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    V&A’s Tropical Modernism exhibition explores “the politics behind the concrete”

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    London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has launched its Tropical Modernism exhibition, which highlights the architectural movement’s evolution from colonial import to a “tool of nation building”.

    According to the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), the exhibition aims to examine the complex context, power dynamics and post-colonial legacy of tropical modernism – an architectural style that developed in South Asia and West Africa in the late 1940s – while also centralising and celebrating its hidden figures.
    London’s V&A museum has opened a major exhibition exploring tropical modernism”Tropical modernism is experiencing something of a modish revival as an exotic and escapist style popular in verdant luxury hotels, bars and concrete jungle houses,” the exhibition’s lead curator Christopher Turner told Dezeen.
    “But it has a problematic history and, through an examination of the context of British imperialism and the de-colonial struggle, the exhibition seeks to look at the history of tropical modernism before and after Independence, and show something of the politics behind the concrete,” he continued.
    The exhibition traces the evolution of tropical modernism within a South Asian and West African contextThe exhibition follows the V&A’s Tropical Modernism exhibition at the 2023 Venice Biennale, which revealed the team’s precursory research on tropical modernism in a West African setting.

    For the in-house iteration of the exhibition, additional architectural models, drawings and archival imagery have been introduced to interrogate tropical modernism in India alongside the African perspective.
    Exhibition materials line a series of rooms within the V&A’s Porter Gallery, divided by brightly coloured partitions and louvred walls referencing tropical modernist motifs.
    Archival imagery, architectural drawings and physical models line the gallery roomsThe exhibition begins by tracing tropical modernism back to its early development by British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Stationed together in Ghana from 1944, Drew and Fry adapted international modernism to the African climate, proposing functional over ornamental design.
    Drew and Fry would also become part of the Department of Tropical Studies at the Architectural Association (AA), which exported British architects to the colonies from 1954 in a bid to neutralise calls for independence.
    The exhibition aims to centralise local professionals who have gone widely unrecognised for their contributions to the movementThe exhibition continues by spotlighting local Ghanaian figures who worked with Fry and Drew, noting the power shifts that were taking place behind the scenes to reappropriate the architectural style for an emerging era of colonial freedom.
    Influential political leaders Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana are the exhibition’s key personas, framing the evolution of tropical modernism from conception to regionalisation.
    Gallery rooms are divided by brightly coloured partitions informed by tropical modernist motifs”The heroes of our exhibition are Nehru and Nkrumah, the first prime ministers of India and Ghana,” Turner explained. “Tropical modernism, a colonial invention, survived the transition to Independence and was appropriated and adapted by Nehru and Nkrumah as a tool of nation building.”
    “Nkrumah, who sometimes sketched designs for the buildings he wanted on napkins, created the first architecture school in sub-Saharan Africa to train a new generation of African architects, and this institution has partnered with us on a five-year research project into tropical modernism.”
    According to the V&A’s research, tropical modernism shifted from its western Bauhaus roots towards a localised vernacular stylesThrough a host of physical models and artefacts, the city of Chandigarh becomes the exhibition’s narrative focal point for tropical modernism in India.
    Under prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Chandigarh was the first large-scale modernist project, recruiting Drew and Fry along with French architect Le Corbusier to plan the ideal utopian urban centre.
    As with Nkrumah – who saw how the Africanisation of architecture could become a symbol of progress and change – the exhibition also aims to highlight Nehru’s ambitions for a localised modernism drawing from the Indian vernacular, rather than the Western Bauhaus style.

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    The display culminates in a video featuring 16 key tropical modernist structures, interspersed with interviews and footage explaining the social and political context behind each building’s realisation.
    “We made a three-screen 28-minute film, shot in Ghana and featuring panoramic portraits of over a dozen buildings, cut with archive footage from the time and interviews with architects like John Owusu Addo and Henry Wellington, and Nkrumah’s daughter, the politician Samia Nkrumah,” said Turner.
    The exhibition aims to address gaps in the museum’s African and South Asian studiesAccording to Turner, the exhibition begins to address gaps in the V&A’s collections and archives pertaining to architecture and design in the global south.
    “Archives are themselves instruments of power, and West African and Indian architects are not as prominent in established archives, which many institutions have now realised and are working to address,” Turner explained.
    “Tropical modernism was very much a co-creation with local architects who we have sought to name – all of whom should be much better known, but are excluded from established canons.”
    The display will inhabit the V&A’s Porter Gallery until 22 September 2024Bringing tropical modernism back into contemporary discourse was also important to the V&A as a timely investigation of low-tech and passive design strategies.
    “Tropical modernism was a climate responsive architecture – it sought to work with rather than against climate,” Turner said.
    “As we face an era of climate change, it is important that tropical modernism’s scientifically informed principles of passive cooling are reexamined and reinvented for our age,” he added.
    “I hope that people will be interested to learn more about these moments of post-colonial excitement and opportunity, and the struggle by which these hard-earned freedoms were won.”
    A 28-minute video captures footage of remaining tropical modernist structures at the end of the exhibitionThe V&A museum in South Kensington houses permanent national collections alongside a series of temporary activations and exhibitions.
    As part of London Design Festival 2023, the museum hosted a furniture display crafted from an Alfa Romeo car by Andu Masebo and earlier in the year, architect Shahed Saleem created a pavilion in the shape of a mosque at the V&A as part of 2023’s Ramadan Festival.
    The photography is courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
    Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence will run from 2 March to 22 September 2024 at the V&A Museum in London. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design visit the Dezeen Events Guide.

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      R for Repair London exhibition features “sympathetic” repairs to sentimental objects

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      A rattan cast created to protect the damaged wing of a toy puffin and a fractured plate held together with steel staples feature in R for Repair, an exhibition of repaired objects presented at the V&A museum as part of London Design Festival.

      Curated by Jane Withers and Hans Tan, the exhibition is the second edition of R for Repair, and follows the first iteration of the show that was held in Singapore last year.
      R for Repair is on display at the V&A in LondonThe show presented at London’s V&A museum includes 10 damaged objects repaired by 10 different designers from Singapore or the UK. They are displayed alongside three repaired objects from the original exhibition.
      Responding to an open call, members of the public were invited to contribute sentimental but broken objects to the project. Designers chosen by Withers and Tan then repaired the objects in various creative ways.
      Ng Si Ying repaired a toy puffin by creating a rattan cast for its wingDesigner Ng Si Ying created a cast and belt out of rattan and thread for Graham Secrets, a toy puffin owned by UK-based Oli Stratford, which was a gift from the owner’s parents on his 30th birthday.

      Originally made by Danish silversmith and designer Kay Bojesen in 1954, the object was damaged by Stratford’s cat. Ying created a cast for the puffin’s wing in Singapore using an intricate weaving technique.
      Rio Kobayashi used Japanese joinery to adapt an antique sewing chest”We wanted to pair designers who would be sympathetic to the owner’s emotional attachment and what are often quite moving stories behind the objects and why the owners treasure them, but might also have an unexpected take on the object and add new layers of meaning, enriching this evolving narrative of ownership,” Withers told Dezeen.
      “We also looked for designers who might bring interesting techniques and unexpected experimentation to the repairs.”
      The chest now has space to display drawings and paintingsAnother object repaired for the 2022 edition of the exhibition is an 18th-century antique sewing chest owned by Eleanor Suggett Stephens in the UK, which she inherited from her grandmother.
      Suggett Stephens discovered that the chest contained previously unseen sketches and watercolour paintings by her grandmother, who wanted to be an artist but never achieved her dream.
      Other objects include a repaired doll’s house by StudiomamaLondon-based designer Rio Kobayashi used traditional Japanese joinery techniques to raise the furniture’s feet, and also created a large tabletop designed to display and celebrate the secret artwork.
      Kobayashi used walnut, ash, cherry, sapele, paint and glass to repair the chest, which Suggett Stephens said “represents that creative dream which never happened for [my grandma] and reminds me how fortunate I am to have a career in the arts.”
      Studio Dam put a broken plate back together with staplesOther objects in the exhibition include a porcelain dinner plate that broke down the middle and was repaired with steel staples and epoxy glue by Studio Dam in Singapore.
      British owners Karen Birkin and screenwriter Andrew Birkin, brother of actor Jane Birkin, submitted the plate for repair with an entirely open brief. Andrew Birkin quipped that Studio Dam could make a spaceship out of it.

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      In response, the multidisciplinary studio took visual cues from Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Andrew Birkin worked on early in his career.
      Studio Dam was informed by juci, a traditional Chinese porcelain repair technique that involves the use of metal staples.
      At the V&A, the objects are presented on bright yellow boxes”On one hand, the primary motivation was to bring creativity to repair through design,” explained Tan, discussing the exhibition.
      “At the same time, we thought having designers and objects from two countries would add a dimension to the project as a design and cultural exchange.”
      Tzen Chia playfully repaired a glass bottle for an anonymous ownerWithers also added that the exhibition intends to celebrate the process of repair and encourage the idea of giving possessions a second life.
      “I think it is important to broaden the discussion around repair and explore the psychological as well as functional dimension,” concluded Withers.
      “To understand why we keep things and how that can inform the design of products. How can things be designed with repair in mind so they improve with age?”
      As London Design Festival kicks off in the capital, see other installations that are part of the event, such as a collection of rotating stone chairs by Sabine Marcelis.
      The photography is by Zuketa Film Production. 
      R for Repair is on display at the V&A in London from 17 September to 2 November. 
      London Design Festival 2022 takes place from 17-25 September 2022. See our London Design Festival 2022 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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      Sam Jacob Studio adds glass-tube entrance to London's V&A museum

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      British architect Sam Jacob has used ribbed glass to create a contemporary entrance for London’s historic V&A museum and updated its bathrooms with a broken-ceramic cladding that feels “a little perverse”.

      The studio drew on the Victoria & Albert museum (V&A’s) collection for its designs, choosing glass for the lobby in a nod to the museum’s glass collection and crushed jasperware for the bathrooms.
      The lobby has glass tubes in three sizesThe entrance structure was designed in response to the existing proportions of the building and is formed of three bands of glass tubes, starting with 120-millimetre diameter tubes on the lower level that become thinner on the upper levels.
      Sam Jacob Studio wanted the design, which marks the entrance from Cromwell Road, to function as a modern response to the surrounding Grade I-listed museum building.
      It sits in front of a large arched window”The heights of the whole structure and the way it is split into three levels is a contemporary response to the historic fabric,” Jacob told Dezeen.

      “This helps the new elements resonate in a harmonious way even with a very different design sensibility,” he added.
      “Working with historic buildings is a great challenge and one that means it’s important to understand what is really there, and why it might be like that.”
      The contemporary lobby was designed as a response to the historic museumUsing glass for the lobby also helped create a more dramatic and dynamic effect at the entrance, while nodding to the large arched window that dominates the space.
      “The glazing for the entrance – especially the glass tubes – were a way to retain a sense of transparency at the entrance, but also to dramatise the way light is transmitted into the space,” Jacob said.
      Sam Jacob Studio designed the lobby for the Cromwell Road entrance”The effect of the tubes is to act like lenses, and the movement of people through the entrance becomes visually more animated, producing different effects as the daylight changes over time,” he added.
      “It’s also a response to the large arched window above, that has texture and colour to the glass, so that the whole interior elevation now acts in a similar way.”

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      “It’s glass used not so much for quality of transparency but for the dynamic effects of light passing through that it creates,” he added.
      Jacob also added sliding doors to the lobby and designed a collection of moveable stations that will be used for bag checks on entry.
      A welcome desk with mirrored backing sits in the lobbyAt the museum entrance, the studio added a welcome desk made from glass tubes with a mirrored backing that reflects the surroundings.
      As well as the lobby, the architect also updated the bathrooms. Here, Jacob used crushed jasperware waste material from the Stoke-on-Trent factory that makes the V&A’s Wedgwood porcelain collection.
      This was used to create colourful wall panels constructed by crushing 700 kilograms of blue, grey, pink and black ceramic waste.
      Terrazzo made from jasperware decorates the bathroom”Terrazzo is a material you often find in these kinds of spaces, so our intention was to introduce a really unusual material element by using the waste jasperware,” Jacob said.
      “It is a material that resonates with the history of the V&A, and with the history of British applied design and with a certain luxury,” he added.
      “Even in a fragmented state, jasperware colours are instantly recognisable. Using it in this smashed-up state, and making a feature of its brokenness, felt like a very modern take on those traditions.”
      Bathroom walls have life-sized digital printsThe design was also intended to make the museum’s visitors think about reuse and how we care for objects.
      “It also feels a little perverse – using broken ceramics in a museum where objects are usually incredibly carefully looked after,” Jacob said. “But a beautiful kind of perversion – all the coloured fragments make a speckled colour field to the walls that surround you.”
      “It’s an interesting experiment in the high concept reuse of waste material, about how we care for objects and the impact that the production of designed objects has on the world.”
      The V&A Museum is in a Grade I-listed buildingThe bathroom walls have been decorated with life-sized digital prints showcasing figures from V&A’s collection, as well as landscape scenery.
      For Jacob, designing for the V&A meant “working in the shadow of people” such as British designer William Morris, a history that made him think about what a similar design response might look like today.
      “We tried to channel a contemporary version of that same spirit of applied arts to help transform some of the most functional spaces of the museum into places of delight, places to interact with the collection in different ways, and make it a more accessible and engaging experience,” he said.
      The glass entrance lets light into the interiorOther recent projects by Sam Jacob Studio include an office, bar and events space for the ArtReview magazine in London and a neolithic shelter in Shenzhen port.
      The photography is by Timothy Soar.
      Project team:
      Architecture: Sam Jacob StudioLighting: Studio ZNAStructure: Price and MyersMain contractor: AlcemaSpecialist fabricator: MillimeterTerrazzo: DiespeckerQuantity surveyor: Currie BrownMechanical and electrical services (M&E): Harley Haddow / JRG Electrical

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      V&A curator picks five highlights from Bags: Inside Out exhibition

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      The 19th-century equivalent of an activist’s slogan tote and a portmanteau made from repurposed fire hoses feature in this roundup of V&A curator Lucia Savi’s favourite pieces from the Bags: Inside Out exhibition.On show at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum until September of next year, the exhibition traces the evolution of bags from the 16th century to the present day.
      Over three distinct sections and nearly 300 exhibits, it explores the different functions that these carriers can serve, the ways they can communicate status and identity as well as the craftsmanship that goes into their making.
      Along the way, designs by luxury fashion houses rub shoulders with personal items belonging to historical figures such as Winston Churchill and artefacts sourced everywhere from Pakistan to Burma.

      “If you think about it, bags are everywhere. Men, women, children – everybody wears them and uses them on an everyday basis,” Savi told Dezeen.
      “We can’t even pinpoint when the first bag in history was made or used because it’s such a functional object that was useful for so many reasons – to travel from A to B, to transport personal belongings.”
      “But they can also be status symbols and carry meaning or memories. In the fashion business today, bags are often the biggest revenue drivers,” she continued. “The exhibition sets out to investigate what makes this object so special, so coveted and so multi-layered.”
      According to Savi, a key factor in this is the fact that bags allow their wearer to present themselves to the world while simultaneously revealing who they really are on the inside.

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      “I think this is at the core of what bags are – they’re functional, they have meaning but they’re very private. We carry our most personal belongings in our bags and not everybody wants to open theirs and show off the contents,” she said.
      “At the same time, we carry them physically on the body, we’re commuting, were travelling. So there are these dichotomies between inside and outside, private and public.”
      This is evidenced by the millions of view racked up by “What’s in my bag” videos on YouTube and translated into the design of the exhibition itself, which is courtesy of London architecture practice Studio Mutt.

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      The ground floor of the V&A’s Gallery 40 is transformed to resemble the inside of a bag, with fabric partitions acting like the lining and dividing the space into small, intimate “pockets”. Here, the exhibits are displayed largely on their own, cracked open to reveal their vulnerable insides, while on the upstairs mezzanine the bags are showcased on mannequins, to suggest their public, outward-facing role.
      Bags: Inside Out opened its door earlier this month after being delayed twice due to coronavirus lockdowns and only a few days before Tier 3 restrictions were once again imposed on London.
      As a result, the museum is currently closed, so we have enlisted Savi to share her personal highlights from the show below:

      Jane Birkin’s Birkin bag by Hermès, 1984
      “This is the very first Birkin bag that was ever made. The story goes that Jane Birkin was on a plane from Paris to London in the 80s and was complaining to the man next to her that she couldn’t find a leather bag she liked. It turns out she was talking to the CEO of Hermès, so they start drawing some ideas on one of those paper [sickness] bags.
      “Now, the Birkin is the most recognised and coveted handbag of our time. It’s not easy to get hold of one, because of the price but also because you can’t just walk into a shop and buy one. They fetch crazy prices at auctions and a report found that the value of a Birkin is actually more stable and better-performing than gold.
      “The primary function of a bag throughout history was to carry valuables and in this case, the bag became a valuable object in itself. This is, of course, because of the craftsmanship and the quality – it takes many hours for a Birkin to be made and it’s all done by one artisan. But it’s also because of the exclusivity and the celebrity association, which together created the phenomenon of ‘it-bags’.”

      Anti-slavery workbag by Samuel Lines and the Female Society for Birmingham, 1828
      “This bag was made by women from the Female Society for Birmingham as part of their campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire. Printed on the bag is a powerful image of an enslaved woman who is breastfeeding while a man is telling her to go back to work.
      “This piece was showcased very much on the body, for everybody to see what these women were advocating for. It was used to carry pamphlets and campaign materials, which they sold alongside the bags to raise money. But also, because it’s a work bag, it was used to carry tools and little items that were used for sewing, so there’s really a double function there.
      “What’s interesting about this bag is that we just have the silk part but we don’t have the metal frame and the handles. So it really shows you how these bags were made by this group of women. Not many of them have survived but they exemplify an important function of bags, both historically and today, as a way of showcasing our beliefs.”

      Daln by Kazuyo Sejima for Prada, 2019
      “Bags offer fertile soil for experimenting with new ideas and for collaborations between designers, artists and more recently architects. They’re quite sculptural objects with a large surface area, so they’re almost like a blank canvas.
      “This collaboration is part of a collection called Prada Invites, where the brand recruited four female architects to reinvent its iconic nylon bag. Prada is a historic fashion house that started in 1913 as a leather luggage maker. But when Miuccia Prada took the helm of the company in the 80s, she introduced this very new material that you normally wouldn’t associate with luxury and redefined it.”
      “Kazuyo Sejima’s interpretation of the bag really gives the freedom to the wearer to reinvent the bag every time – you can un-zip some parts, make it longer or shorter. And you can add all these colourful, detachable pouches and pockets with soft shapes that contrast with the black, square body of the bag.”

      Weekend bag by Elvis and Kresse, 2019
      “More and more, we’re seeing brands try to work with materials that are not exploiting the natural world and not creating too much waste. But this brand, Elvis and Kresse, has been doing it for years and decades.
      “They saw that fire hoses, once they reached the end of their life, were just ending up in landfill. So they started to produce accessories out of them, using the material almost as if it was leather and fabricating the bags using similar machinery.
      “First, the hose gets washed and then it’s cut in half. It has two surfaces, a smooth and a dimpled one, and they combine these to create the designs. The lining is made out of parachute silk or old auction banners and everything from the packaging to the labels is made from rescued materials.”

      Iside Toothpaste bag by Bethan Laura Wood for Valextra, 2018
      “Normally, Valextra’s bags are quite severe. They’re very simple, very structured bags, but with the intervention of British designer Bethan Laura Wood on the handles and the addition of this sinuous, toothpaste-like hardware, the bag almost becomes a completely different object.
      “She was inspired by the linework of [Scottish artist] Eduardo Paolozzi and the piping along the side of the Valextra bag, where the leathers is inked to finish the seams. And I really enjoyed the idea of playing with that line and the fact that she intervenes on the hardware but not on the leather, which is a very interesting way of thinking about bags.
      “Working with a designer who normally maybe doesn’t work on leather or hardware and has never worked on bags, I think it does bring a completely different perspective. It challenges the makers and it creates almost like wearable pieces of art.”
      Bags: Inside Out is on show at the V&A in London until 12 September 2021. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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