We are delighted to announce this SAHGB/IHR Seminar
Please note that this event will be Online Only, via Zoom.
A Zoom link will be circulated on the day of the event to all those who registered.
Post-War Tropical Architecture in West Africa: Knowledge Production and Affluent Consumption
Tropical Timber: The United Africa Company and Modern Interiors in Mid-Century Britain
Speakers: Iain Jackson & Rixt Woudstra
Floating logs down the river to the factory site, Sapele, Nigeria, African Timber & Plywood Company,
1950s - Unilever Archive, Port Sunlight
Post-War Tropical Architecture: This paper is concerned with modernist architecture in “British West Africa” produced in the aftermath of WW2 and the independence period of these countries.
These experimental and often provocative structures were designed for climatic comfort, as well as becoming didactic vehicles for ideas sharing ideas of a modern and liberated Africa. The paper will discuss attempts at forming an ‘Bauhaus’ Art School in Accra, followed by various commissions of libraries, community centres, and museums that sought to blend the most radical architectural designs with decoration, murals, and sculptures. The West African context seemingly presented a ‘blank canvas’ for newly qualified architects eager to ‘experiment’ in ways that would be impossible in Britain. Whilst these buildings were often presented as symbols of an emerging nationalism and expectation of liberation, they also reveal the ongoing neo-colonial methods, with many relying on the patronage of multinationals such as the United Africa Company.
Finally, the paper will discuss how these projects were reported, especially through the high-brow magazine “Nigeria”, which regularly featured extensive articles written by the architects on the latest designs. The result was a diverse and extremely fertile context that reveals an often-overlooked set of important structures responding to a period of political flux and cultural exchange.
Tropical Timber: In 1960, the new, modernist headquarters of the United Africa Company (UAC) opened in central London, designed by the partnership Kenneth Wakeford, Jerram and Harris. Since the late nineteenth century, the UAC was one of the leading British trading companies extracting a variety of raw goods, including palm oil, cocoa, as well as tropical timber from colonial and, subsequently, independent British West Africa. While the structure’s concrete and glass exterior may have seemed cold, inside, the architects used a strikingly large variety of tropical timber. The doors, floors and panelling, as well as most of the furniture, were made of honey-coloured idigbo, pinkish makore, fine-textured guarea and deep-brown African mahogany. What were once stately trees standing tall in the dense, remote and humid forests of the Niger Delta and Western Ghana had become office chairs, parquet floors and cocktail cabinets, transformed through the labour of hundreds of African workers.
Although an exceptional example, United Africa House was certainly not the only building decorated with tropical timber in mid-century Britain. This talk focuses on how ‘empire timber’ left an imprint on British post offices, university buildings, civic centres, housing estates and sport facilities. Tracing the origins of this specific material and examining how and by whom it was logged, sawn and shipped, shows, I argue, the extent to which British modernism was dependent on imperial and neo-imperial networks of extraction.
BIO
Rixt Woudstra is a historian of modern architecture, material culture and colonialism. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, she worked at Liverpool University as part of a Leverhulme-funded project on the architectural and urban history of the United Africa Company in British West Africa. She completed her Ph.D. at MIT.
Iain Jackson is an architect and historian at the Liverpool School of Architecture. His research is mainly focused on 20thC architecture in ‘the tropics’. After completing his PhD on the Indian city of Chandigarh, Jackson co-authored a monograph on Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. He has continued to work in West Africa and is currently PI on a Leverhulme Trust funded project to research the buildings of the United Africa Company. Jackson co-curated an exhibition with ArchiAfrika in 2019 on the 20thC architecture of Accra.