfortable interiors, as well as a careful composition of buildings and their facades. The university uses these structures to this day.

Tropical modernism’s dissemination was not just through publications, but also pedagogy. Architecture as a profession was a western construct. Thus the first and only architects in the newly independent nations were mostly privileged elites educated in Britain. The intentional repatriation of the profession back to Africa and India occurred with the construction of new national institutions that kick-started ‘living architecture schools’.

The Architectural Association (AA) in London – then the leading school in the Empire’s metropolis – had a central role: it established the Department for Tropical Architecture in 1954 after Nigerian student Adedokun Adeyemi complained about the unsuitability of the syllabus – which included calculating snow loads on roofs – for practising in West Africa. With Fry as its first director, the Department reoriented its curriculum around climate-responsive design for the tropics, training more than 600 students from 80 countries until its closure in 1971. Many of these students returned home for literal nation-building.

Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry with a model of one of their many buildings for the Gold Coast, 1945. Image: RIBA

The Department’s archive in Bloomsbury therefore holds the history of mid-century architectural production across multiple continents. Selections on display include students’ meticulous climate charts and calculations. This technocratic preoccupation with climate ‘solutions’ created what Ingrid Schroder – the current director of the AA and an editor of a book on African modernism – describes as tropical modernism’s ‘formal uniformity’. The idea of rooting architecture in local cultures fell by the wayside. The AA, which still educates a global student body, has since thankfully departed from the dogma of ‘finding universal answers’.

This is the main criticism of tropical modernism: that indigenous vernaculars were routinely disregarded or downplayed. But the exhibition’s greatest revelation is that, despite its colonial origins, tropical modernism survived national independence movements. For the same reasons that modernism was initially resisted in Britain (and sent architects to the colonies searching for more pliant testing grounds), its universality and discontinuity with traditions were ideal for an architecture charged with building new nations.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, valued its ahistoricity and abstraction. This secular, neutral aesthetic could unify a multi-ethnic, multi-religious India. Similarly, Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah, used it to project internationalist, progressive visions of Pan-Africanism and independence. Just look at the foreign-press-friendly parade ground, Black Star Square.

What filled the vacuum left by dispensing with tradition was the architect’s ego. The exhibition is dominated by tropical modernism’s apotheosis: Chandigarh, Punjab’s new planned capital commissioned by Nehru in 1950. A gargantuan model of the city underscores the megalomania of Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, recommended for the job by Drew and Fry. Here, it’s less about coloniser against colonised than architect against the people: his obsession with order sterilised the informal charisma of Indian street life, which Indian architects subsequently had to rehabilitate. Nearby are mosaic figurines from Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, an idiosyncratic sculpture park built secretly under the nose of Le Corbusier’s monumental Capitol Complex, embodying one man’s resistance against the architect’s heavy hand.

Tropical modernism’s ideals and ideologues have since departed: its death knell was air-conditioning technology, which allowed architects to defy the will of the climate (at least for a while). Yet its histories still reverberate today, with Ghana and India embarking on a fresh wave of nation-building. Ghana’s controversial new National Cathedral, spearheaded by President Nana Akufo-Addo, has employed British-educated Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, eclipsing the homegrown talent Nkrumah had wished to cultivate in his modernist University of Science and Technology. Meanwhile, Narendra Modi, in building a Hindu nationalist India, has already bulldozed through Nehru’s secular modernist legacy in Delhi, demolishing the space-age, pyramidic Hall of Nations designed by Raj Rewal. (Lutyens’s Delhi is also under threat.)

Tropical modernism survived as long as it did because it could bend to the winds of political change. But as it becomes an object for conservation, it also becomes a target. Emerging architects now call for their imperial pasts to be blown away, and this latest shift in the cultural weather might be one that tropical modernism will not survive. These young architects are clamouring for the freedom to leave their own stamp on the nation. Curator Christopher Turner recalls their pleas: ‘Conserve, yes. But where are our opportunities if we keep everything?’