Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization - Softcover

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ALEXANDER TZONIS is Professor of Architectural Theory at the TUDelft and director of Design Knowledge Systems Research Center. Among his books are Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment (I-Press/MIT Press, 1972) and Hermes and the Golden Thinking Machine (Bradford/MIT Press, 1990). He has also co-authored several books with Liane Lefaivre, including Classical Architecture (MIT Press, 1986) and the AIA prize-winning Architecture in Europe since 1968 (Thames Hudson, 1992).
LIANE LEFAIVRE is a researcher at the DKS Center at the TUDelft. She has authored prize-winning scholarly books on the Renaissance and Enlightenment, among them the AIA award-winning Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (MIT Press, 1997). She is a contributing editor of Architecture magazine in New York and has written widely on contemporary architecture, in particular on dirty realism.
BRUNO STAGNO, a practising architect in San Jose, Costa Rica, studies in Santiage, Chile and Paris and is one of the most eminent architects of South America today. He is Director of the Institute for Tropical Architecture, San Jose. His work has been published in Bruno Stagno: An Architect in the Tropics (Asia Design Forum Publications, 1999). It was Stagno's initiative to invite leading architects from the tropical region to enter a discussion that served as a point of departure of the present book. In 1997 he was given the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development Award.

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The tropical region covers a significant proportion of the globe, and yet its architecture receives relatively little outside comment or exposure. Dispersed widely throughout the world, the region incorporates areas as far-flung as the Caribbean islands, India, South-East 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, as well as a post-colonial condition and the pressures of modernization in the world of globalization. Architects' reactions to the tropical context are as varied as the region is diverse.
Tropical Architecture brings together architects and critics from throughout the tropical region, examining the implications of the opposing forces of tradition and innovation and the struggle between global and local order. Among the issues covered are sustainability, bio- and cultural diversity, micro-climatic control and technology and multi-disciplinary design. The argument centres on Critical Regionalism, a concept introduced into the architectural debate in the early 1980s by two of the book's co-authors, Tzonis and Lefaivre. This is not a style but rather an approach to architecture that asks for design to be conceived in response to the needs and opportunities of a specific region - although it is not inherently opposed to global potentials. The theoretical debate is backed up by case studies of a range of projects, from small-scale designs using minimal technology to super-sophisticated, high-tech solutions, and from schemes that look to environmental comfort to ones concerned with issues of symbolism and memory. It is out of this multiplicity of approaches that the general global lesson of Critical Regionalism as applied to tropical architecture is to be found.
THE PRINCE CLAUS FUND stimulates and supports activities in the field of culture and development by granting awards, funding and producing publications and by financing and promoting networks and innovative cultural activities. Support is given both to persons and to organizations in African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbearn countries.

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Tropical Critical Regionalism

Next to the great ideological struggle between modernism and traditionalism, the conflict between regionalism and globalism has shaped most social, political, economic, and cultural debates of the past century. It continues to dominate most discussions today in almost every field. The conflict has also marked architectural and urban planning debates. There is much written in support of global architecture. Most of the architectural press has an implicit agenda in support of global values by giving preference to projects that follow few major acknowledged trends around the globe, encouraging tacitly the conformity of architectural ideas, even when this is expressed in terms of 'non-conformist' design. Without doubt discovering, encouraging, and applying universal norms in design practice has its benefits. But it also has a serious negative impact when employed uncritically and without consideration of the regional scope and the regional values. The aim of this book is to make the case for regionalism by presenting a spectrum of ideas and design proposals related to a special case of contemporary regionalist architecture, tropicalist architecture.

The present book was assembled with the aim of bringing together representatives as varied as possible from sub-regions of the overall tropical region. Rather than rushing to impose a consensus among the diverse and a general rule that would have violated the very spirit of regionalism, we wished to present clear, distinct, and high contrast views of tropicality. In other words, we opted for difference. If we might cite our collaborator Bruno Stagno, we tried to focus on singular situations, "making it difficult to establish stable parameters of conduct" because "freedom" is "continually adapting and changing". We were brought into the project by Bruno Stagno to introduce the conference he organized in Costa Rica on tropical architecture because on our prior work on regionalism and more specifically on its contemporary problematic we framed in previous writings under the term critical regionalism.

The opportunity to study the question of tropicalism during the Costa Rica conference of 1998 and subsequent meetings with the original participants, and, a half later, to discuss it Milton Tan, Philip Bay, and Tai Kheng Soon during a month's stay at the National University of Singapore in May 2000, enormously enriched our ideas about critical regionalism and its urgent message for contemporary architecture. As opposed to globalism, which promotes universal values and norms, regionalism stands for the local and the specific to a region, that is to a unique, distinct geographical area occupied homogenously by similar objects or objects having common characteristics. Such objects, prevailing in the area, can be flora or fauna, people or artifacts, or attributes of these objects, such as shape, size, materials, or color. This makes it appear very simple and straightforward to objectively divide the world into regions. However, the ways one can identify an object or an attribute are infinite, and pose a major problem of choice and leading to an infinite number of alternative ways of depicting and dividing the world into regions. It is clear that we 'finite' humans construct regions within a finite framework of intentions. We make them through our mind imposing criteria of choice that depend not only on how the real world 'out there' is made, but also on how we view the world, a view biased by our prior beliefs as well as our desires.

To discuss tropicalism as a kind of regionalism presupposes that the 'tropics' is recognized as a region. At first glance it might not be so easy to see the 'tropics' as a region. In fact geographers refer to the Torrid Zone, rather than Region, as the part of the earth between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Although there are dry areas, the zone is characterized mostly by a typically year-round hot humid and steamy with high rainfall climate and great similarities in vegetation. Geographers talk about the 'tropics' more as a family of regions lying between and near the boundaries of these parallels. Intuitively, we are accustomed to think about regions as continuous parts of the surface of a body modest in size, uninterrupted, and concentrated. By contrast, the 'zone of the tropics' is closed but stretched all around the earth, a vast belt that stretches over the entire middle of the globe, from the Pacific Islands, South East Asia, and Australia to India, Africa, the Caribbean, and large tracts of the Americas. Moreover, regions are usually considered as places with relatively homogeneous cultures. The tropics appear as scattered culturally as they are geographically.

But in spite of these differences, there are many other common attributes present in the tropics that one might consider more significant to regard the tropics as a region within a pragmatic framework of architecture. Throughout the area we call the tropics, people share the problem of having to cope with extreme conditions of a hot and humid climate. As a result of such conditions, to quote the observation of Singapore's long time prime minister, Li Kuan Yu, high productivity is very difficult to achieve. Second, in spite of the vastness of the area, there is a common historical, political fact: they are all ex-colonies. As a result there is a common need to overcome the post-colonial frame of mind that has its roots in the period of expansion of Europe and the United States during which a common model was applied with small variations from Central Asia to Central America. The vestiges of this long period of domination, political, economic, and intellectual, are still there and designers find themselves working as if driven by an automatic pilot inherited from the colonial period. And when such pilot is not in action, the problem is to fill in the void of social, political, administrative, and cultural structures left after the departure of the colonial powers with new, up to date models. Third, there is a common architectural heritage from the colonial period, individual buildings, building types, and urban tissue that serve as a precious precedent. It is a design experience...