ABSTRACT
What is tropical architecture? According to contemporary discourses, tropical architecture refers to buildings as diverse as bioclimatic skyscrapers, modernist “climate-responsive” buildings, vernacular houses, neo-vernacular resorts and colonial bungalows.1 Why is this wide array of different building types and design approaches situated in heterogeneous social, cultural, historical and political contexts subsumed under the label of tropical architecture? Is it because the designers of these buildings “start[ed] by looking at nature” to understand its ecosystems?2 Or that “[t]he point of departure for most tropical architecture is climate,” as some of the advocates and practitioners of tropical architecture claimed?3 If that is the case, these discourses are privileging the “natural” forces of the tropics – particularly ecology and climate – as the prime determinants of architectural form and space. By privileging tropical ecology and climate, these discourses are also appealing to the purportedly timeless and unchanging essence of designing in the tropics. According to some writers, this essence of designing in the tropics, evident in the vernacular “architecture without architects,” was purportedly grasped by both “modern masters” – Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, for example – and regionalist architects – such as Lina Bo Bardi, Minette de Silva, Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry, Otto Koenigsberger, Paul Rudolph, Richard Neutra, the Olgyay brothers, and Tay Kheng Soon – and transmitted between generations of architects.4 Yet, in doing this, aren’t these discourses wittingly or unwittingly glossing over the various historical and political forces that shaped these tropical architectures across different time-spaces, flattening them out and rendering them both ahistorical and apolitical?
