Contents
List of Figures xi
Preface xviii
Acknowledgements xxiii
Abbreviations xxvii
Introduction: Framing Tropical Architecture 1
Tropicality and colonial nature 5
Colonial technoscientific networks and circulations 8
Governmentality and colonial power 10
Plan of the book 12
Part I : Building Types 19
The Emergence of the Tropical ized House: Comfort in the Heteronomous and Heterogeneous Conditions of Colonial Architectural Production
Presentism and historiographical problems 23
Heteronomy and the dependence on local builders 30
Heterogeneity and building artifacts 36
Multicultural influences, comfort and house typologies 39
2 Engineering Military Barracks : Experimentation, Systematization and
Colonial Spaces of Exception 51
Military barracks as tropicalized "global form" 53
Royal engineers, constructional training and experimental tradition 62
The prefabricated tropicalized barracks 66
Barrack synopses, climates and type plans 69
"Global form" in colonial spaces of exception 78
The intelligible enclave 85
3 Translating Pavilion Plan Hospitals: Biopolitics, Environmentalism and Ornamental Governmentality 94
Light. air and coolness: the "new" pavilion plan hospital 97
Metropolitan origins and technologies of population 100
Quantification and environmental technologies 103
The "accumulation of neglect" beyond the enclave 113
Colonial monuments and ornamental governmentality 117
4 Improving "Native" Housing: Sanitary Order, Improvement Trust and Splintered Colonial Urbanism 129
Knowing the governed, regulating the environment 132
Deficient "information order" and belatedness 142
The defining problem 146
Housing experiments for a variegated "public" 148
The anatomy of a failed case 155
Part II : Research and Education 163
5 Constructing a Technoscientific Network: Building Science Research ,
"Rendering Technical" and the Power-knowledge of Decolonization 165
The missing technoscientific dimensions 166
The colonial research model 170
Network building and the tropical building division 175
(lm)mutable mobiles and climatic design 184
Conflicting interests and the contingent center 191
6 Teaching Climatic Design: Postcolonial Architectural Education, Scientific Humanism and Tropical Development 203
The new model of architectural education 206
Decolonization, the RIBA and Commonwealth architecture 211
Climate and fundamental principles 217
Pedagogy and curriculum 221
The rise of building science and architectural research 227
The legacies 231
Conclusion: Tropical Architecture Today 245
Nature, tropicality and anthropocene 245
Technoscientific constructions and network building 247
Power and governmentality 249
Bibliography 254
Index 278