A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience by Jiat-Hwee Chang (review)

Beginning with the 1978 publication of Edward Said's groundbreaking book Orientalism, a body of scholarly work emerged in multiple historical disciplines to provide a critical reexamination of the legacy of Western colonialism. As the field of postcolonial studies expanded to include other protagonists, while embracing psychoanalytic, subaltern, feminist, and other marginalized perspectives, a new wave of architectural histories participated in this wide diffusion of subjects and methods. Despite the many directions of this scholarship, most challenged the dichotomy between East and West to examine the varying circulation of power as well as the diverse hybridities produced under (and after) colonialism.

Jiat-Hwee Chang's book is a fine example of the continuing expansion of this promising field of research, with an explicitly stated intention to critically examine "the ahistorical and apolitical discourses of tropical architecture" (p. 2). The book explores the term "tropical architecture" as a discursive field in the manner of Said's Orientalism and in so doing it challenges the assumptions that would make it seem a rather innocently conceived and timeless reference to the architecture of a particular climatic zone. As Chang argues, tropical architecture exists within a constantly changing field defined by colonial and postcolonial power relations. Drawing heavily on the writings of philosopher Michel Foucault, the book offers a "genealogy" of tropical architecture—an approach to history that disrupts normative readings of the past by examining it through a variety of marginal sources. In the case of this book, Chang references an impressive range of what might seem to be peripheral actors, from military engineers to medical and sanitary experts, as well as consulting alternate areas of knowledge, such as environmental technologies, engineering and building sciences, tropical medicine and sanitation—the intention being to destabilize any normative reading of tropical architecture. Beyond the impact of Foucault, the book is clearly cognizant of the existing scholarship, whether that be Brenda A. Yeoh's Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996), which tackles the same geographic locus, or Mark Crinson's Modern Architecture at the End of Empire (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), which provides a powerful and expansive model for studying the late British Empire.

One of the strengths of the book is the clarity of its organization and argumentation, which allows for the complexity and richness of the research to come through. The work is organized in two parts, with the first four chapters dealing with the "pre-institutionalized" history of tropical architecture beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing to the mid-twentieth century. The focus of this discussion is on ideas of nature, hygiene, and health whose impact is measured through specific building types—the house, the barracks, and the hospital—as well as in broader attitudes to planning. The second half of the book shifts to examine what the author refers to as "knowledge production and circulation" (p. 13). This subject is discussed through the initiation of coordinated scientific study through a network of research stations as well as the emergence of "experts"—the culmination of which was seen in the education and professionalization of the field of tropical design in the 1950s and '60s.

In assessing the book, some of the most compelling moments are where broader fields of knowledge come to bear on specific buildings and environments. Particularly strong is the discussion of Foucault's concept of biopower in relation to the barracks, which was described as a "biopolitical and sanitary haven" in the context of a larger "insanitary wasteland" (p. 84). Leveraging the racial dimensions of this discriminatory order seems particularly promising for this topic, though that promise is largely unfulfilled as the issue is only periodically referenced. More generally, while the book largely succeeds in its aim of challenging the normative definition of tropical architecture through a genealogical approach, at times the structure of the book...