TROPICAL TROPES

Tropical Modernism, an exhibition at the V&A, London, looks at the adoption of this architectural style in post-independence India and Ghana

- Charles Hind

This exhibition at the V&A, one of the few dealing with architecture held there in recent years, looks at Britain’s unique contribution to international modernism in the mid-20th century, not at home, but in Ghana and India, where projects were selected, as the exhibition’s principal curator Christopher Turner has written in the V&A Magazine, “that came to symbolise the utopian possibility of the transitional moment, a break with the colonial past articulated through art and architecture.” This should be part of a wider examination of how European modernism responded to tropical climates, as there is no mention of countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Ethiopia, which did not have a mid-20th century disengagement from colonialism, nor of countries that did, such as Malaysia and, most significantly, Sri Lanka. But that would have required a far larger exhibition.