(Re)constructing Tropical Architecture in Solomon Islands

Abstract

Reiterating conversations with my father, this paper retrieves a little known trajectory of tropical architecture to the Pacific and brings to light a Nigerian lineage to tropical modern buildings in Honiara, Solomon Islands. My father worked as an architect in the Public Works Department in 1950s Lagos, Nigeria, and 1960s Honiara, in the then British Solomon Islands Protectorate. The paper furthermore explores the agency of oral history in forming a nuanced narrative of modern architecture through the juxtaposition of the two different types of discourses: the discourse on tropical architecture, as reflected by my father's perspectives; and a postcolonial reading of colonial-modern architecture, as reflected by myself as the interviewer. The combination of these differing frameworks prompts a rich and nuanced reading of the buildings in Honiara. This oral history affirms tropical architecture's emphasis on climatic and technical factors as an intrinsic aspect of the colonial outlook of that time, while demonstrating that its political entanglements with colonialism and modernisation can only now be exposed through contemporary postcolonial perspectives: a frame which – in this paper – aligns more closely with the discourse of colonial-modern architecture. Finally, the paper explores – through my own filmmaking – the dialogical relationship between oral history and material evidence, thus exposing the contingent nature of colonial legacies and postcolonial realities present in tropical architecture in Solomon Islands.

Notes

^1. Jiatt-Hwee Chang and Anthony D. King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Historical Fragments of Power-knowledge, Built Environment and Climate in the British Colonial Territories,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32 (2001): 284.

^2. The title refers to the well-known Pijin English term “Iuminao”, meaning “we all, as a collectivity now”, as translated in David Welchman Gegeo, “Culture Rupture and Indigeneity: The Challenge of (Re)visioning ‘Place’ in the Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): 498.

^3. Louise Stevenson, You Me Now, artist's book, Special Collection, Fine Arts Library, The University of Auckland, 2012. Seven booklets: You Me Now (text), High Court 1962, Guadalcanal Club 1965, Public Works Department 1961, General Post Office 1968, Honiara Public Library 1968, King George Secondary School 1963 (photographs).

^4. Louise Stevenson, In Conversation with the Architect (Dad and I), 22min HD Film, 2012, accessed 15 August 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = NyOciZYx2QQ&feature = em-upload_owner.

^5. Chang and King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture,” 283.

^6. Ola Uduku, “Modernist Architecture and ‘the Tropical’ in West Africa: The Tropical Architecture Movement in West Africa, 1948–1970,” Habitat International 30, no. 3 (September 2006): 396–411.

^7. Chang and King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture,” 283.

^8. Vandana Baweja, “A Pre-history of Green Architecture: Otto Koenigsberger and Tropical Architecture, from Princely Mysore to Post-colonial London” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008).

^9. Dana Arnold, Elvan Altan Ergut and Belgin Turan Ozkaya, Rethinking Architectural Historiography (Oxon: Routledge, 2006), xviii.

^10. Arnold, Ergut and Ozkaya, Rethinking Architectural Historiography, xix.

^11. “The British Solomon Islands Protectorate: Elysian Fields at the End of the Line,” Pacific Islands Monthly 13 (May 1963).

^12. “The British Solomon Islands Protectorate,” Pacific Islands Monthly.

^13. “Old and New in the Solomons,” Pacific Islands Monthly 57 (October 1964).

^14. My father was an advisor for local housing on the Housing Authority Board and contributed voluntary work, including a theatre for the Central Hospital commissioned by the Lions Club, a Red Cross staff house and Honiara social clubs (Point Cruz Yacht Club and Guadalcanal Club). My mother wrote Solomon Islands: An Official Publication of the Solomon Islands Tourist Authority (Auckland: Lahood Publications, 1988) and was involved in local arts, organising exhibitions and employed as Art Advisor for Solomon Islands Central Bank. My brother publishes his research on World War II history in the Solomon Islands on his website, accessed 11 August 2014, www.archaehistoria.org.

^15. Postcolonial literary theorist Homi Bhabha introduced the concept of an “in-between” and “hybrid” space to negotiate binary relationships, significantly between “colonialized” and “colonizer”. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 2.

^16. Website of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, accessed 18 August 2014, http://www.ramsi.org/about-ramsi/.

^17. Website of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, accessed 30 July 2014, http://www.ramsi.org.

^18. Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in Return of the Real, ed. Hal Foster (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 203.

^19. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bahktin (London: Belkap Harvard University Press, 1984), 65.

^20. Mikhail Bahktin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

^21. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffen, Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2000), 9.

^22. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (London: Batsford, 1956).

^23. Hyunjung Lee and Younghan Cho, “Introductions: Colonial Modernity and Beyond in East Asian Contexts,” Cultural Studies 26, no. 5 (2012): 610–16.

^24. Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity,” in Modernologies: Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernisms, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Barcelona: Museu Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 39.

^25. Chang and King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture,” 284.

^26. Peter Scriver, “Placing In-between: Thinking Through Architecture in the Construction of Colonial-Modern Identities,” National Identities 8, no. 3 (2006): 208.

^27. Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia 1893–1978, accessed 22 July 2014, http://www.solomonencyclopaedia.net/biogs/E000154b.htm.

^28. “The British Solomon Islands Protectorate,” Pacific Islands Monthly.

^29. “Kapkap” refers to the traditional circular head ornament from the island of Malaita made of finely carved turtle shell overlaid on a white clamshell disk.

^30. The plans for the school belonged to the Public Works Department, and my father did not see a need to make personal copies at the time.

^31. “The British Solomon Islands Protectorate,” Pacific Islands Monthly.

^32. Parliamentary debates, Commons, 5th series (1909–80), accessed 12 November 2013, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/acts/colonial-development-and-welfare-act-1959.

^33. Building Construction BSIP Design Program, WPHC 222/11/12 Vol. 1–II. Great Britain: High Commission for Western Pacific Islands, Western Pacific Archives, 1875–1978, MSS & Archives 2003/1, Special Collections, The University of Auckland.

^34. Building Construction BSIP Design Program, WPHC Archives.

^35. Building Construction BSIP Design Program, WPHC Archives.

^36. Jiat-Hwee Chang, “Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network: Tropical Architecture, Building Science and the Politics of Decolonization,” in Third World Modernism, ed. Duangfang Lu (Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 214.

^37. Personal communication. From notes given to the author by her father, 12 August 2014.

^38. “The British Solomon Islands Protectorate,” Pacific Islands Monthly.

^39. These buildings were primarily funded from social activities organised by the founding committees of these clubs.

^40. Hannah Le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture 8, no. 3 (2003): 337–54; and Uduku, “Modernist Architecture and ‘the Tropical’ in West Africa,” 404.

^41. Personal communication. My father was describing the circumstances of being an architect in Nigeria during the 1950s in a recorded discussion on 13 November 2013.

^42. Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa: The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1946–56,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 65, no. 2 (2006): 198.

^43. Liscombe, “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa,” 189.

^44. Liscombe, “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa,” 204.

^45. Liscombe, “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa,” 204.

^46. Personal communication. From notes given to the author by her father, 22 July 2014.

^47. Liscombe, “Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa,” 198.

^48. Stevenson, In Conversation with the Architect (Dad and I).

^49. Stevenson, In Conversation with the Architect (Dad and I).

^50. Local design later informed my father's buildings. Notably, his last commission, Selwyn College (1993), features distinctive curved roof structures influenced by local “leaf” buildings. This was also a large secondary school, this time funded by the Anglican Church, as well as the government (being a designated National Secondary School).

^51. Such water pipes can be seen on the open corridors of the Holy Cross School, Lagos, by Fry, Drew & Partners (c. 1961). See Uduku, “Modernist Architecture and ‘the Tropical’ in West Africa,” 403.

^52. Stevenson, In Conversation with the Architect (Dad and I).

^53. Crown Agents provided logistics, procurement, funding and employment services for the British Colonial Service. Accessed 20 August 2014, http://www.crownagents.com/about-us/our-history.

^54. There is evidence of an old rice cooker used by Dutch colonials in the Wikipedia website on rice cookers, accessed 20 August 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_cooker.

^55. He began his private practice with a government commission to design the new General Post Office in Honiara (1969). Later work included residential housing for diplomats, expatriates and locals, factories, broadcasting stations on outer islands, commercial shops in Honiara, hotels and schools.

^56. Chang, “Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network,” 218.

^57. Stevenson, In Conversation with the Architect (Dad and I).

^58. Ola Uduku, “Educational Design and Modernism in West Africa,” Docomomo 28 (March 2003): 79.

^59. He later incorporated Solomon Islands decorative arts into some of his buildings – notably, carved posts on the University of the South Pacific (USP) centre (c. 1983).

^60. Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia 1893–1978, accessed 19 August 2014, http://www.solomonencyclopaedia.net/objects/D00000259.htm.

^61.Grass Roots Art of the Solomons: Images and Islands, eds. John Chick and Sue Chick (Sydney: Pacific Publications, 1978).

^62. David Welchman Gegeo, “Culture Rupture and Indigeneity: The Challenge of (Re)visioning ‘Place’ in the Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): 494.

^63. Scriver, “Placing In-between,” 207.

^64. Solomon Islands Historical Encyclopaedia 1893–1978, accessed 22 July 2014, www.solomonencyclopaedia.net/biogs/E000154b.htm.

^65. Barbara Riley, “When Cultures Meet: Preserving Oral Traditions in Western Province, Solomon Islands,” Oral History Forum d'Histoire Orale: E-journal of the Canadian Oral History Association 12 (1992): 34, accessed 5 May 2014, www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/viewFile/199/248.

^66. Riley, “When Cultures Meet,” 35.

^67. Marion von Osten, “In the Desert of Modernity, Colonial Planning and After: The Making of an Exhibition,” in Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions of the Future, eds. Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali and Marion von Osten (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010), 306.

^68. Kobena Mercer, “Photography and the Global Conditions of Cross-Cultural Modernity,” in Unfixed: Photography and Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art, eds. Sara Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy (Netherlands: Japsam Books, 2012), 72–83.

^69. Stevenson, In Conversation with the Architect (Dad and I).

^70. William S. W. Lim and Jiatt-Hwee Chang, Non West Modernist Past: On Architecture and Modernities (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Ltd, 2012), 10.