The notion of “tropical” as an adjective describes a region or climate’s characteristics. The tropical region covers a significant proportion of the globe, yet its architecture receives little outside comment or exposure. Dispersed worldwide, the region incorporates areas as far-flung as the Caribbean islands, India, Southeast Asia, and large parts of Australia, Africa and South and Central America. Despite their great cultural diversity, these areas share both climatic and ecological factors, a postcolonial condition and the pressures of modernisation in the world of globalisation. It is crucial to delve deeper into Asian tropicality to appreciate its cultural and regional nuances fully.
Romanticised Tropical Image
While environmental sustainability is about the science behind buildings, the dissemination of tropical architecture within the fraternity of architecture through books often portrays the physical character of tropical architecture as images of the romantic tropics. This portrayal emphasises a solid connection between outside and inside and draws links to tradition-based and culturally situated architecture. Understanding and respecting the cultural context of tropical architecture is crucial, as demonstrated in the book published in 2001 titled Tropical Architecture and Interiors: Tradition-based Design of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand by Tan Hock Beng. This emphasis on cultural context is also evident in other publications such as New Directions in Tropical Asian Architecture (Goad, Pieris & Bingham-Hall, 2005), Recent Malaysian Architecture (Goad & Ngiom, 2007), Tropical Style: Contemporary Dream Houses in Malaysia (Beal & Termansen, 2008), collection of contemporary houses in the New Malaysian House (Powell, 2008), Rethink – A New Paradigm for Malaysian Timber (Lee & Zainal, 2010), and design showcase of luxury Asian homes in The Sustainable Asian Houses (McGillick & Kawana, 2017) and Tropical Houses: Equatorial Living Redefined (Akmal, 2017).
(Critical) Regionalism
While regionalism has its roots in the writings of Bruno Stagno and earlier writings of Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, tropical architecture was reincarnated as various forms of regionalist architecture in Asia in the 1980s (Yeang, 1987; Tay, 1989; Powell & Tay, 1997). It was in Dhaka in 1985, in fact, a few years following the publications of Kenneth Frampton’s and Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s seminal essays on critical regionalism, that informed the Aga Khan Program on Islamic Architecture led by Asian architects such as Charles Correa, Balkrishna Doshi and others. Rather than fixed categories, the seminar participants argued in favour of regionalism as a practice that transforms along with societal changes and projects new formal organisations of the city.
This early critical response to regionalism at the Dhaka seminar reflects more recent scholarly efforts at opening up the discursive categories of regionalism to more accurately reflect what Lilian Chee and Jiat-Hwee Chang call the “material diversity and semantic density” of tropical architecture. These more recent critiques take up the challenge posed by the South Asian architects in the Dhaka seminar to a normative and generalisable idea of regionalism and extend the meaning of regionalism to include speculation through engagement with global thematics, local environmental processes, and urbanisation.
Of “Otherness”
The notion of tropical architecture is also situated within the discourse on postcolonial identity. Ironically, dossiers on tropical architecture are usually written with Western-centric views. The perception of tropics from the outside leads to the homogenisation of the idea of “tropical” architecture, by which Asian architecture continues to be framed within this otherness. Tropical was a concept that defined architecture as antithetical to the architecture of the temperate climate.
The term is also argued from the perspective of power relations, particularly those relating to accepting “other” foreign civilisations, either directly or indirectly. In the publication Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture, Chang & King (2011) argued that tropical architecture is based on power relations in the British colonial territories. He ended the book with a short reflection on the afterlives of tropical architecture after the early 1970s, focusing mainly on tropical architecture in the contemporary world. He argued that tropical architecture today carries historically sedimented meanings. Key themes and concepts, such as nature, technoscience, governmentality, and network, recur in diverse mutated forms.
Alternatives for Asian Tropicality
Chee and Chang (2011) have argued that topicality is oversimplified, purporting it as a concept “in motion” rather than a finite and stagnant concept. The meanings associated with tropicality are not a priori but grow from sets of bodily practices and situational contexts. Tropicality, in such terms, is a politicised approach as opposed to something natural. Rejecting the essentialization of the tropical built environment, they critiqued existing discourses of tropical architecture that have defined the field as unproblematically essentialist or nostalgic to local climate and tradition or alternately objectified its forms as exotic artefacts for passive consumption.
Giving a more hopeful stance, David Beynon (2017), in his writing on tropicality, modernity, and identity, pointed out a proliferation of the local cultures and forms much in the same manner as local languages that were previously restricted or prohibited in their use have gained popularity, repressed local forms and expressions legible in architecture are being remade at a variety of levels, from the national (e.g. Indonesian/Malaysian/) to the provincial (West Sumatra/Sarawak) to the local (Toba Batak/Karo/Iban).
So, what does all this mean? They reflect on how tropical architecture, in its documented or narrated formats, may operate as modes of criticism and transform how we understand tropicality. The complexity of Asian tropicality stems from objectifying its form as exotic artefacts, and at once, it is being conceived as a discursive concept and a cultural and political construct.
References:
Akmal, I. (2017). Tropical Houses: Equatorial Living Redefined. Indonesia: IMAJI Books.
Beal, G. & Termansen, J. (2008). Tropical Style: Contemporary Dream Houses in Malaysia. Hong Kong: Periplus Editions.
Beynon, D. (2017). Tropical Architecture in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Tropical, Modernity and Identity. Fabrications, Volume 27 (2), pp. 259-278.
BluPrint (ed.) (2017). Tropical Architecture for the 21st Century Volume 1.
Chang, J.-H., & King, A. D. (2011). Towards a genealogy of tropical architecture: Historical fragments of power-knowledge, built environment and climate in the British colonial territories. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Volume 32(3), pp. 283–300. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2011.00434.x
Lee, C. W. & Zainal, S. (2012) Rethink – A New Paradigm for Malaysian Timber. Malaysia: MPH Publishing/Malaysian Timber Council.
Goad, P. & Ngiom, L. (2007) Recent Malaysian Architecture. Singapore: Pesaro Publishing.
Chee, L. & Chang, J. H. (2011). Tropical-in-Motion: Situating Tropical Architecture. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Volume 32, pp. 277–282, 280.
Goad, P., Pieris, A. & Bingham-Hall, P. (2005). New Directions in Tropical Asian Architecture. Hong Kong: Periplus Editions.
McGillick, P. & Kawana, M. (2017). The Sustainable Asian House: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing.
Powell, R. (1985). Regionalism in Architecture. Singapore: Concept Media.
Powell, R. (2005). The Tropical Asian House. Bournemouth: Select Publishing.
Powell, R. (2008). The New Malaysian House. Hong Kong: Periplus Editions.
Powell R., &Tay K.S. (1997). Line, Edge & Shade: The Search for a Design Language in Tropical Asia. Singapore: Page One.
Stagno, B. (1999). An Architect in the Tropics. Asia Design Forum Publications.
Tan, H.B. (1994). Tropical Architecture and Interiors: Tradition-based Design of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand. Singapore: Page One Publication.
Tay, K.S. (1989). Mega-cities in the Tropics: Towards an Architectural Agenda for the Future. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Tzonis, A., Lefaivre, L. & Stagno, B. (2001) Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. New York: Wiley Academy.
Yeang, K. (1987). Tropical Urban Regionalism, Building In A SouthEast Asian City. Singapore: Concept Media Pte Ltd.
