Village Housing in the Tropics
Village Housing in the Tropics

Author: Jane Drew

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1135018227

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Tropical Architecture, although now a highly contested and debated term, is the name given to European modern architecture that has been modified to suit the climatic and sometimes cultural context of hot countries. These hot countries were labelled ‘the tropics’ and were often European colonies, or countries that had recently won their independence. Fry & Drew’s book, written on the threshold of the end of the British Empire, was one of the first publications to offer practical advice to architects working in ‘the tropics’, based on the empirical studies they conducted whilst based in British West Africa during the Second World War. The book with its numerous illustrations, plans and easy to follow explanations became a key manual for all architects working in hot climates, and in particular those tasked with designing dwellings and small town plans. Although the Royal Engineers and Schools of Tropical Medicine had long been designing and campaigning for better planning, improved sanitation and had for example developed methods of cross-ventilation, this book became an instant hit. ‘Tropical Architecture’ suddenly bloomed into its own distinct canon, and by 1955 the Architectural Association had set up a course specialising in tropical architecture, led for a short time by Fry. Village Housing in the Tropics had a significant impact when it was written on a profession that had had little guidance on working in hot climates and on architecture students and universities who began to modify their courses to accommodate different conditions. Although from a post-colonial perspective many scholars now associate this architecture as being a continuation of the Imperial mission, this does not reduce the significance of the publication. Indeed, Tropical Architecture is regarded as being the forerunner to ‘green architecture’, developing passive low energy buildings that are tailored to suit their climate and built with local materials.

Learning Spaces in Africa
Learning Spaces in Africa

Author: Ola Uduku

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1317152107

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With a key UN Sustainable Development Goal for 2030 being to make basic education available to all the world’s children, Learning Spaces in Africa explores the architectural, socio-political and economic policy factors that have contributed to school design, the main spaces for education and learning in Africa. It traces the development of school building design, focusing on Western and Southern Africa, from its emergence in the 19th century to the present day. Uduku’s analysis draws attention to the past historic links of schools to development processes, from their early 19th century missionary origins to their re-emergence as development hubs in the 21st century. Learning Spaces in Africa uses this research as a basis to suggest fundamental changes to basic education, which respond to new technological advances, and constituencies in learning. Illustrated case studies describe the use of tablets in refugee community schools, "hole-in-the wall" learning and shared school-community learning spaces. This book will be beneficial for students, academics and those interested in the history of educational architecture and its effect on social development, particularly in Africa and with relevance to countries elsewhere in the emerging world.

Tropical Toolbox
Tropical Toolbox

Author: Jacopo Galli

Publisher: LetteraVentidue Edizioni

Published: 2022-03-24

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 886242728X

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Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew are two key figures of British architecture in the second half of the twentieth century, their most important work was the book Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones, a manual compiled from the experience acquired in Ghana and Nigeria between 1949 and 1960. The manual is the formalisation of a design method specific for tropical areas, the search for a renewed rooting of modern architecture, not based on formal research or the revival of folkloric themes, but on the close relationship between environmental support and anthropic intervention. The design method has its roots in African colonial history and was the result of a long process of adaptation of Western modernist ideas to the extreme climatic conditions of the African continent. A cosmopolitan localism based on the application of science in humanistic terms and capable of combining global and local dimensions was translated into an approach that respected the deep roots of tradition while providing innovation in terms of architectural solutions.

Village Housing in the Tropics
Village Housing in the Tropics

Author: Jane Drew

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1135018219

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Tropical Architecture, although now a highly contested and debated term, is the name given to European modern architecture that has been modified to suit the climatic and sometimes cultural context of hot countries. These hot countries were labelled ‘the tropics’ and were often European colonies, or countries that had recently won their independence. Fry & Drew’s book, written on the threshold of the end of the British Empire, was one of the first publications to offer practical advice to architects working in ‘the tropics’, based on the empirical studies they conducted whilst based in British West Africa during the Second World War. The book with its numerous illustrations, plans and easy to follow explanations became a key manual for all architects working in hot climates, and in particular those tasked with designing dwellings and small town plans. Although the Royal Engineers and Schools of Tropical Medicine had long been designing and campaigning for better planning, improved sanitation and had for example developed methods of cross-ventilation, this book became an instant hit. ‘Tropical Architecture’ suddenly bloomed into its own distinct canon, and by 1955 the Architectural Association had set up a course specialising in tropical architecture, led for a short time by Fry. Village Housing in the Tropics had a significant impact when it was written on a profession that had had little guidance on working in hot climates and on architecture students and universities who began to modify their courses to accommodate different conditions. Although from a post-colonial perspective many scholars now associate this architecture as being a continuation of the Imperial mission, this does not reduce the significance of the publication. Indeed, Tropical Architecture is regarded as being the forerunner to ‘green architecture’, developing passive low energy buildings that are tailored to suit their climate and built with local materials.

Climatology of West Africa
Climatology of West Africa

Author: Derek F. Hayward

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-28

Total Pages: 523

ISBN-13: 1000692698

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Originally published in 1987, this book brings together information previously buried in specialist sources and makes it available to the student in a non-technical and well-illustrated synthesis. It builds a clear and detailed picture of the climates of West Africa, describing and explaining them and showing how crucial this understanding is to everyday life. The climate’s relevance to water resources, agriculture, health and industry is systematically considered.

Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire
Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire

Author: G. A. Bremner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-10-13

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0191022322

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Throughout today's postcolonial world, buildings, monuments, parks, streets, avenues, entire cities even, remain as witness to Britain's once impressive if troubled imperial past. These structures are a conspicuous and near inescapable reminder of that past, and therefore, the built heritage of Britain's former colonial empire is a fundamental part of how we negotiate our postcolonial identities, often lying at the heart of social tension and debate over how that identity is best represented. This volume provides an overview of the architectural and urban transformations that took place across the British Empire between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Although much research has been carried out on architecture and urban planning in Britain's empire in recent decades, no single, comprehensive reference source exists. The essays compiled here remedy this deficiency. With its extensive chronological and regional coverage by leading scholars in the field, this volume will quickly become a seminal text for those who study, teach, and research the relationship between empire and the built environment in the British context. It provides an up-to-date account of past and current historiographical approaches toward the study of British imperial and colonial architecture and urbanism, and will prove equally useful to those who study architecture and urbanism in other European imperial and transnational contexts. The volume is divided in two main sections. The first section deals with overarching thematic issues, including building typologies, major genres and periods of activity, networks of expertise and the transmission of ideas, the intersection between planning and politics, as well as the architectural impact of empire on Britain itself. The second section builds on the first by discussing these themes in relation to specific geographical regions, teasing out the variations and continuities observable in context, both practical and theoretical.

Rethinking Global Modernism
Rethinking Global Modernism

Author: Vikramaditya Prakash

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1000471632

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This anthology collects developing scholarship that outlines a new decentred history of global modernism in architecture using postcolonial and other related theoretical frameworks. By both revisiting the canons of modernism and seeking to decolonize and globalize those canons, the volume explores what a genuinely "global" history of architectural modernism might begin to look like. Its chapters explore the historiography and weaknesses of modernism's normative interpretations and propose alternatives to them. The collection offers essays that interrogate transnationalism in new ways, reconsiders the agency of the subaltern and the roles played by infrastructures, materials, and global institutions in propagating a diversity of modernisms internationally. Issues such as colonial modernism, architectural pedagogy, cultural imperialism, and spirituality are engaged. With essays from both established scholars and up-and-coming researchers, this is an important reference for a new understanding of this crucial and developing topic.

Developing Iran
Developing Iran

Author: Hamidreza Mahboubi Soufiani

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-20

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1000987604

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This book examines the emergence of modern company towns in Iran by delineating the architectural, political, and industrial histories of three distinct resource-based ‘company town’ projects built in association with the ‘Big Three’ powers of World War II. The book’s narrative builds upon a tripartite research design that chronologically traces the formation and development of the oil, steel, and copper industries, respectively favoured by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States in this part of the world. By applying three sets of comparative studies, the book provides critical vantage points to three different ideological design paradigms: postcolonial regionalism, socialist universalism, and rationalist modern nation building. From a global political context, the book contributes to the disclosure of new information about the geopolitical confrontation of these three nations in the Global South to increase their sphere of influence after the Second World War. Furthermore, it demonstrates how postwar architectural modernism was adopted by each power and adapted to their ideological mind frame to fulfil distinct social, cultural, political, and economic targets. This book examines multiple interconnections between architecture, politics, and industrial development by adopting a transdisciplinary approach based on comprehensive fieldwork, site surveys, and the analysis of original multilingual documents. As such, it will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, history, international relations, and Middle Eastern studies.