On Wednesday 15th March 2017, Iain Jackson from the University of Liverpool will give a CREAte Open Lecture entitled ‘Tropical Modernism: Developing solutions in West Africa, with forays into the West Indies and India’. The lecture will take place in Marlowe Lecture Theatre 1 at 5PM.
Iain Jackson is a Senior Lecturer and architect at the Liverpool School of Architecture. His PhD investigated Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh, and more recently he has written a monograph on the works of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. He is currently writing a book on the history of twentieth-century Ghanaian Architecture and Planning.
This lecture will investigate the city plans, infrastructure and architectural solutions deployed in Ghana and Nigeria, during the early to mid-twentieth century. It will seek to track how notions of ‘tropical modernism’ were developed, as well as how these ideas were shared (from the West Indies) and dispensed throughout the territories of the empire, former empire (such as at Chandigarh), and beyond. Whilst the focus will be on the seductive ‘modernist’ projects, we will also examine some of the less glamorous solutions that have frequently been overlooked, and consider how political ambition along with the drive for sanitation and transportation has informed the architecture and planning of this region.