Building on the boundary — modern architecture in the tropics

This paper is drawn from research into architectural practice and discourse in colonial settings during modernism, to investigate the entangled and sometimes antagonistic relations between architectural, political and cultural contexts. The paper will show how the built boundary in ‘tropical’ sites has been the site of much architectural thought and experimentation. The nature of this experimentation is technical, and constructs differences in terms of certain physical aspects of the site, mostly regarding climate. Through design, the building boundary is configured to alter the climate's effect and make the interior more comfortable for western users. By examining how this boundary functions, however, it appears that far from being neutral the boundary works to structure (other) relations between the inside and outside of the building. These mirror the power relations between centre and periphery. The built boundary can also be seen as a production of unequal exchanges between these locations, exchanges ...