Tropical Variants of Sustainable Archit

The SAGE Handbook
of Architectural Theory
Tropical Variants of Sustainable
Architecture: A Postcolonial Perspective
Contributors: C. Greig Crysler & Stephen Cairns & Hilde Heynen

Print Pub. Date: 2012
Online Pub. Date: May 31, 2012
Print ISBN: 9781412946131
Online ISBN: 9781446201756
DOI: 10.4135/9781446201756
Print pages: 602-625
This PDF has been generated from SAGE knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
National University Singapore
Copyright ©2013 SAGE knowledge
10.4135/9781446201756.n36
[p. 602 ↓ ]
Chapter 34: Tropical Variants of

Sustainable Architecture: A Postcolonial
Perspective
Jiat-Hwee Chang
In recent years, architectural discourses have been increasingly dominated by issues

pertaining to sustainability. The wide acceptance of these discourses of sustainable
architecture has led some critics to fear that they will become the new hegemonic
knowledge – setting agendas and silencing other critical positions – in architectural
education and practice (Jarzombek 1999). In response, some scholars argue that
sustainable architecture can be understood pluralistically as situated socio-cultural
practices, each with its own history, geography, and politics (Guy and Moore 2008).
Despite this emphasis on the varieties of approaches, most studies of sustainable
architecture, unlike scholarship in environmental politics and history, have largely been
confined to the Euro-American contexts. Although exemplars from the ‘developing’
countries are sometimes included to give the impression of a global discourse, these
studies tend to be silent on the variegated, historical and contested nature of the
1
sustainability debate in the ‘developing’ countries. Instead, the inclusion of exemplars
from ‘developing’ countries serves to demonstrate that sustainable architecture is a
new monolithic global entity – one without history and differentiated only in terms of
technoscientific configurations responding to ‘natural’ variations, such as climate and
ecology, but entirely unaffected by socio-political forces.
I propose to contribute to the pluralistic understanding of sustainable architecture by

examining a few particular variants of it – permutations of tropical architecture in relation
to the social, cultural and political conditions of the postcolonial contexts. By tropical
architecture, I refer to the architectural discourses and practices that appear to give
Page 2 of 47 The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory:

Tropical Variants of Sustainable Architecture: A
Postcolonial Perspective
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primacy to tropical nature, mostly in terms of climatic and environmental conditions, as

the prime determinant of architectural form. Tropical architecture could be regarded as
a variant of sustainable architecture as there are many similarities between the current
discourses of sustainable architecture and the prior discourses of tropical architecture
in terms of their shared emphasis on minimizing resource usage and waste production,
their common concern for social and cultural issues of a locality, and their association
with the diverse issues of [p. 603 ↓ ] socio-economic development. Moreover, tropical
architecture has recently been recast as sustainable architecture (Lauber et al. 2005).
As has been convincingly argued elsewhere, the practices of sustainable architecture

are better understood through narratives that attend to the particularities of a place
and its socio-historical contingencies than through abstract models or best practice
lists (Moore 2007), this chapter draws primarily from a situated study of architecture
and discourses on sustainability in South and Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore,
Malaysia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The architecture and discourses to be examined
centred around the discourses and practices of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture
(AKAA) in these countries in the past two decades or so. Although primarily concerned
with architectural excellence and socio-cultural development in Muslim societies around
the world, AKAA activities have nonetheless wielded considerable influences over the
trajectories that the discourses and practices of tropical sustainable architecture in
South and Southeast Asia took (Chang 2007). Not only were the key protagonists of
tropical sustainable architecture, such as Geoffrey Bawa and Ken Yeang, involved in
AKAA's activities, its transnational network also enabled the coalescence of discrete
discourses and practices from different nation-states into larger unitary regional ones.
Moreover, AKAA's focus on the Islamic and non-Western world highlights the tensions
behind North–South and East–West socio-cultural inequalities and differences, key
aspects of the sustainability concept often ignored in Euro-American discourses on
sustainable architecture.
There are three main sections in this chapter, each representing a particular recent
strand of tropical architecture, each with its own theories of sustainability, politics
of development and entanglements with prior colonial history. In the first section, I
examine recent tropical sustainable architecture in relation to the notions of ecological
modernization and green developmentalism, and I show how it is in many ways an
extension of the post-World-War-II development regime and the modern tropical

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architecture created then. In the second section, I examine neo-traditional tropical

architecture as an alternative path of development in relation to the perceived failure
of the post-World-War-II development regime and the rejection of modern tropical
architecture produced under that regime. I look at how the traditional is imbued with the
ecological. I will also review criticisms of this ‘invention’ of tradition, especially its elitism
and its reproduction of colonial notions of tropicality. In the final section, I examine the
self-help tropical architecture of squatter settlements in Indonesia in relation to how
they address the social dimensions of sustainability, and I also examine them in relation
to the governmental rationality of the global neoliberal regime in capacity building and
producing self-reliant subjects.
I. Green Developmentalism, Ecological

Modernization, and Tropical Sustainable
Architecture
If one looks at the tenth award cycle, 2005–2007, of the AKAA, the winners from
Singapore and Malaysia – the Moulmein Rise Residential Tower designed by WOHA
Architects and University of Technology Petronas designed by Foster and Partners –
give the impression that sustainable architecture in the tropics is merely an extension of
that elsewhere, differentiated only by climatic variations. Both projects are not untypical
of recent large-scale sustainable architecture elsewhere; the Moulmein Rise Residential
Tower is a high-rise condominium development targeted at the high-end housing market
segment while the University of Technology Petronas is a new university established
by Malaysia's state petroleum company to help the nation produce technologists and
engineers to drive the nation's economy forward.
[p. 604 ↓ ]
The Moulmein Rise Residential Tower was primarily lauded by the jury for addressing
‘the challenges of the tropical climates’ by successfully adopting passive cooling
strategies for the high-rise residential typology, while the University of Technology
Petronas was applauded for its ‘contemporary reinterpretation of the classic metaphor

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for tropical architecture – an umbrella that offers protection from the sun and rain’(AKAA
2007). These two projects appear to continue the trend started by Menara Mesiniaga,
a project designed by Hamzah and Yeang, which was an AKAA winner of the sixth
award cycle in 1995. Menara Mesiniga is an office tower designed as a ‘showcase
building’ for the agent of IBM in Malaysia. The standard office tower typology was
reinterpreted through the incorporation of bioclimatic architectural features, such as
the spiralling terraced garden balconies, sun-shading devices, and naturally ventilated
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spaces (Menara Mesiniaga 1995). Seen in the larger context of the Singapore and
Malaysia governments' recent initiatives in encouraging sustainable architecture through
the funding of research in green technologies, building high profile energy efficient
buildings, and the use of sustainable building assessment methods, these AKAA
projects appeared to be in line with these initiatives (Chang 2005; Yap 2007). They are
exemplary components of Singapore and Malaysia's larger environmental movement,
perhaps following the well-trodden paths taken in certain Euro-American societies,
towards what Michael Bess (2003) describes as the global ‘light-green society.’
Underlying the light-green society and these projects are the characteristics of what
has been described as ecological modernization (Barry 2005). Unlike the radical
environmental politics of the 1970s, ecological modernization does not reject the
basic tenets of capitalist modernization. Those who embrace ecological modernization
seek more and better modernization. They share the modernization programme's
fundamental faith in science and technology, and they believe in technological fixes
for environmental problems. Ecological modernization typically entails programmes
that establish and fund research infrastructure to re-engineer or to produce better
technological systems in order to, for example, utilize energy more efficiently or to
exploit renewable energies. In architecture, that could mean that energy profligate
International Style modern buildings should be modified with green gadgets, such as
photovoltaic cells, efficient air-conditioning systems and ‘intelligent’ lighting systems,
to reduce energy consumption and their ecological footprints. It could mean embracing
alternative or even seemingly radical design philosophies and methodologies, such
as biomimicry, ecological design and whole system engineering, to rethink standard
building typologies like the ubiquitous hermetically sealed air-conditioned office tower,
and re-engineer their energy management systems (see for example McDonough and
Braungart 2002).

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Ecological modernization typically works hand in hand with green capitalism and
green developmentalism (McAfee 1999). Green capitalism purportedly transforms
the old regime of capitalist development, which dominated and destroyed nature,
and reconciles the former opposition between economic growth and environmental
protection. One of the basic assumptions is that environmental problems could be
rectified by market solutions based on neo-classical economics promoted by the global
hegemonic regime of neoliberalism. Green capitalism entails the use of market-based
instruments to evaluate and value nature with the implication that in order for nature to
be protected, it must first be demonstrated as a ‘resource’ or a ‘natural capital’. Hence,
for example, the protection of a tropical rainforest from logging and deforestation, and
the conservation of its biodiversity could only happen if it is financed by the sale of
access to eco-tourism sites in the rainforest, or the granting of rights of bio-prospecting
in the rainforest to multinational pharmaceutical companies (Escobar 2004). [p. 605 ↓ ]
In a related manner, sustainable architecture and green design have in recent years
gained widespread acceptance among diverse large corporations because investments
in sustainable architecture and green design are often rationalized economically
in terms of an increase in workforce satisfaction and the concomitant increase in
productivity, cost savings through reduced energy consumption, or increase in symbolic
capital to boost the company's green credentials and increase green consumerism.
Because ecological modernization works hand in hand with green capitalism and
its attendant green consumerism, it does not require structural changes to be made
to the economy. Existing consumption patterns remain largely unchanged, with
perhaps the exception of the increasing commodification of nature, and the existing
measures of development remain unquestioned. Although ecological modernization
and green developmentalism have been equated with the hegemony of the sustainable
development paradigm, as outlined in the Brundtland Report (WCED 1987) and
further articulated in Agenda 21 (following the 1992 Rio Earth Summit) (Carruthurs
2005), one of the three Es of the Brundtland Report – equity, ecology, economy –
is ignored in the discourses and practices of ecological modernization and green
developmentalism (Campbell 1996). Equity, or distributional justice, the key principle
of sustainable development that seeks to address uneven development and unequal
distribution of wealth and resources between the northern (temperate) and southern

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(tropical) hemispheres, and the resultant North–South development conflict, is simply

not addressed.
Post-War Development and

Technoscientific Power-Knowledge
When the AKAA jury referred to tropical architecture in their citation of the University of
Technolgy Petronas, they drew upon the discourses and practices of modern tropical
architecture produced in the post-World-War-II era of decolonization under another
development regime. Those schemes were devised either by international agencies
primarily under the aegis of the United States or the various imperial French and British
agencies. In the context of the decolonizing British Empire, modern tropical architecture
was mostly built by British or British-trained architects, including key figures such as
Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and James Cubitt (Crinson 2003; Fry and Drew 1964; Le Roux
2003). Modern tropical architecture was mainly built as part of the social development
programmes in the colonies funded by the Colonial Development and Welfare Act
(CD&W) first passed in 1940, in the forms of schools, hospitals, mass housing and other
welfare facilities (Atkinson 1953; Stockdale et al. 1948). Although post-war development
in general and CD&W programmes in particular are in some ways different from the
later green developmentalism under the global neoliberal regime described earlier,
there are quite a few significant similarities.
Just as green developmentalism in the guise of sustainable development was

formulated to address uneven development and poverty in the global South in
the 1980s, the CD&W was devised to compensate for years of neglect in social
development and widespread poverty in many of the British tropical possessions in
the late 1930s. It was primarily aimed at quelling anti-colonial sentiments and other
‘disturbances’ linked to the socio-economic problems in many parts of the British
tropical possessions, and it was also in response to criticisms, both in the metropole
and in the colonies, of exploitative colonialism (Cooper and Packard 1997). Not only
were the problems similar, the practices employed in addressing the problems were
also analogous. Many scholars argue that the different post-war development practices,
be they in agriculture, health, education or housing, employed a particular way of

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problematizing that linked the diagnoses with specific prescriptions, and anticipated
certain [p. 606 ↓ ] techniques required to solve the problem. Such an approach of
‘rendering technical’ in which socio-political problems were turned into technical ones
has the effect of depoliticizing social problems (Li 2007). For example, despite the
initial recognition that post-war colonial housing problems were part of the larger
structural problems of poverty, the Colonial Office framed the housing problem as
a strictly specialized technical problem of building cheaper and ‘better’ (in terms of
meeting comfort and sanitary standards) housing (Chang 2010a). In doing so, the
larger structural conditions of poverty for most of the colonial native populations
and their inability to afford better housing were suppressed. In a related way, green
developmentalism framed the question of sustainability strictly in terms of neo-classical
economics and technological change while largely ignoring the underlying questions of
distributional justice and socio-economic relations.
Central to rendering a problem technical was a corresponding body of technoscientific

knowledge, which as scholars in science and technology studies have noted, is
produced by a technoscientific infrastructure of research and educational institutions,
experts and other trained personnel, normative practices and standardized instruments
(Latour 1987). In the case of modern tropical architecture, it was supported by
conferences (The Natal Regional Research Committee 1957; Foyle 1953), educational
institutions such as the Department of Tropical Architecture established at the
Architectural Association (Wakely 1983), and an international network of building
research stations coordinated by the Colonial Liaison Unit of the Building Research
Station in Garston, England (Atkinson 1952; Lea 1971). Technoscientific knowledge
was privileged because the prevailing ideology of post-war development programmes,
as exemplified by American president Harry Truman's Point Four Program, was a
fundamental faith in the transformative power of science and technology, especially in
terms of how the application of technoscientific knowledge would enable development
and provide for welfare (Escobar 1995; Sachs 1992). Green developmentalism and
ecological modernization that underlay tropical sustainable architecture also share this
faith in technoscience. In fact, tropical sustainable architecture often draws directly on
the technoscientific knowledge created earlier. Similar strategies of passive cooling and
even common parti diagrams and architectural language were often adopted, although
their uses are now enhanced by more advanced technologies. Likewise, the building

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research institutions may have evolved but they still play key roles in producing the
technoscientific knowledge in tropical sustainable architecture.
Following scholars who criticized the discourses and practices of post-war development
for reducing a complex life-world into abstract technical knowledge, it could be argued
that the technoscientific practices of modern tropical architecture have the similar effect
of dissolving the historical, social, cultural and political differences between the different
tropical colonies into the common denominator of climate. Moreover, modern tropical
architecture facilitated the replacement of embodied knowledge of place with abstract
technical knowledge of climatic conditions and thermal comfort conditions, thus enabling
the knowledge of ‘place’ from a distance through meteorological data and thermal
comfort charts (Chang 2010a). To be sure, the point here is not to present a (false)
dichotomy between, what James Scott conceptualizes as, the localized, quotidian and
embodied knowledge (or metis) and the codified, standardized and technical knowledge
(or episteme) (Scott 1998, 309–341). Rather, the point here is to attend to the creation
of a modern power-knowledge regime through, what Bruno Latour (1987, 215–257)
calls ‘network building’ and to foreground its effects. In the case of modern tropical
architecture, network building entailed the arduous work of collecting and analyzing
standardized climatic data of different localities at certain ‘centres of calculation’. [p. 607
↓ ] These localities were then grouped into climatic zones and the climatic data were
abstracted into graphical design aids such as sun-path diagrams and prevailing wind
charts. Together with thermal comfort standards and the use of instruments like the
heliodon, which could simulate the positions of the sun and thus test the effectiveness
of sun-shading devices in different localities at different times of a year, these processes
allowed an architect based in, say, London to ‘know’ different localities in the tropics
and propose design for them without having to visit these localities or be personally
acquainted with them. As such, modern tropical architecture could be understood as
a power-knowledge configuration, in that the accumulation of knowledge of the tropics
was also the accrual of power, specifically the power to act on these places from a
distance.
The new technoscientific power-knowledge on modern tropical architecture, along with

neo-colonial capitalist development, also contributed to the creation of new building
norms in the decolonizing developing countries, in terms of modern building standards,
specifications, materials, components and construction methods. Certain commentators

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noted that, not only did these new norms displace traditional constructional crafts
and materials, they also created a dependency on imported construction materials,
components and expertise from the industrialized countries in the tropical colonies
(Jayewardene 1986; 1988). In view of these, some post-development scholars suggest
that post-war development schemes like the CD&W and, in extension, the introduction
of modern tropical architecture, were part of a new hegemonic regime of power-
knowledge to contain and manage the decolonizing/developing world economically and
culturally (Escobar 1995; Sachs 1992). This reliance on imported expertise, building
materials and building components appears to continue into tropical sustainable
architecture given the continued technological gap and inequalities in distribution
of resources between the countries in the tropical south and those in the industrial
north. It should, however, be noted that modern tropical architecture and the attendant
processes of technicalization did not necessarily lead to neo-colonial dominance
and dependency. In some cases, local postcolonial architects were able to produce
influential built exemplars in modern tropical architecture through local improvizations
and innovations (e.g. Tay 2001c). Furthermore, in and of themselves, technicalization
processes and the production of immutable mobiles were not the sole monopoly of
Britain and other developed countries. Although disadvantaged socio-economically,
developing countries could potentially still develop the technical infrastructure and
produce the technoscientific knowledge themselves.
Postcolonial Contestation
Given that tropical sustainable architecture has been interpreted by some as an
extension of the neo-colonial power-knowledge regime that contributed to the
underdevelopment of postcolonial nations in the tropics, does it mean then that any
postcolonial subject pursuing tropical sustainable architecture is suffering from what
a postcolonial critic called ‘epistemic conquest’ (Chatterjee 2001 [1986]) in which
the power-knowledge regime of development paralyses him? There are two main
problems with this reading. Firstly, it assumes that the structure of power-knowledge
is so overbearingly powerful that the postcolonial architect in the tropics could not but
be a ‘“bearer” of structure’ (Bourdieu et al. 1991). Secondly, it assumes that all the
postcolonial nations are a homogeneous entity, similarly caught up in a postcolonial

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mire of poverty and dependency. But as Foucault (1980, 98) notes, ‘[p]ower must
be analyzed as something which circulates … It is never localized here or there,
never in anybody's hands’. In fact Foucauldian theory emphasizes that ‘power is
only power when addressed to individuals who are free to act [p. 608 ↓ ] in one
way or another’ (Gordon 1991, 5). Thus, in spite of their powerful technoscientific
configurations, the neo-colonial power-knowledge on modern tropical architecture
was appropriated and interrogated by post-colonial subjects. Technical expertise
could be acquired by postcolonial subjects; furthermore, technoscientific knowledge
circulated it could be infused with socio-cultural meanings and re-politicized. In the
context of Singapore and Malaysia, which, unlike many other developing countries in
the tropics, were not impoverished by neo-colonial capitalist development but enjoyed
rapid economic growth in the past few decades during the Asia economic ‘miracle’, the
pursuit of tropical sustainable architecture has to be situated and perhaps understood
differently.
In the context of 1980s Singapore and Malaysia, more than a decade before
sustainability was being incorporated into the state's agendas, Singapore architect
Tay Kheng Soon and Malaysia architect Ken Yeang undertook pioneering work on
tropical architecture and urbanism (Chang 2010b; Tay 1989; Yeang 1987). Tay and
Yeang's works then were both related to some of key issues and debates raised at
an AKAA seminar on architecture and identity held at Kuala Lumpur in 1983 (Powell
1983). It was in a context of booming Asia economies and prevailing Asia Pacific
Century boosterism that both Tay and Yeang, along with other architects in the
region, sought to articulate their visions of the ‘tropical city’ as a regional architectural
identity, in what Abidin Kusno (2000, 201) describes as ‘a cultural restructuring of late
capitalist development’. Both Tay and Yeang proposed designs that do not really differ
architecturally from the ecological modernization paradigm described earlier. Green
features such as sun-shading devices, rain-water collectors, and photovoltaic cells
were incorporated into the designs. Bio-mimetic design strategies, such as the lowering
of the ambient temperature of the city environs through simulating the micro-climatic
conditions of the tropical rainforest, were also an intrinsic part of the designs. However,
they were not simply designs using technoscientific discourse in the service of green
developmental-ism or green capitalism. Rather, they were also eco-social visions that
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reject both the Malaysia government's ‘visible politics’, i.e. their imposition of ethnic-

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based architectural identity through the use of ethnic symbols on new buildings, and the
crass commercialism of architectural postmodernism that was then sweeping through
Southeast Asia. Tay (1989), in particular, sought inspiration ‘from the environment
itself, which is specific to time and place … as a generator of form and expression and
to create a sense of cohesive identity which transcends ethnicity and culture’. Tay is
acutely aware of the historical role that colonial cities in the tropics played in the global
division of labour during the age of imperialism. Tay (2001b, 268) describes the eco-
social inequality as such:
Looked at from an ecological perspective, colonialism's exploitation

of tropical resources in effect transferred the surplus value of crops
produced by solar infusion in a flow northwards of commodities in
exchange for cheap manufactured goods at prices preferential to the
North and disadvantageous to the South. Colonial economy was, in
effect, a systemic appropriation of solar energy, which acted as a pump
in service of the northern economies during their industrial revolution.
Tay sees this eco-social inequality lingering into the postcolonial present in the form of a
hierarchical global network of cities and economies. According to Tay, the top-tier cities
in the northern hemisphere control not only the economic production, but also have
an hegemony over the intellectual and artistic production of the tropical cities in the
southern hemisphere. Tay's vision of the ‘tropical city’ represents a way out of this neo-
colonial dependency by creating an urban environment that is conducive to innovation
and provides the conditions of possibilities for people in the tropics to overcome the
northern hegemony. If anything, this example perhaps illustrates that technoscientific
knowledge and practices of tropical architecture [p. 609 ↓ ] that reinforce neo-colonial
dependency in one socio-political context could be appropriated and deployed in
another context, and re-imagined as an emancipatory identity that purportedly frees the
postcolonial subject ‘from the political and taste-dictates of [his] masters’ (Tay 2001a).

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II. Development Alternatives, the Invention

of Tradition, and Neo-Traditional Tropical
Architecture
Besides the works mentioned earlier, there is another group of AKAA-winning projects
that arguably represent a much more influential form of sustainable architecture in
Southeast Asia. This group includes: the Tanjong Jara Beach Hotel in Terengganu,
Malaysia, designed by the Hawaiian architectural firm of Wimberley, Whisenand,
Allison, Tong and Goo, and awarded in 1983 during the second three-year cycle; the
Datai Resort in Langkawi, Malaysia, designed by Kerry Hill Architects and awarded
in 2001 during the eighth cycle; and the Salinger Residence in Selangor, Malaysia,
designed by CSL Associates and awarded in 1998 during the seventh cycle. Tanjong
Jara Beach Hotel was hailed by the jury for reviving local traditional crafts and for
producing ‘an architecture that is in keeping with traditional values and aesthetics,
and of an excellence that matches the best surviving examples’. (Cantacuzino 1985,
141). Datai Resort and Salinger Residence were similarly celebrated for their use of
local materials, crafts and reinterpretation of traditional built form (AKAA 2001) and
uncovering the ‘deeper meanings of a vernacular architectural tradition’ (AKAA 1998).
In other words, this group of projects is unified by their neo-traditionalism, i.e. their
adaptation of traditional building practices and built forms of Malaysia, at the very
time when these traditions were disappearing. The neo-traditional architecture is also
aligned with ecological approaches to building. Their building features, such as the
deep overhanging roof and the porous wall, are said to facilitate passive cooling through
sun-shading and natural ventilation. The timber used in the Salinger Residence was
justified as a local renewable resource with low embodied energy (Alamuddin 1998).
The designers of both the Datai and the Tanjong Jara Beach Hotel approached their
ecologically sensitive sites, i.e. the tropical rainforest and the beachfront breeding
ground of a rare breed of leather-back turtles respectively, in ways that minimized the
disturbances to the fragile ecosystems (Cantacuzino 1985; Mehrotra 2001).
When compared to the AKAA-winning projects discussed in the previous section on

ecological modernization, the difference in built form and construction techniques

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could not be more marked – low-rise pitched roof buildings in contrast with mid-
to-high-rise flat roof buildings, the use of timber and stone instead of concrete and
steel, and the (selective) reliance on pre-industrial low technology ways of building
against the use of industrial cutting-edge high technology. Underlying the differences
in built form and building practices are said to be fundamental differences in ideology
and outlook. In contrast to the faith in modern science and technology central to
the ecological modernization paradigm, this group of buildings appears to reject
the technocentric approach and seek a return to pre-modern traditional practices.
One of the key impetuses behind this impulse to return to tradition arose from the
disillusionment with post-war development and modernization programmes, which were
said to promise the postcolonial developing world emancipation from economic poverty
and social backwardness, but instead produced economic dependency and cultural
demise (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997).
Criticisms of development and modernization are an integral part of the discourses

that AKAA produced. For example, in an AKAA seminar on regionalism held in Dhaka,
Bangladesh, the prominent Indian writer [p. 610 ↓ ] and art critic Mulk Raj Anand (1985,
41) captured the overall sentiment when he remarked poignantly: ‘We were gifted with
the word liberty, but were made slaves’. Criticisms were largely targeted at International
Style modern architecture and how the importation of its foreign building norms and
expertise into the developing countries since the post-war years repressed indigenous
building traditions (Mumtaz 1985). Criticisms were also directed at how the technical
practices of International Style modern architecture purportedly brought about homo
genization and the destruction of local socio-cultural diversities. Undoubtedly also
influenced by the scholarship on traditional architecture which first emerged in the
1960s (see for example Oliver 1969; Rudofsky 1964) and became widely disseminated
and prominent by the 1980s, many of these critics found the panacea for all the evils of
modernization, development and International Style modern architecture in traditional
buildings and traditional building practices, and became their advocates. Instead of
the dependence on foreign capital, building expertise and building materials required
in the production of International Style modern architecture, these advocates saw
traditional buildings as promoting self-reliance because of their utilization of local
knowledge, local labour and locally available materials. In place of the abrupt break
with the past that modernization and development programmes brought about, these

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advocates believed that the return to tradition meant socio-cultural continuity with the
past. In contrast to the purported conditions of homogenization and placelessness
brought about by International Style modern architecture, these advocates felt that
the revival of traditional building would contribute to the construction of regional and
place-based identity (Powell 1985). Set against the energy and resource profligacy
of the International Style modern architecture and the domination of nature by man in
the industrial West, the traditional architecture supposedly evoked an ecological pre-
industrial past in which the built and the natural environments were in harmony.
The discourse of AKAA both reflected the larger sympathies towards traditional
architecture while also playing the active role of shaping those sympathies by
‘championing indigenous architecture’ (Serageldin 1989b, 26). This is evident when
one examines the list of AKAA winners, in which approximately half of the ninety-two
winners (until 2007) are either heritage conservation projects or projects related to the
4
reinterpretation and continuation of traditional building typologies, crafts, and materials.
In addition, two of the three recipients of prestigious AKAA Chairman's award,
presented to an individual architect in recognition of his lifetime achievement, were
exponents of ‘neo-traditional’ architecture – Hassan Fathy (in 1980) and Geoffrey Bawa
(in 2001). The extent of AKAA's reverence for tradition was such that it was accused by
one of its jurors of having ‘a romantic bias towards traditionalism, historicism and the
vernacular’ (Pamir 1989, 75).
In the context of tropical architecture in Southeast Asia, Bawa's work is said to be

especially significant. Bawa's work was considered to have influenced many architects
in what one writer called ‘Monsoon Asia’, specifically Singapore, Malaysia and
Indonesia, especially in the design of luxurious neo-traditional houses and resorts for
the super-rich (Robson 2007). His work at the Batujimbar Estate in Bali for Australian
artist Donald Friend is an important precedent that established a particular model
of luxurious tropical ‘Balinese Resort’ that is purportedly sensitive to the cultural
and ecological contexts of a place (Goad 2000). This model of luxurious tropical
resort, although initially produced by the confluence of tourism, transnational capital,
international artists and architects in Bali, subsequently proliferated transnationally
beyond the confines of Bali and even Southeast Asia and became what a critic
described as a ‘non-specific Asian style’ (Sudjic 2000). Two of the aforementioned

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AKAA winners, Tanjong Jara [p. 611 ↓ ] Beach Hotel and especially the Datai Resort,
represent the exemplars of this new model of resorts. The other winner, the Salinger
Residence, is exemplary of the luxury neo-traditional houses that were influenced by the
‘Balinese resorts’.
Postcolonial Traditional Elitism

Tradition is of course not a timeless, eternal entity ‘out there’ or from the past to be
recovered by some historical actors (Al Sayyad 2004). Rather, there is no tradition
that pre-exists its social, cultural, political and economic construction or ‘invention’.
Thus, it is perhaps pertinent for one to ask who is mobilizing what kind of tradition in
service of what kind of visions and agendas? Recent studies have shown that the
production of neo-traditional architecture in different parts of the developing world
was intimately connected with social, cultural and political elitism (see for example
Mitchell 2002, 179–205). Many of the key producers of neo-traditional architecture in
different parts of developing world, such as Hassan Fathy and Geoffrey Bawa, were
from the land-owning class. For these cosmopolitan professionally trained architects,
their selective interpretations of the traditional architecture tended towards romantic
idealization, made possible through their aloofness from the actual living traditions
of the peasants. These supposed that ‘architecture without architects’ in fact had to
be anointed through the cultural authority of the elite architect. Besides that, these
interpretations of traditional architecture frequently draw from prior colonial construction.
Historians of colonial societies argue that European scholars sought to study, classify
and order the traditions and customs in these societies as these knowledges help
to legitimize the colonizers' power and rule over the colonial societies (Metcalf 2002
[1989]). As such, many of the ‘traditional’ architectural forms that we often take for
granted are in fact recent colonial ‘inventions’. In the context of Sri Lanka, it is argued
that Bawa's neo-traditional architecture reproduces the colonial gaze and the associated
value system (Pieris 2007). Moreover, as mentioned, these neo-traditional architectures
are often luxury houses and resorts, produced for an elite clientele that comes from the
same privileged socio-economic stratum as the architects, i.e. those who could afford
to share the cultural distinction as the architects themselves; not the poor or even the
middle class. These neo-traditional architectures tended to rely heavily on a labour-

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intensive craft-based construction process, which was premised upon the availability of
pools of cheap labour. Given that the return of tradition was often attributed to the failure
of the modernization and development to liberate the developing world from poverty and
backwardness, the elitism associated with neo-traditional architecture is paradoxical
and its exploitation of the poorer class is, to say the least, ironic.
Landscape and Tropicality

The history of the bungalow could be instructive for understanding of neo-traditional
tropical architecture. Not only were there spatial similarities between neo-traditional
tropical architecture and the Anglo-Indian bungalow in terms of features such as the
verandah, large and lofty rooms, and large landscaped compound; neo-traditional
tropical architecture is also akin to bungalows in British seaside resorts, in that they
are both purpose-built holiday dwellings linked to the (post) colonial world economy. As
the aforementioned building features of a bungalow contribute to a cool, shady interior
environment and a picturesque landscape, neo-traditional tropical architecture was
often considered by its advocates and other architecture connoisseurs to be in harmony
with the tropical ‘nature’. However, Anthony D. King (1995 [1984]) points out that the
built form of the bungalow was inextricably connected to the colonial capitalist economy.
For, example [p. 612 ↓ ] the plantation bungalow, one of the most common forms of
bungalow, was an intrinsic part of the colonial tropical mode of production, i.e. that
of the plantation system supplying raw material for industrial production in temperate
Europe and America. Environmental historians argue that each mode of production
also entails a specific mode of resource use (Gadgil and Guha 1992). In the case of
the plantation in the tropics, it entails the conversion of ‘useless’, i.e. unproductive in
the capitalist sense, ‘virgin’ tropical rainforest into plantations. In the early twentieth
century, pestilential tropical nature, teeming with millions of parasites and pathogens
that threatened the health of the white man and the plantation labourers, had to be
transformed into a safe, romanticized Edenic tropical landscape through the pioneering
anti-malarial and rural sanitary work by heroic figures such as Malcolm Watson and
Ronald Ross (Watson 1915). From this perspective, far from being in harmony with
some primal tropical nature, tropical architecture was in fact part of the resultant
landscape produced through the colonial capital's transformation of tropical nature.

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The colonial plantation bungalow in the tropics was also linked to the bungalow
in the British seaside resorts in the nineteenth century through the colonial world
economy, which facilitated not only the metropole's extraction of economic surpluses
from the colonies but also the circulation and exchange of people, commodities
and, especially in this case, building types. King notes that one of the effects of the
accumulation of surplus capital through the colonial world economy, and the attendant
social segmentation and spatial differentiation, in Victorian Britain was the production of
new spaces of consumption and recreation. In addition, the use of the sea, specifically
the breathing of its air and bathing in its water, with curative powers in the nineteenth
century medical discourse and the romantic idealization of the Anglo-Indian bungalow in
the travel literature of nineteenth century Britain helped to bring about the emergence of
the seaside resort with its holiday bungalows (King 1995 [1984]). With the emergence
of the seaside resorts, uneconomic stretches of the cliffs and beaches on the British
coastline were converted into valuable real estate. Similar forces could be said to be
at work in the neo-traditional resorts. With the rapid growth of international tourism in
Southeast Asia from the 1960s onwards and the pursuit of tourism development by
the Malaysian government in the economically less developed parts of the country in
the 1970s and 1980s, resorts such as the Datai and Tanjong Jara were built in areas
with pristine but ‘unproductive’ nature, such as the tropical rainforest in the case of
the former and sandy beaches in the latter. At these resorts, the pristine nature was
incorporated into the neo-traditional architecture and staged as part of the tourists'
experience there. Unlike the earlier colonial moment, when pristine nature was of little
value under the agricultural economy, the experience of pristine nature is key to value-
creation in, what some business school gurus describe as, the ‘experience economy’ of
the tourist resorts (Pine and Gilmore 1999).
Such a commodification of tropical nature draws on prior colonial constructions.

Along the line of Saidian orientalism, scholars of colonial environmentalism argue
that the colonial tropical landscape could be understood as an imaginative geography
constructed as an alterity against the perceived normality of the temperate lands.
It represented a way of seeing the tropics that entangled nature with socio-political
notions such as race, civilization and gender, rendering tropical nature variously as the
exotic, Edenic, pestilential or backward other (Anderson 2006; Arnold 1996; Stepan
2001). Not only did the imaginative geography shape the material landscape at different

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levels – from how tropical ‘natural’ landscape was moulded in the creation of gardens
and plantations, to how architectural urban types such as bungalow, hill station and
‘garden city’ were planned in the tropics – these scholars also [p. 613 ↓ ] argue that
the discursive construction of categories such as the Orient and the tropics in colonial
knowledge helped to produce socio-political norms and shape subjectivities that
underwrote the power structure of colonial rule.
III. Grassroot Development, Kampung

Improvement, and Self-Help Tropical
Architecture
The final group of AKAA-winning projects to be examined represents the only projects
in this chapter that attempted to address the social equity dimension of sustainability
ignored by the previous two strands of tropical architecture. They are the Kampung
Improvement Program (KIP) in Jakarta awarded in 1980 during the first three-year
cycle, Kampung Kebalen Improvement in Surabaya awarded in 1986 during the third
cycle, and Kampung Kali Cho-de in Yogyakarta awarded in 1992 during the fifth
cycle. These Indonesian projects, though fairly varied, do share quite a few similar
characteristics. These projects dealt with not the elite socio-economic minority but the
impoverished masses of the society and they sought to address the most rudimentary
issues of housing these people. The KIP in Jakarta is an initiative that was first started
in 1969 to improve the city's kampungs, which were the overcrowded and insanitary
squatter settlements occupied by a large portion of Jakarta's population that could not
afford better housing. These kampung dwellers built their own houses out of cheap
local and cast-off building materials. As these houses squat on undeveloped land, they
typically did not have proper electricity and water supplies, and sewerage systems.
As a result, these kampung dwellers had to rely on polluted sources for water, and
the problems with rubbish disposal and drainage led to frequent flooding during the
rainy seasons and, consequently, major health problems (Holod and Rastorfer 1983).
Kampung Kebalen was an exemplar for the KIP in Surabaya, which was also initiated in
1969 to deal with largely the same problems as those in the case of Jakarta (Serageldin
1989a; Silas 1992). In the case of Kampung Kali Cho-de, it was about helping a group

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of people who were not only very poor and disadvantaged but also stigmatized. This
group of people, many of whom were ex-criminals or prostitutes, was considered
sampah masyarakat or ‘the dregs and outcasts of society’. They lived in ‘miserable huts’
made of cartons and plastic sheets, which disintegrated each time there was a heavy
rain, erected on a site that was literally a refuse dump by the bank of the Cho-de river
(Al-Radi and Moore 1992; Mangunwijaya 1992).
Unlike the neo-traditional tropical architecture, the environmental problems in these

squatter settlements were not about the preservation of some pristine external nature
through the use of certain exalted traditions; neither was it like the tropical sustainable
architecture in which concerns were focused on energy and environmental resource
profligacy that have to be reined in and modified. Instead, with limited funds from
the local governments and international development institutions such as the World
Bank, the improvements proposed for these squatter settlements were basic, aimed at
improving fundamental environmental, and the attendant social, problems. The KIPs in
Jakarta and Kebalen sought to address the problems of access, sanitation, health and
certain aspects of social improvement. They entailed what is called a ‘site and service’
approach in which basic site infrastructure such as water supply, electricity supply,
sewerage, drainage, roads and pavements were provided or improved. Furthermore,
washing and toilet facilities, clinics and schools were also added.
The case of Kampung Kali Cho-de, however, was more complex. While the KIPs in
Jakarta and Surabaya were sanctioned by the Indonesian state as part of a national
development strategy, the inhabitants of Kampung Kali Cho-de were considered such
undesirable members of the society that their wretched [p. 614 ↓ ] existence at the
site might not even be tolerated by the authorities and they faced the likelihood of
eviction. The strategy adopted by Y.B. Mangunwijaya, a Catholic priest-architect-
social activist (Lindsay 1999), and Willi Prasetya, the social chief of the area, was to
organize the inhabitants into a cooperative community to improve themselves and their
built environment, so as to demonstrate that they were improvable subjects and thus
worthy members of the society who deserved the state's recognition. With funds drawn
from donations by the local newspapers, Mangunwijaya himself and his friends, the
site was improved and the provisional huts were converted into permanent buildings.
Unlike the KIPs, the focus was not on building services and site utilities; it was instead
placed on creating an appealing appearance and making a good impression. The

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community was organized to keep the kampung compound and the adjoining river-
bank clean and tidy. With the help of art student volunteers, the inhabitants painted their
dwellings in colourful patterns. The transformation of the kampung from a ramshackle
plot into an orderly, well-maintained and appealing place helped it gain the local
authorities' acceptance. From the initial fear of being evicted, Kampung Kali Cho-de was
‘benevolently tolerated’ by the authorities after its improvement and subsequently it was
even informally recognized by being permitted to be connected to the city's electricity
system (Mangunwijaya 1992).
Another characteristic that unifies the different projects is their reliance on not only
the professional architects, contractors and other usual members of the construction
industry, but on the participation of the kampung inhabitants themselves and the help of
volunteers and social activists from nongovernmental organizations. Even though both
KIPs were initiated by state agencies and adopted more or less top-down approaches to
design decision-making, they sought help from non-governmental organizations and the
design process frequently involved consulting the kampung inhabitants. For example,
the Kampung Kebalen project enlisted the help of the professors and students from the
local university's faculty of architecture to survey the site and conduct other preparatory
planning work. These consultants emphasized that the kampung inhabitants were
consulted and involved in their design and planning process (Serageldin 1989a).
Similarly, in the Jakarta KIP, the kampung headmen and inhabitants were, to varying
degrees, consulted in the planning process, and organized in the maintenance of
the amenities built. As noted earlier, this sense of community participation and self-
improvement was the most important aspect behind the strategy for the inhabitants of
Kampung Kali Cho-de to gain acceptance by the local government and their officials.
Behind these projects was an important shift in the attitude towards squatter settlements
and the urban poor who built and lived in them. Kampung improvement in Indonesia
has a long history that could be traced to the Dutch colonial practices at the turn of
the twentieth century. KIP was used by the Dutch colonial government as a political
strategy of pacification, and these colonial practices of managing the native population
no doubt shaped postcolonial kampung improvement practices (Kusno 2000, 120–
143). However, the recognition bestowed upon KIP by transnational organizations
such as AKAA, the funding of KIP by international development agencies such as
the World Bank and the subsequent development of the KIP into, what a World Bank

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representative considered as, the ‘best and richest model’ (Darrundono and Tirtamadja
2000, 2–3) in the 1990s that others were emulating should be understood in relation to
the influential international theories and practices of self-help housing drawn primarily
from the Latin American exemplars. John Turner's seminal Housing by People (1976)
and the first Habitat conference in Vancouver in 1976, marked this important shift
towards recognizing the ability of the poor and the value of the self-help housing they
built (Berner and Phillips 2005). These ideas were also accepted [p. 615 ↓ ] by the
World Bank and incorporated into its loan assistance programme for urban projects in
the developing countries at around the same time. Indonesia's post-independence KIPs
started receiving World Bank loan assistance from 1976 onwards.
Behind this shift was a group of advocates who regarded the informal self-help housing
as being better suited to local conditions and needs than the modern housing provided
by either the state or the formal market. Rather than seeing the urban poor who
engaged in self-help housing as a group of ignorant and marginalized people trapped
in a ‘culture of poverty’, the advocates regarded them as resourceful individuals.
They pushed for the recognition and the legalization of self-help housing and squatter
settlements, along with their informal economic activities (De Soto 1989). They argued
that the state should not demolish the squatter settlements; instead, it should facilitate
and encourage the growth and improvement of the squatter settlements through
schemes such as the provision of ‘sites and services’ and through providing security
of tenure and financial aid. Like the other variants of tropical architectures discussed
earlier, the shift of attitude towards self-help housing could also be attributed to the
perceived failure of standard modernization and urbanization programmes, particularly
the urban renewal, slum clearance and public housing programmes in the developing
countries during the post-World-War-II decades. However, unlike the cases of tropical
sustainable architecture and neo-traditional tropical architecture, there was no need for
better modernization, nor was there a need to return to past traditions; the advocates for
self-help housing saw the solution in recognizing what was already there – the squatter
settlements and development from below.
Self-help housing initiatives received a further boost with the emergence of the global
neoliberalism regime in the 1980s. The neoliberal institutions and policymakers see self-
help housing as the only feasible solution to developing countries' housing problems
(Davis 2006). Encouraging and facilitating self-help housing is not just a cost efficient

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way of dealing with the severe housing problems and a justification for the fiscal
austerity measures and the withdrawal of state housing subsidies that frequently
accompanied the neoliberal economic restructuring in these developing countries. It
is also a new technology of government that entails specific practices of identifying
the targets to be governed, i.e. the urban poor, directing their conduct by supposedly
empowering and optimizing their capacities for improvement, and thus producing self-
reliant subjects (Dean 1999; Foucault 1991). As the consultants for Kampung Kebalen
put it, the KIP was organized in a manner that would ‘stimulate the community in the
priority setting of the project components, upgrade their own private domain, and
complement the result of the KIP in a process in order to enhance… their own life
style’ (AKAA 1986). Through an economy of means, in financial outlay, in the extent of
construction, and also in terms of minimum intervention and exertion of power from the
consultants and the government, the dwellers of squatter settlements would purportedly
become self-reliant, entrepreneurial subjects. Moreover, these kampung dwellers
were deemed to be producing climatically responsive ‘tropical architecture’. One of
the technical reviewers noted that the upgrades by the kampung dwellers enhanced
the natural lighting and the ventilation in their houses and improved the microclimate
in the kampung through their planting of trees, flowers and shrubs (AKAA 1986).
The climatically-responsive architecture was seen as another demonstration of the
ingenuity of the urban poor, of their ability to use limited resources in both an efficient
and effective manner.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I review three different broad categories in the postcolonial tropical [p.
616 ↓ ] variants of sustainable architecture. I draw from a range of interdisciplinary
scholarship to critique these variants of sustainable architecture. I started the chapter by
arguing that each of three broad categories represents a specific configuration of theory
of sustainability, politics of development and entanglements with prior colonial history. I
will conclude by looking at the commonalities between the three categories, sieving out
and summarizing four key themes and related theoretical insights.
The first theme is the need to historicize ideas and practices of sustainability. It has
been noted that environmentalism, of which sustainability is a part, tended to be

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presented as something relatively new and thus without much of a history. As a result,
much of the contemporary scholarship on environmentalism has been silent on how
certain ideas in environmentalism have been part of longer and deeper historical and
ideological debates. This inattention to the history of environmental ideas and practices
is even more unfortunate in the case of the post-colonial nation-states. As scholars
in post-colonial studies note, colonial knowledge and practices, and the attendant
relations of power and difference, not only linger on after the formal end of colonialism
but are continually being reactivated in the contemporary world. In my study of tropical
sustainable architecture, I show that it draws significantly on the mid-twentieth-century
knowledge and practices of colonial development and modern tropical architecture.
Furthermore, in my review of neo-traditional tropical architecture, I argue that, in
turning away from the modernization and development doctrine, the advocates of neo-
traditional architecture returned to not so much a vaunted pre-modern tradition as to a
colonial invented tradition and the colonial notions of tropicality.
The second theme concerns power-knowledge. Foucault (1995 [1977], 27) notes that
‘power and knowledge directly imply one another, that there is no power relation without
the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not
presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’. The same could be said
for the different knowledge of sustainable architecture. This is not simply innocuous
knowledge as suggested by the anodyne phrase. Rather, the knowledge of sustainable
architecture has been mobilized to augment different configurations of power relations.
As my review of modern tropical architecture shows, the apparently objective and
value-free technoscientific knowledge on climatic design was used to facilitate action
at a distance and thus enabled the creation of ‘centres of calculation’. Moreover, the
practices of ‘rendering technical’ which produced the technoscientific knowledge not
only reduced controversial social, cultural and political problems into abstract technical
questions, they also led to larger structural conditions behind the problems to be
glossed over. In my review of neo-traditional tropical architecture, I mention how it
relied on previous colonial knowledge of the natives' traditions and customs that were
used to legitimize colonial rule. Power-knowledge is also linked to the technologies of
government under the regime of neoliberalism. As I note in my review of the KIPs in
Indonesia, knowledge of the urban poor made their conduct amenable to intervention.
It is, however, important to note that the very concept of power-knowledge implies

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that any knowledge is itself is a field of contestation. As I argue in the case of tropical
architecture in Singapore and Malaysia during the 1980s, the technicalized colonial
knowledge in tropical architecture was appropriated by post-colonial architects and re-
invested with socio-cultural meanings.
Hybridity forms the third theme. This conception of hybridity comes, not from post-
colonial studies but, from Bruno Latour's argument that distinct categories and
especially dichotomies, such as humans versus non-humans and nature versus social
as produced by the modern work of purification, fail to account for the complex reality
(Latour 1993). Latour proposes that the artificial [p. 617 ↓ ] distinctions should be
discarded and they should instead be understood as hybrid assemblies that gather and
interconnect heterogeneous elements through networks and translations. Extending
such a view, I argue that sustainability should be treated as a hybrid assembly that
has to be understood in terms of how the three Es of economy, ecology and equity
are interconnected. My critique of the three different broad categories of tropical
architecture, especially the first two, lies also in how each category operates through
privileging a particular narrow dimension of sustainability and isolating it from the other
dimensions of the hybrid assembly of sustainability.
The fourth and final theme is on local – global interactions. I argue at the beginning of
the chapter that any understanding of sustainability has to depend on local specificities.
I also note that the local and global do not form a dichotomy. Rather, the local
and global are linked in a complex network. The historical moments of the various
variants of sustainable architecture in the tropics should be understood in the various
larger global context, from the colonial world system in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, to the post-World-War-II regime of international development and
modernization in the mid-twentieth century, to finally the neoliberal globalization from
the late twentieth century onwards. Further complicating these is the regional discourse
of AKAA, a unique model of transnational Islamic network. Thus, while I insist on
situating this chapter in relation to local specificities, I am sure these particular variants
of sustainable architecture that I study have wider resonances beyond the South and
Southeast Asian contexts.

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Notes
1 For discussions on the differences between the environmentalism in the ‘developed’
and ‘developing’ countries, see, for example Greenough and Tsing (2003); Guha and
Martâinez Alier (1998).
2 The bioclimatic approach was first advocated by the Olgyay brothers in the 1960s
and Yeang has been further refining the approach for high rise buildings since the early
1980s, see Olgyay and Olgyay (1963); Powell (1989).
3 Sibel Bozdog#an's term in another context. She was describing how the Turkish state
used architectural design as symbols of official nationalism (Bozdog#an 2001).
4 A large proportion of the rest of the projects are public housing and infrastructure
related projects, including self-help housing improvement and the renowned Grameen
Bank Housing Programme. Only a very small number of projects awarded could be
considered ‘modern’, at least aesthetically. For a recent overview of the projects
awarded under AKAA, see Özkan (2001).
[p. 618 ↓ ]
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The SAGE Handbook

Contributors: C. Greig Crysler & Stephen Cairns & Hilde Heynen

Chapter 34: Tropical Variants of

In recent years, architectural discourses have been increasingly dominated by issues

I propose to contribute to the pluralistic understanding of sustainable architecture by

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primacy to tropical nature, mostly in terms of climatic and environmental conditions, as

As has been convincingly argued elsewhere, the practices of sustainable architecture

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architecture created then. In the second section, I examine neo-traditional tropical

I. Green Developmentalism, Ecological

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(tropical) hemispheres, and the resultant North–South development conflict, is simply

Post-War Development and

Just as green developmentalism in the guise of sustainable development was

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Central to rendering a problem technical was a corresponding body of technoscientific

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The new technoscientific power-knowledge on modern tropical architecture, along with

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Looked at from an ecological perspective, colonialism's exploitation

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II. Development Alternatives, the Invention

When compared to the AKAA-winning projects discussed in the previous section on

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Criticisms of development and modernization are an integral part of the discourses

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In the context of tropical architecture in Southeast Asia, Bawa's work is said to be

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Postcolonial Traditional Elitism

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Landscape and Tropicality

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Such a commodification of tropical nature draws on prior colonial constructions.

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III. Grassroot Development, Kampung

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Unlike the neo-traditional tropical architecture, the environmental problems in these

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Adams David ‘Rudolf Steiner's first goetheanum as an illustration of organic

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AKAA (1986). ‘AKAA Kampung Kebalen Improvement Project Architects’ Record' ,

AKAA (1998). ‘Technical Review Summary of Salinger Residence’ , http://

Alexander Christopher, Sara Ishikawa

Alamuddin Hana(1998). ‘AKAA 1998 Technical Review Summary of Salinger Residence’ ,

AlSayyad Nezar (ed.) (2004). The End of Tradition? London: Routledge.

(1985). ‘Background’ , in R. Powell (ed.) Regionalism in Architecture .

Anderson Warwick (2006). Colonial Pathologies . Durham: Duke University Press.

Arnold David (1996). The Problem of Nature . Oxford: Blackwell.

(1948). ‘The Industrial Revolution 1760–1830’ . Retrieved from

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‘British architects in the tropics’ , Architectural Association Journal

Audacity (2009). Audacity website , http://www.audacity.org, accessed December 30,

(2005). ‘Ecological modernisation’ , in J.S. Dryzek, ed. and D. Schlosberg

(1982). The Ecology of Freedom, The Emergence and Dissolution of