• 1 “A Tropic City: Townsville, North Queensland,” Illustrated Sydney News, 20 February 1898, p. 21.
• 2 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, D (...)
• 3 Hannah le Roux, “Comfort, Violence, Care: Decolonising Tropical Architecture at Blida, 1956,” ABE (...)

1There had long been architecture in the tropics, and then there was “tropical architecture.” As a conjuncture of modern architecture or international style and late-colonial developmentalism, formal tropical architecture flourished after World War II in West Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. The obvious, though usually neglected, antecedents could be found in the settler colonial tropics, especially in northern Australia and parts of Latin America. “The matter of tropical architecture has always been a subject of discussion in North Queensland,” observed an Australian reporter in 1898.1 The goal then was to aid those deemed “white” in efforts to acclimatize to the supposedly depleting tropical environment. Through stipulation of diet, clothing, physical activity, and housing, whites might achieve comfort in a place allegedly deleterious to their race.2 In late-colonial developmental projects, mostly after World War II, these racialized medical schemes for ensuring thermal comfort and labor productivity, predicated on disciplining white bodies and social relations, were further extended to reform the “colored” colonized too. Thus, while the new tropical architecture could be envisaged as a strategy associated with formal decolonization, it was also, like other development programs, a means of disciplining and managing subject populations, mobilizing and inserting them into the lower levels of global capitalism. Making people comfortable in the tropics, as Hannah le Roux and others have argued, was closely allied with making tropical populations submissive and productive.3

• 4 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and Harry L. Ford, Village Housing in the Tropics: With Special Reference t (...)
• 5 Arthur M. Foyle (ed.), Conference on Tropical Architecture: A Report of the Proceedings of the Con (...)
• 6 Ola Uduku, “Modernist Architecture and ‘the Tropical’ in West Africa: The Tropical Architecture Mo (...)

2The colonial history of modern tropical architecture is now well recognized. The origin story is conventional, even hackneyed. Fresh from military service in Ghana in 1945, young English architect Maxwell Fry, together with architect Jane Drew, abandoned neo-classical style for modernism, which better expressed zeal for social reform and progress. Based in London, their practice initially focused on British government commissions in West Africa. In Village Housing in the Tropics (1947), and later in Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (1956), they sought to acclimatize new construction technologies, functionalism, and minimalism to the late-colonial tropics, planting delicate seedlings such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius in the torrid zone.4 Modern tropical architecture was inaugurated as a movement at a conference at University College, London, in 1953 and institutionalized as the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architecture Association, London, in 1954.5 Critics have noted the connections of this new tropical architecture with the developmental mentality that emerged toward the end of the British Empire, and with strategies to mollify and disarm independence movements.6 Fry and Drew, along with their associates, emphasized attaining a level of thermal comfort through passive cooling, designing buildings that maximized shade and ventilation. In stressing the importance of a universalized concept of comfort, they attempted to disavow older racial connotations of the idea, with its lingering tinges of whiteness. However, they never quite managed to repudiate them entirely. The white colonial past of tropical architecture would continue to haunt their buildings.

• 7 Thomas Griffith Taylor, “The Distribution of Future White Settlement: A World Survey Based on Phys (...)
• 8 Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: Oxfo (...)
• 9 J.W. Gregory, The Menace of Colour: A Study of the Difficulties due to the Association of White an (...)
• 10 Raphael W. Cilento, The White Man in the Tropics, with Especial Reference to Australia and its Dep (...)
• 11 See Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the P (...)

3The whiteness of earlier tropical architecture had been most vivid in settler colonies such as northern Australia. In the 1920s, geographer T. Griffith Taylor drew racial “climographs” that indicted tropical Australia, a site of increasing white settlement, especially along the Queensland coast, as an insalubrious place where pure Europeans, women particularly, would feel “discomfort” and fatigue, leading inevitably to degeneration.7 Taylor endorsed fellow geographer Ellsworth Huntington’s contention that it was impossible to sustain white racial energy and initiative in the depleting, unstimulating tropics—such climatic discomfort led always to a race’s enfeeblement and hastened the drift from civilization into barbarism.8 Climatic decline in white vitality would appear to represent therefore a physiological and mental challenge to the settler colonial goal of a purely white Australian nation. But other experts on the coalescence of climate and civilization were more sanguine. Thus, geologist J.W. Gregory believed that improvements in architecture meant there would be “no physiological reason why the white man should not live and work in the tropics.”9 Tropical medicine expert Raphael W. Cilento, based in Townsville, vigorously asserted the viability of a tropical and civilized white race, provided the stock was eugenically selected, sober, exercised regularly, clothed and fed appropriately, and housed comfortably. Most whites still lived in unsuitable galvanized iron humpies, without verandas, whereas Cilento favored physiological dwellings, shaded from the sun, high set, and promoting passive cooling.10 Such models had worked well, on a smaller scale, in hill stations, cantonments, and army barracks elsewhere in the topics.11 The Queensland health officer lamented that so many white women were cooking in galvanized iron cubicles, giving rise to what he called ‘kitchen neurasthenia.” To remedy these conditions, Cilento drew up plans for his “ideal tropical house,” a dwelling congenial to white comfort and civilization between Capricorn and Cancer.

• 12 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, Chicago, IL: Univers (...)
• 13 The quotation is from David Livingstone, “Climate’s Moral Economy: Science, Race and Place in Post (...)

4It is clear that the concept of modern tropical architecture derived from at least two invented categories, one temporal—the “modern”—and the other geographical—the “tropics”—which until the middle of the twentieth century more often were juxtaposed than affiliated. Varied and eminently contestable, the tropics escaped any simple and singular definition, whether geographical, climatic, botanical, zoological or anthropological. As a region, it was one of those “spatial fantasies through which a culture declares its presence”—in this case, a white colonial culture.12 The fetish of “tropicality” conjured natural exuberance, promiscuity, abundance, along with racial backwardness and primitivity—in marked contrast to the reticence and reserve of temperate zones and their civilized and retentive inhabitants. But by the early twentieth century, the “ethnic moral topography” of the tropics was fracturing, becoming modern.13 There was growing confidence that architectural improvements and technological advances, such as the electric fan, might mend the perceived mismatch of racial constitution and depleting foreign environment. Moreover, development projects began to extend these technical benefits to subject races, in the hope they might uplift, reform, and provide care for the colonized at the same time as they made comfortable the colonizers. A technocratic possibilism suggested that the tropical climate could be transcended or avoided or refashioned as innocuous, thus rendering colored races more virile and energetic, eligible for modern citizenship and fitted for exploitation in global capitalism. Hence the proliferation of modern tropical architecture during the Cold War.

• 14 Douglas H. K. Lee and Ronald K. Macpherson, “Tropical Fatigue and Warfare,” Journal of Applied Phy (...)
• 15 M. K. Woodburn, “Darwin: Australia Plans a Tropical City,” Walkabout, vol. 13, no. 7, 1947, p. 6-1 (...)
• 16 Douglas H. K. Lee and Ronald K. Macpherson, “Tropical Fatigue and Warfare,” op. cit. (note 14), p. (...)
• 17 Richard J. de Dear and Marc E. Fountain, “Field Experiments on Occupant Comfort and Office Thermal (...)

5In the 1940s, estimates of thermal comfort had begun to discard racial baggage and assume generic guise. Douglas H. K. Lee, a former collaborator with Cilento, and later professor of physiology at the Johns Hopkins University, emerged after World War II as a leader in the new science of “human” climatology, which evolved from studies of white racial acclimatization in the tropics. The objective of human climatology was to determine the effects of hot and humid environments on the well-being and comfort of generic “individuals,” not specific races. Employing laboratory and field studies, the new discipline sought to assess the impact of tropical climates on human fatigue and efficiency. The problem of tropical fatigue—“the firmly rooted conviction that there was a residuum of morbidity directly attributed to extremes of heat and humidity”—had recently beset armies and navies in the Pacific.14 In settler colonial Australia, it seemed a potential stumbling block in the post-war reconstruction of Darwin and in development of newly acquired territories in Papua and the Pacific.15 Lee, in particular, was committed to improving housing design in the tropics, to making sure architecture and town planning were based on physiological principles, which happened to be implicitly white, if increasingly enigmatically so. He believed that “home and office design according to available scientific knowledge,” especially in relation to shade and ventilation, could make tropical populations of all types more comfortable and productive.16 The evasion of the racist origins of thermal comfort research was so effective that later assessments of housing and office conditions in Townsville and Darwin could claim complete novelty, ignoring extensive pre-war psychological and physiological investigations into the impact of the hot and humid environment on a “working white race.”17 The settler colonial predicates of the research—its whiteness—had been thoroughly overwritten.

• 18 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Daniel J. Ryan, “Editorial: Historicizing Entanglements of Architecture and Co (...)
• 19 Hannah le Roux, “Comfort, Violence, Care,” op. cit. (note 3).
• 20 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, [First published as Les Damnés de la Terre, Paris: Franço (...)
• 21 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, New York, NY: Picador, 2000; and Richard C. Keller, “Clini (...)
• 22 Michelle Murphy, “Unsettling Care: Troubling Transnational Itineraries of Care in Feminist Health (...)
• 23 For more on the promises and pitfalls of decolonizing knowledge practices, see Warwick Anderson, “ (...)

6This is a rather oblique and circuitous way of endorsing le Roux’s proposal to decolonize, or at least critique, notions of “tropical” in tropical architecture and “comfort” in thermal comfort. Following a different path, I have reached much the same destination. I tried here to show how the tropical and the comfortable both came to be fabricated within white imperial structures of power, functioning to reconstitute and discipline the bodies and social relations of colonizer and colonized. Jiat-Hwee Chang and Daniel J. Ryan have urged us to historicize the hegemony of comfort in the tropics, thereby both situating it and unsettling it.18 More provocatively, le Roux asks, “how do we approach histories of comfort differently, inclusive of their dark content?”19 She suggests we might substitute for comfort the “revolutionary care” championed by Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon when he practiced at Blida Hospital in colonial Algeria.20 The reference to Fanon signals her hopes for a radical decoupling of modernity and Europe, a reversal of agency and authority in architecture and design, a decolonization of dwelling in hot and humid environments. While I am in complete sympathy with this proposal, I find Fanon an ambiguous role model. Obsessed with recuperating Black virility, the psychiatrist never learned the language of his patients at Blida, which boasts a Mediterranean rather than a tropical climate. Concerned with French occupation, he was indifferent to the Arab settler colonialism that had displaced the local Berbers (Djebailia). He refused to enter the life worlds of the oppressed.21 He may have renounced colonial comfort and become a revolutionary, but he was just not that into care. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. As Michelle Murphy and others argue, “care” is yet another part of the lexicon that needs to be decolonized, along with “tropical” and “comfort.”22 To do so, we might better listen to people on the ground, as they go about their lives in hot and humid environments, recognizing them as agents and authors in their own sensibilities and architectures, and thereby as the real protagonists of decolonization—rather than heed a theorist who was part of the problem, not the solution.23