www.docomomo.site Open in urlscan Pro
185.200.102.166  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to the current issue Skip
to site footer
Open Menu


DOCOMOMO JOURNAL

Docomomo Journal
 * Current
 * Archives
 * About
   * About the Journal
   * Submissions
   * Privacy Statement

Search
 * Register
 * Login

No. 63 (2020)
Tropical Architecture in the Modern Diaspora
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterShare to LinkedInLinkedInShare
to EmailEmailShare to MoreAddThis

Getting back to the point of “Tropical architecture,” architecture in the humid
tropics is collaboration with nature to establish a new order in which human
beings may live in harmony with their surroundings. As publications at the time
concentrated on French and British colonies, to achieve a comprehensive
understanding of the Modern Movement diaspora, it is essential to revisit,
analyse, and document the important heritage built south of the Tropic of
Cancer, where the debate took place and architectonic models were reproduced,
and in many cases subjected to metamorphoses stemming from their antipodal
geography. Notable for the modernity of its social, urban, and architectonic
programs, and also its formally and technologically sustained research, the
modern architecture of these latitudes below the tropics constitutes a
distinctive heritage.

Editors: Ana Tostões

Keywords: Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Modern housing, Post-war
housing, Welfare architecture, Mass housing.

Published: 2021-12-25


EDITORIAL

 * Tropical Architecture, South of Cancer in the Modern Diaspora
   Ana Tostões
    * PDF
   
   Getting back to the point of “Tropical architecture,” architecture in the
   humid tropics is collaboration with nature to establish a new order in which
   human beings may live in harmony with their surroundings. As publications at
   the time concentrated on French and British colonies, to achieve a
   comprehensive understanding of the Modern Movement diaspora, it is essential
   to revisit, analyse, and document the important heritage built south of the
   Tropic of Cancer, where the debate took place and architectonic models were
   reproduced, and in many cases subjected to metamorphoses stemming from...


INTRODUCTION

 * South of Cancer: Modern Architecture’s Tropical Diasporas
   Pedro Guedes, Johannes Widodo
    * PDF
   
   Over twenty years ago in the shadows of an architectural conference in the
   USA several of us from outside the American/European axis left early, finding
   the mainstream presentations and discussions boring, predictable and stuck in
   the ruts of well-worn paths. We were aware that in the wider world genuinely
   new ideas were emerging with rich traditions at play, altogether less
   constrained by self-conscious architectural production. We were keen to find
   a name for these new approaches emerging across latitudes below the Tropic of
   Cancer and settled on “South of Cancer” as a suitable catch-all...


ESSAYS

 * Behind the Veils of Modern Tropical Architecture
   Pedro Guedes
    * PDF
   
   While orthodoxy was consolidating its hold on modern architecture in the
   1930s, fresh new ideas from the periphery began to widen and question its
   limiting vocabulary. This study looks at projects emerging before the end of
   that decade that paralleled the much publicized work of Le Corbusier and
   Brazilian innovators in developing ideas for taming the sun in warm climates.
   The story focuses on a forgotten speech given in Rangoon which enthused about
   a soon to be forgotten but effective method of solar control and triggered a
   yearning for architecture widening its scope to engage with...
 * Tropical Building Research: the Angolan Case
   Margarida Quintã
    * PDF
   
   This paper investigates how the notion of “tropical architecture” was
   established in Angola by looking at the local development of scientific
   knowledge on climate during the 20th century. It focuses on the processes
   that gave rise to a growing understanding of the geography and climate of the
   country, namely through the creation of local research institutes. Between
   the 1950s and the 1970s, increasingly more climatic data was collected in the
   country. This data was later combined with studies in building physics,
   giving rise to original research developed by the lea. Local institutions,...
 * Otto Königsberger and Global Architectural Histories
   Vandana Baweja
    * PDF
   
   Otto Königsberger was a German émigré architect who worked as the state
   architect in princely Mysore in British India in the 1940s. Upon emigration
   to London in 1951, he subsequently became an educator of Tropical
   Architecture (1954-1971) at the AA School of Architecture. This paper
   examines how Otto Königsberger’s career can illuminate “global” as a paradigm
   in Modernist historiography.
 * Monuments of Country, Climate and Culture: Michel Écochard and the Design of
   the Postcolonial Tropolis
   Tom Avermaete
    * PDF
   
   The French architect and urban designer Écochard, was one of the numerous
   architects that designed buildings and cities for newly independent nations
   in the post-war era of decolonization. Many of these young nation states were
   in search for urban and architectural projects that would explicitate a
   “proper” model of modernization that differed from that of the former
   colonizer. This essay argues that the principles of tropical architecture
   would play a key role in representing and monumentalizing such an alternative
   model of modernization.
 * “Our Cinderella North” – The Modern Diaspora’s long reach into Australia’s
   tropical zones
   Elizabeth Musgrave
    * PDF
   
   Modernism in tropical in Australia is testimony to the tenacity and optimism
   of individuals and communities in the vast, “empty north” of the continent,
   but also reflects a young nation’s strategic and commercial need to develop
   and make viable this region in the years following WWII. As practitioners,
   academics and public servants, the Modern Diaspora, introduced and promoted
   Modernism as a climate responsive solution to building in the tropics. The
   result is work that is inventive, frequently of modest material means and
   expressive of its tropical circumstances.
 * Alfred Preis and Viennese Modernism in Hawai‘i
   Laura Mcguire
    * PDF
   
   Preis, who was a Viennese émigré and refugee architect with no early
   experience designing for tropical climates, went on to become one of the most
   prolific mid-century regionalist and modernist Hawai‘i designers. Although he
   is best known for his award-winning design for the USS Arizona Memorial
   (1962) - one of the ships infamously sunk in the Japanese attack on Pearl
   Harbor, Pries’s earlier institutional and residential commissions are
   arguably his most compelling. His Viennese roots directly influenced Pries’s
   approach to design in Hawai‘i. By engaging numerous precedents from Vienna,
   he...
 * Tropical Modernity: A Hybrid-Construct in South China
   Rui Leão, Charles Lai
    * PDF
   
   Parallel to the discourse of Tropical Architecture and the work of UK
   architects in the British colonial territories in the Middle East, Africa,
   and India after the WWII, climate adaptation designs or devices such as
   brise-soleil, perforated cement bricks, sun shading screens, courtyards,
   etc., started to emerge in modernist buildings in Asia. This article is a
   preliminary survey of these cases in Hong Kong and Macau since the 1950s. It
   discusses how tropicality was used in response to the post-war revisionism of
   Modern Movement that placed emphasis on local identity and culture.
 * The Japanese Embassy in Mexico: a Fortunate Association, a Threatened
   Heritage
   Lourdes Cruz
    * PDF
   
   An examination of the architectural value of the Japanese Embassy in Mexico,
   designed by Kenzo Tange, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Manuel Rosen Morrison,
   which is in danger of being demolished. The context of mid-century Mexican
   architecture is addressed in order to situate this work within its historic
   moment, thus confirming its importance. This building was the result of an
   intellectual encounter between one Japanese and two Mexican architects, who
   exchanged ideas, concepts and criteria, resulting in a building with an
   innovative formal design, due to the use of reinforced concrete, and the...


DOCUMENTATION ISSUES

 * The Nature of Tropical Architecture in Indonesian Modernism
   Setiadi Sopandi
    * PDF
   
   The idea of environmental design – or loosely referred to as “tropical
   architecture” – is an ever-present but underlying discourse in modern
   Indonesian architectural history. Despite being tentative and, at times,
   overshadowed by other dominant issues, the quest for climate-related
   environmental tropical design is apparent in almost every generation of
   Indonesian architects.
 * Religious Tropical Architecture: the churches of Leandro V. Locsin in the
   Philippines
   Jean-Claude Girard
    * PDF
   
   The focus of this contribution is on the importance of tropical architecture
   in the work of Leandro V. Locsin, in the context of post-WWII in Asia. Based
   in the Philippines, Locsin is immersed in the Christian tradition – the main
   religion of a country that was dominated by the Spanish crown from the mid
   16th-century to 1898, and where the Catholic Church remains powerful across
   much of the archipelago today. Attention is focused on Locsin’s religious
   buildings and projects, where he succeeded in giving a new treatment to the
   tropical architecture of faith-based structures, through the...
 * Makkasan Train Factory: an attempt to preserve Bangkok’s urban heritage
   Pongkwan Lassus
    * PDF
   
   The Makkasan Train Factory, opened 110 years ago, is the first industrial
   estate in Thailand and used to be the biggest hub for train production in
   Southeast Asia. Nowadays, this huge land of 80 hectares, with direct access
   from the Savarnabhumi airport rail link, is considered a golden land right in
   the business center of Bangkok, that attracts real estate investors. A third
   of the land set aside at the end of last year for the development of a mixed
   use commercial project as a part of the High Speed Train project. As this
   land is the last big area of public land in the capital, civic...
 * Encounters with Southeast Asian Modernism
   Moritz Henning, Sally Below, Christian Hiller, Eduard Kögel
    * PDF
   
   Against the backdrop of the Bauhaus centenary in 2019, Encounters with
   Southeast Asian Modernism examined the history, significance, and future of
   postcolonial modernism in this region, with partners in four cities –
   Jakarta, Phnom Penh, Singapore, and Yangon. The project provided a historical
   perspective on the societal and political upheaval that accompanied the
   transition to independence after the colonial period in these countries. It
   also showcased current initiatives in the fields of art, architecture, and
   science that are committed to the preservation and use of Modernist
   buildings....


TRIBUTES

 * Towns are made from houses – Jean-Pierre Watel (1933-2016)
   Richard Klein
    * PDF
   
   Jean-Pierre Watel (1933-2016) has not been forgotten in the history of
   contemporary architecture. Gérard Monnier recounts the architect’s success in
   the 1960’s, his single-family houses and a domestic modernity largely linked
   to his design of North European-style houses: a central living room, an
   assumed horizontality and large sections of glass. His main constructions
   were mentioned or have featured in the professional magazines as well as in
   the more mainstream press - ensuring recognition from his peers and the
   aspirations of potential clients. The houses grouped together into new
   towns...


CURRENT ISSUE

 * 
 * 
 *