Modernism in late Imperial British West Africa: The work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1946-56

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

Volumn 65, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949922263     PISSN: 00379808     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/25068264     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. H. A. N. Brockman in the introduction to Stephen Hitchens, Fry Drew Knight Creamer Architecture (London, 1976), 6.
2. The work of British architects in West Africa, including Fry and Drew, isdiscussed in Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire(Aldershot, England, 2003), 137-56.
3. The interconnections between the colonial and the modernist projects areexamined in Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass., 1989);
4. Jean-Louis Cohen, Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Modern Ventures (New York, 2002);
5. and in the British imperial context by John Lang, Madhivi Desai, and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence: The Search for Identity - India 1880 to1980 (Delhi, 1997).
6. The issue of interface between indigenous and colonial practice isexamined in Thomas Metcalf, "Architecture and the Representation of Empire:India, 1860-1910, Representations 6 (spring 1984), 7-36,
7. and in several recent articles published in the JSAH, ranging from by Swati Chattopadhay, "Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of 'White Town' in Colonial Calcutta, " to Ikem Okoye, "Architecture, History, and the Debate on Identity in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, " and Shirine Hamadeh, "Ottoman Expressions of Early Modernity and the'Inevitable' Question of Westernization, " JSAH 59 (June 2000), 154-79; 61(Sept. 2002), 381-96; and 63 (March 2004), 32-51, respectively.
8. The interrelation of architectural with literary fabric reflects Hayden White's argument in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987).
9. Another model of diverse analysis is Michel-Rolf Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995).
10. The interrogation of literary sources to disclose the cultural projectionof power is central to postcolonial discourse; the critical approaches are wellrepresented in Ismail Talib, The Language of Postcolonial Literatures (London, 2002),
11. and summarized by Leela Ghandi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, 1998).
12. Modernist claims to universal relevance are examined in Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, "Perceptions in the conception of the modernist Urban Environment: Canadian Perspectives on the Spatial Theory of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, " in Iain Boyd Whyte, ed., The Man-Made Future (London, 2006).
13. For more specific information about Fry̧'s career, see Alan Powers, "Edwin Maxwell Fry, " Dictionary of Art (London, 1993),
14. and Edwin Maxwell Fry, Autobiographical Sketches (London, 1975).
15. Fry's prewar residential design is examined in Gavin Stamp, ed., The Modern House Revisited (London, 1996),
16. and Jeremy Gould, Modern Houses in Britain 1919-1939 (London, 1977).
17. The MARS plan is contextualized in Eleanor Morris, British Town Planningand Urban Design: Principles and Policies (London, 1997), esp. 68-70;
18. see also Arthur Korn, History Builds the Town (London, 1953), 83, 89,
19. and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, "'Cities More Fair to Become the Dwelling Place of Thy Children': Transcendent Modernity in British Urban Reconstruction, " in Iain Boyd Whyte, ed., Modernism and the Spirit of the City (London, 2003), 181-208.
20. Royston Landau, "Jane Drew, " in Adolf Placzek, ed., Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects (New York, 1989), vol. 1: 598-99.
21. I discuss the impact of women on modernism in "The Fe-male Spaces of Modernism: A Western Canadian Perspective, " Prospects 26 (2002), 767-800.
22. See also Marilyn Friedman, "Glamour à Mo Mo: Women's Roles inthe Modern Movement, " and Mary McLeod, "Undressing Architecture:Fashion, Gender and Modernity, " in Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen, Backfrom Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement (Rotterdam, 2002), 327-38 and213-326, respectively;
23. and Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar eds., Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Production of Gender in Modern Architecture (London, 2005).
24. Fry dedicated his Art in a Machine Age: A Critique of Contemporary Lifethrough the Medium of Architecture (London, 1969) to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.
25. Three British examples are Richard Sheppard, Building for the People(London, 1948);
26. Frederick Gibberd, Town Design (London, 1953);
27. and Percy Johnson-Marshall, Rebuilding Cities (Edinburgh, 1966).
28. Edwin Maxwell Fry, Fine Building (London, 1944), 115.
29. F. M. Bourret, ed., Ghana - The Road to Freedom 1919-1957 (Lagos, 1960), esp. 26-34.
30. On British West African colonial policy, see also Michael Crowder, The Story of Nigeria (London, 1978).
31. Detailed accounts of these programs appear in The Nigeria Handbook(Lagos, 1956),
32. and Huxley included some information in a travelogue she wrote: Elspbeth Huxley, Four Guineas: A Journey through West Africa (London, 1954).
33. On the broader policy context, see also Basil Davidson, Africa in Modern History: The Search for a New Society (London, 1978).
34. The Colonial Development legislation and its effects are related in David Fieldhouse, Black Africa 1945-60: Economic Decolonization and Arrested Development (Cambridge, England, 1985),
35. and Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development:Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1850-1960 (London, 1993).
36. Another instrument of late imperial policy, inflected with reformist butalso legitimating objectives, was the British Council, on which see Frances Donaldson, The British Council: The First Fifty Years (London, 1984).
37. This commission is discussed with illustrations in Hitchens, Fry Drew Knight Creamer, 119-20.
38. Huxley would later publish an objective study of British immigrationpolicy and attitudes, Back Street New Worlds: A Look at Immigrants in Britain(London, 1964), in which the Commonwealth was described as "A sort of mummycase in which we have embalmed an empire that's dead" (51).
39. The text is in Creech Jones's papers in the library at Rhodes House in Oxford: Mss. Brit. Emp. S332, Box 47. Two other relevant archives are, at Rhodes House, that of A. E. S. Alcock, director of the Planning Board of the Gold Coast, Mss. Afr. S 666, among which is the text of a paper "Winds of Planning Change - Africa, " ca. 1960, declaring that from 1944Reconstruction had "become part of imperial policy"; and at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, the papers on housing andtown planning assembled by J. B. Heigham, permanent secretary to the Ministry of Trade and Commerce in the Gold Coast, 2000/166/649. On Jones's career, see Lionel Wickham Legg, ed., Dictionary of National Biography 1931-1940 (Oxford, 1949) vol. 8, 524-26,
40. and on the political context, see Peter Clark, Hope and Glory: Britain1900-1990, 2nd ed. (London, 1998).
41. Fry, Art in a Machine Age, 141 (see n. 9).
42. The monograph is Hitchens, Fry Drew Knight and Creamer.
43. "European Importation, " Progressive Architecture 41 (Dec.1962), 83-85;
44. and "Architecture and Planning in the Tropics, " Optima 19(1969), 52-60.
45. Drew, "Recent Work, " 139.
46. The term was coined by Clarence Perry and defined in his book, The Neighborhood Unit (New York, 1929).
47. Contemporary "insider" views of the MARS plan appear in Korn, History Builds the Town, 83, 89 (see n. 7),
48. and Edward Carter, The Future of London (Harmondsworth, England, 1962), 169.
49. See also Morris, British Town Planning, 68-70 (see n. 7).
50. Modernism's primary location in the Atlantic sphere is evident in theframing of standard studies, exemplified by Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture(Oxford, 2002).
51. The main studies on modernist design in Africa are Udo Kultermann, New Architecture in Africa, trans. Ernst Flesh (New York, 1963)
52. and New Directions in African Architecture, trans. John Maas (London, 1969).
53. Hannah Le Roux, "Modern Movement Architecture in Ghana, " 62-67;
54. and Ola Uduku, "Educational Design and Modernism in West Africa, " 76-82.
55. Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an Indian City (Delhi, 1999);
56. and Vikram Prakesh, Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernityin Post Colonial India (Seattle, 2002).
57. Maxwell Fry, Fine Building (London, 1944), esp. 3.
58. Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case (1960; London, 1961), 50. Querry commentson the hospital at the leper colony: "It reminds me of something in one ofour new satellite towns. Hemel Hempstead, perhaps, or Stevenage" (187).
59. Fry and Drew, Tropical Architecture, 20 (see n. 31).
60. Fry is quoted in Richards, Nets Buildings, 103 (see n. 27); otherquotations appear on 104-6.
61. Related concepts of the cultural analysis of colonialism are discussed in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture(Chicago, 1988)
62. and Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner, eds., Unpacking Culture: Artand Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley, 1999).
63. See also Andrew Benjamin, Tony Davies, and Robbie Goh, eds., Postcolonial Cultures and Literature: Modernity and the (Un)Commonwealth (New York, 2002).
64. The literary origins of British colonialism are discussed in Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity(Cambridge, England, 1998).
65. Fritz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (1952;London, 1967),
66. and The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1962).
67. Bakhtin's works include Marxisme et la philosophie du langage, trans.Marina Yaguello (Paris, 1997),
68. and Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Practice, trans. Albert Wehrle (Baltimore, 1978);
69. and his influence is examined in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzick (Minneapolis, 1995).
70. Bhabha's publications include Nation Narration (New York, 1990)
71. and The Location of Culture (New York, 1994).
72. Quoted in Todorov, Bakhtin, 99;
73. an interesting application of the principle as related to colonial regimeappears in Nicki Levell, Oriental Visions: Exhibitions, Travel and Collectingin the Victorian Age (London, 2000).
74. Allister Macmillan, The Red Book of West Africa: Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures and Resources (London, 1920), 16.
75. W. E. Simnett, British Way (London, 1943), 127-28.
76. The Nigeria Handbook (Lagos, 1953), 39.
77. Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 29, 91 (see n. 22).
78. Elspbeth Huxley and Margery Perham, Race and Politics (London, 1944), 15.
79. Huxley, Four Guineas, 134, 136, respectively (see n. 16). St. Monica'swas commissioned by the Sisters of the Order of the Holy Paraclete centred at Whitby in Britain.
80. Huxley, Four Guineas, 183.
81. Elspeth Huxley, A New Earth: An Experiment in Colonialism (London, 1960), 9.
82. Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom (London, 1962), 27.
83. See also Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Tunes of Kwame Nkrumah (London, 1989).
84. See n. 55, and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
85. See also Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts. Practices.Politics (London, 1997),
86. and Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Historyof the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
87. Basil Davidson, in Davidson and Adenekan Ademola, eds., The New West Africa: Problems of Independence (London, 1953), 56.
88. A biography appears in Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series (New York, 1995), vol. 47, 1-9;
89. see also Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London, 1991).
90. Achebe's socialization into the colonial system probably correspondedwith that narrated in Patrick Chamoiseau, School Days, trans. Linda Coverdale(Lincoln, Nebr., 1997).
91. Chinua Achebe, Man of the People (London, 1966), 4.
92. Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (1936; London, 1946), 41.
93. The literature on Greene's thought and writing, predominantly as asupposed Roman Catholic novelist, is extensive, and includes Robert Evans, Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations (Lexington, Ky., 1967);
94. Terry Eagleton, "Reluctant Heroes: The Novels of Graham Greene, " in Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Graham Greene (New York, 1987);
95. and Cates Baldridge, Graham Greene's Fictions: The Virtues of Extremities(Columbia, Mo., 2000).
96. Greene, Heart of the Matter (1948; London, 1954), 7.
97. The formulation of the British West African colonies, especially Sierra Leone, as dystopic space beginning with the writings of Richard Burton butincluding those of Greene, is traced in Richard Phillips, "Dystopian Spacein Colonial Representations and Interventions: Sierra Leone as 'the White Man's Grave, '" Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography 84B (2002), 3-4, 189-200.
98. The commissioning of universities and technical colleges in the Colonial Empire, notably in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), West and East Africa, and the West Indies, preceded higher education construction in Britain; see Stefan Muthesuis, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven, 2000), esp.62-64.
99. Respectively discussed in Stephen Dobney, ed., Harry Seidler: Selectedand Current Works (Mulgrave, Australia, 1997);
100. Justine Clark and Paul Walker, Looking for the Local: Architecture andthe New Zealand Modern (Wellington, 2000);
101. and Harold Kalman, A History of Canadian Architecture (Toronto, 1994), vol. 2, 797-800.
102. Progressive Architecture (Dec. 1962), 85.