The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew

Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa: The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane
Drew, 1946-56
Author(s): Rhodri Windsor Liscombe
Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp.
188-215
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural
Historians
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Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa

The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, 1946-56
RHODRI WINDSOR LISCOMBE

University of British Columbia
One significant episode in the transoceanic

migra
uct
of British colonial policy in West Africa. Foll
tion of modern-movement architectureWorld

and plan
War I, British policy had promoted educat
ning was a series of educational commissions
essential to its conjoined goals of colonial economic d
completed by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in West

Africa
opment
and gradual devolution of legislative pow
(1946-5 6). * The architects designed or enlarged

seventeen
Africans.
This policy led to an increase in the constr
institutions in the British colonies of the Goldof
Coast
(nowduring the interwar period, including the
schools
lishment in
Ghana) and Nigeria and in the contiguous Protectorate
of1927 of the influential Prince of Wales N
Togoland (Figure 1). These buildings formedSchool

a notable
for Teachers in Achimota, outside Accra.
afterof
World War II, creation of educational facil
part of what one biographer described as Fry's and
"empire
inofficially
the British West African colonies was accelerated
good practice."2 Fry and Drew's application of
sanctioned modernist design in their practice

West mobilization and by postwar developmen
by in
wartime
Africa illustrates the movement's global dispersal through

In West Africa, Fry and Drew would be able to
the networks associated with the British

Empire of the relative freedom for experimen
advantage
Commonwealth and its relationship to colonial
policy.3
afforded
to architects in the colonies that permitted t
This moment of intersection between modernistcontinue

and late refining their conceptual and practical
British imperialist practice also corresponds withstanding

the emer
of the European modern movement. Howeve
gence of a textual fabric in the form of fictional,

technical,of modernism to the design of educationa
application
historical, and touristic literature on the colonial

enter
ities in
West Africa in the postwar period was fraugh
prise. A comparative analysis of the architectural

internal
with the
tensions and complexities. These become app
textual fabric of the British colonial regime reveals

a grow
from
a detailed analysis of British colonial policy, F
ing recognition of the colonial subject, an increasingly

Drew's educational designs, and the textual constr
reflexive anxiety among agents or associates of
ofacolonial
colonial subject that reveals both the altruism a
authority such as Fry and Drew, and the limitations

iety that of
characterized the ideological and technical s
modernist claims to universal technique and of
aesthetic.4
British imperial expansion. I argue that while Fry
The comparison?using visual and literal materials

from to resolve the divergent expectations w
Drew sought
the period?allows for a situated reading ofmodernist
modernist
theory concerning the application of univ
praxis in a colonial context.
principles to local conditions, they were constrained i
aim
of initiating a legitimate modern African archite
Fry and Drew's educational commissions were
a prod
^^ l?li'aiiiiy
The Careers of Fry and Drew
and 1934, respectively.6 His desire to realize the m
ofof
universal social improvement was
Fry was trained in the suave neo-Georgianobjective
classicism
through advanced
low-cost housing and egalitaria
Charles Reilly, director of the School of Architecture
at
tionalofthat
construction. This aspect of his moder
Liverpool University.5 His subsequent renunciation
demonstrated
design ethos in favor of an independent functionalist
design in the 1936 Kensal House commissio
idiom modified from the main German and French

progen and aesthetically innovative Impingto
pedagogically
itors of the modern movement coincided with
frustration
College
near Cambridge (1935-37; Figure 2), w
at the conservatism of British architecture anddesigned

society in
the Walter Gropius, whom he took int
with
thralls of the General Strike of 1926, the collapse

ship between
of the 1934 and 1937. Fry espoused the socia
of integrating
Gold Standard, and the depression. The austere
formalismeducational with community facili
Impington,
the irregular, functional arrangement
and social idealism common to the quite diverse
polemic of
story
class and craft rooms linked to a curved poly
continental modernism appealed to Fry's Quaker
upbring
and auditorium
ing and his zeal for fundamental change in reaction
to con would also carry over into the ed
ditions after World War I.
commissions Fry undertook with Drew in West Af
Asideartic
from his building designs, Fry's growing re
In the 1930s, Fry's experimentation with a severe
asby
an the
articulate
ulation of structure and function was modified
evoca and respected avant-garde architect
on his
contribution to the Modern Arc
tion of natural and spiritual qualities through
themercurial
use of
Research
Group founded in 1934 as the Br
extensive glazing, as can be seen at the Sun
House (MARS)
in
the in
Congr?s
Hampstead or the House at Coombe in Surrey,of
built
1930 Internationaux de l'Architecture M
THE WORK OF MAXWELL FRY AND JANE DREW, 1
Figure 2 Maxwell Fry and Walter

Gropius, Impington Village College,
arnnrrir.?^âm^ : ' - ' V--^^tfi^^^^^^^^^^B

(CIAM). Fry played an active role in the production and sub
sequent refinement of the 1941^42 MARS London Plan, both
Fry was on detached service to West Africa in 1944 to

apply his expertise in advanced planning and design to new
as a civilian and as commissioned officer in the Corps of Royal
infrastructure intended for the strategic development of
Engineers. The plan was modeled around graduated traffic cir
agricultural and mineral resources. He was appointed town
culation and a sequence of Neighbourhood, Town, and
planning advisor, with Drew initially as his assistant, to Lord

Swinton, the resident minister of West Africa. Their official
Borough Units that combined modernist zoning with Garden

City layout and landscaping.7 A much simplified version of the
postings held through 1946. That year, they established a
Neighbourhood Unit component would reappear in the town
practice centered in London, but continued to work prima
plans Fry drew up with Drew for several towns in the Gold
Coast and Nigeria, including Accra, Benin, Enugu, Onitsha,

and Port Harcourt (Figure 3).
During his work on the MARS London Plan, Fry met
Drew. She, like Fry, was a graduate of the Architectural
rily in West Africa over the ensuing decade to complete
their commissions. West Africa offered Fry and Drew a

more liberated sphere of activity engaged with the tradi
tional cultures admired by the modernists for their natural
integrity and vigor of expression. Here the pair would
Association, where they would help found a department of
become imbricated with the web of colonial relations that
tropical studies in 1957, and like Fry was motivated by the

prospect of architectural and social modernization.8 Drew
had grown from decades of British policy, in particular that
pertaining to education.
belongs among a remarkable cadre of feminists active in the

first phase of modernism, which also included Alison Smithson
and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.9 These women were enabled by priv
British West Africa: Colonialism and
ileged birth to take advantage of the professional opportunities
Educational Policy
opened by the world wars and by modernist polemic, if not
The provision of education in British West Africa must be
always practice. Fry and Drew married in 1942.
In 1941, while working on the MARS plan, Fry drafted

Fine Building. Published in 1944, this book joined a series of
interpreted against the context of colonial policy promoting
the devolution of legislative power to Africans in conjunc
tion with colonial economic development. During World
texts that endorsed the socialist and technocratic aspects of War I, the desire for enfranchisement by those Africans
modern-movement design.10 In it, he synthesized his con
conscripted for military service or resource development
cept of the modernist aesthetic: "The beauty of architec
had become evident to the British. After the war, Sir
ture arises in the same way [as progress in engineering and
Gordon Guggisberg, governor of the Gold Coast between
technology] from the fulfillment of useful purpose" in col
1919 and 1927, began initiatives to improve African educa
laboration with the "exercise of imagination."11 His empha
tion and representation, as well as encourage commercial
sis on social utility is apparent in another trenchant
expansion.13 In a 1923 speech, Guggisberg described edu
statement: "It is the machine that used for material ends
cation as the "keystone" of his program of development.14
may destroy us beyond redemption, yet in the service of
He preceded his peers in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and
humanity may lead us into a new age of understanding."12
Gambia by passing an education ordinance in 1925 that
190 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
'msie^S?M:w9?^mry^^mn^m^^
Figure 3 Maxwell Fry, plan of Agbani Neighborhood Unit for Enugu, Nigeria, 1945
THE WORK OF MAXWELL FRY AND JANE DREW, 1946-56 191
included the building of durable replacement structures for
to foster the long-term development of an industrial base
the rudimentary "bush schools" that supplemented the reli
for the region. The project also included the construction
gious mission schools run by the Christian denominations
of a new town, Tema, together with the rebuilding of the
active in West Africa. His greatest legacy was the dedica

tion of the Prince of Wales Normal School for Teachers,
original fishing village, for both of which Fry, Drew, and
more usually known as Achimota College of Higher

Education, which became the training ground for African
leadership.
their associates prepared plans.19

The enormity of the task of social reform in which Fry
and Drew became involved was complicated by the financial
plight of Britain in the post-1945 decade. The West African
Fry and Drew's appointments in 1944 as town planning
advisors to the British West African colonies occurred
alongside new policy directives for social betterment both in
colonial economies did, however, accumulate substantial

surpluses through a produce-marketing board system estab
lished in West Africa by the colonial administration in asso
Britain and across her overseas territories. The increased
ciation with British-controlled trading companies. These
attention paid to the colonized was primarily a consequence
included the United Africa Company, which Graham

Greene associated with exploitative colonial commerce in
of national propaganda that incorporated radical social

agendas to bolster the support of British and colonial citi
zens for imperial war policy. Wartime propaganda also pro
moted the concept of a pan-colonial British collective that
envisaged gradual devolution as proof of the enlightened
purpose of British imperialism. It fabricated a mythology of
his novel The Heart of the Matter (London, 1948). The sys
tem funded the construction of infrastructure and social
welfare expenditures, including a good proportion of Fry
and Drew's educational architecture.
Inherent in the social welfare project of British colo
the unique capability of British governance and institutions
nialism was the presumption of unbounded superior tech
to contain ethno-cultural diversity while enhancing it.
nique and empathy for the subject society. This was
Wartime mobilization required the training, urbaniza

tion, and politicization of a significant proportion of the
African population. In 1944, the Report of the Gold Coast
Education Committee and the contemporary Royal

Commission on Higher Education in the African Colonies,
usually referred to as the Elliot Commission, was pub

lished.15 The extension of higher education was declared to
understood by more enlightened senior colonial officials.

Among them were Thomas Barton, the superintendent of
education in the Gold Coast, who promoted the school

building program in conjunction with the missionary
churches; and Sir Charles Arden-Clark, governor of the
Gold Coast from 1949 to 1957, who forwarded teacher
training and would superintend the transfer of power to the
be "urgent," supported by instrumental arguments parallel
African administration of Kwame Nkrumah in April 1957
to those developed after World War I. Among the more
on the granting of independence to the Gold Coast.20
enlightened senior colonial officials to carry out these plans
Increasing recognition of the colonial subject is appar

ent in texts written both outside and within colonial insti
was Sir Henry Gurney, acting governor of the Gold Coast

in 1944?45, who initiated the school building program that
tutions. Writing in 1943 from her post as research lecturer
was continued by his successor Sir Ralph Stevenson.16
in colonial administration at Oxford University, Margaret
Under Stevenson's authority, Achimota College was
Perham surmised that "the tide of British opinion is flow
enlarged, while another senior official in the colonial serv
ing in the direction of greater justice and generosity to the
ice, Andrew Cohen, soon thereafter brought together the
underprivileged whether they live in Stepney or Kiambu."21
Colonial Office and Crown Agents to establish University
The political structure necessary to realize the new colonial
College Ibadan, which, like Achimota, granted degrees
dispensation imagined by Perham was argued one year later
under the authority of the University of London.
by the "architect" of colonial devolution, Arthur Creech
New policy directives for social betterment across
Jones. In 1944, he was a Labor member of Parliament and
Britain's overseas territories were typified by the Colonial
chair of the Colonial Bureau of the social-democratic pres
Development and Welfare Act and postwar Colonial
sure group, the Fabian Society. "Everything in our power,"
Development Corporation, inaugurated in 1940, but more
he announced at the 10 October 1944 annual meeting of
clearly defined and funded in 1943 and renewed in 1947.17

The main West African scheme under the legislation was
be done to eliminate race discrimination and color preju
the Volta River Project of 1951-59.18 This was intended to
dice. The old feeling of racial superiority should be com
supply hydroelectric power to Accra and to a smelting plant
to be operated by a consortium of the British Aluminum
pletely eliminated in the work of administration, in the

work of legislation and in the great economic tasks."22
Company and the Aluminum Company of Canada in order
Creech Jones would be empowered to forward such
the Anti-Slavery and Aboriginals Protection Society, "must
192 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006

reformed imperial practice when Prime Minister Clement
African work, which in turn occupied the bulk of the sanc
tioned monograph on the firm published in 1961.27

Between 1951 and 1954, Fry and Drew were, moreover, pri
his Labor Party government (1946-51).
When Fry and Drew arrived in Africa in 1944, they marily concerned with the modified implementation of Le
Attlee appointed him secretary of state for the colonies in
assumed positions that placed them within the colonial sys
Corbusier's scheme for Chandigarh, Drew assuming leader
tem, which was espousing greater political participation by
ship for the residential construction.28 Their final commis
the colonized and improved programs of social welfare,
sion in West Africa came in 1959, for the Co-operative
including education, while at the same time supporting the
Bank, Assembly Hall, and maisonette complex in downtown
importation and application of British expertise and
Ibadan. The dearth of institutional architecture prior to Fry
exploitation of African resources for the benefit of the
and Drew's residence, in concert with the wartime disrup
British economy. Fry and Drew were to be caught within
tion of colonial bureaucratic conditions and attitudes,
this contradictory colonial system.
helped open a space for aesthetic no less than social exper

imentation. The absence of an established expatriate profes
sional group, together with the relative ascendancy of
Fry and Drew in West Africa
modernism in Britain?exemplified by the 1951 Festival of
Fry and Drew sailed in a troopship to Port Harcourt in
Britain (whose planning began in 1948)?enabled their
1944, during which time they wrote Architecture for Children
(London, 1944). Fry later recalled, "We came upon a colo
implementation of a radical aesthetic.

The West African work of Fry and Drew would come
nial life relatively untouched by time or war."23 But he, and
to rely on their firsthand experience of the native climatic,
doubtless Drew, eschewed any Orientalist desire for vicar
geographical, social, and cultural conditions in Ghana and
ious experience or superficial appropriation. Instead, as he
in the mandated territory of Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and
described their work in West Africa in 1979, they wished to
Togoland. This direct knowledge stimulated an innovative
test the "singular beauty in the bundle of ideas governing
interpretation of modernist design. The climatic extremes
the modern movement in architecture and this springing
and powerful presence of native topography and society
from the necessity of uniting the material and methods of
invigorated their ideas. Their writings relate a profound fas
modern industry with the realities of art, bade us look nar
rowly into the nature not only of the materials and struc
cination with the climate, topography, and people. "We

were fated to make a new architecture out of love of place,"
tures of the machine age, but into the human needs they
Fry would recall in a 1979 talk at the Royal Institute of
service ... an approach and a method humane and all
British Architects,29 while Drew could express an even more
embracing."24 The humane, and aesthetic, potential of tech
visceral sense of sensual experience as stimulus for architec
nology and technocracy was made more manifest to Fry
tural response. "One had only to sleep in a village on a
during a visit to the United States in 1944 financed by the moonlit night in the high forest listening to the drums," she
British resident minister, Lord Swinton. Swinton arranged wrote in 1955, "to realise the appropriateness of the sculp
for a three-month leave for Fry to inspect the massive infra
structure of the social engineering project for the Tennessee
Valley Authority.25
In Africa, Fry and Drew were first given tasks related to
the infrastructure and urban planning necessary to the war
ture, [the] rhythmic forms and powerful magical appeal to

its setting."30 Whether in the hot dry or hot humid regions,
she associated the local embodiment of collective and indi

vidual identity with local aesthetic and natural forms.
Drew's wording nonetheless intimates an aesthetic and
effort and postwar reconstruction. Between 1946 and 1956,
ideological distance that, while untheorized by her either
assisted by expatriate associates and later some newly
here or in later writings, points to the fundamental diffi
trained African architects, they completed seventeen major
culty confronted in the processes of both colonial devolu
educational and twelve commercial commissions.26 They
tion and modernist migration. The well-intentioned but
also oversaw the rebuilding of the original fishing village as
residually superior attitude toward African society she
part of the Tema New Town development. Setting a con
shared with Fry and the reformist colonial officials they
ceptual program for late colonial architectural practice and
befriended limited the participation of the native popula
contextual modernism, they wrote three books that became
tion. The instruments and ideas of decolonization, while
standard texts?Village Housing in the Tropics (London,
intended to liberate, were nonetheless being directed along
1947), Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (New York,
trajectories defined by the alien colonizers; the transforma
1956), and Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones
tive potential claimed by modernist polemic was similarly
(London, 1964). Both also wrote extensively on their West
controlled. Neither Fry and Drew nor their colonial and

Figure 4 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Theory Crosby, Community Center, Accra, Ghana, 1955-56, plan and view of mural by Kofi Antubam
denominational clients fully comprehended the paradox
Both Fry and Drew admired traditional African society
that the new educational construction they were enabling
and culture, but without either the condescendingly roman
reinforced the hegemony of British colonial rule by its
tic or racist attitudes that had generally characterized British
accommodation of the pressures for independence. That is,
colonialism. Fry mused about one visit to northern Nigeria
by offering West Africa a modern system of education and
in 1954: "Everywhere in pots, mats, baskets, cloth and orna
modernist architectural practice, colonial policy imposed a
ment [I found] evidences for what I can only describe as an
foreign pedagogy and associated cultural ethos, only par

tially modified to local conditions, within which devolution
aristocratic feeling for design," which he likened to the
work of Paul Klee.32 He and Drew noted the divorce from
their previous experience in Britain and articulated it most
could safely unfold.
The modernist idiom embodied a complex, and even

contradictory, set of factors and assumptions about political
clearly with reference to custom and climate.33 The archi

tectural mediation of the African presence, central if not
and cultural change. While Fry and Drew's approach to
paramount to their architectural mission, was registered
design acknowledged local knowledge, customs, and social
through inclusion of local materials and stress on bold com
practices, and took into account local topography and cli
position reinforced by the interplay of vertical and horizon
mate, they also participated in the colonial project to import
tal rhythms. Their use of primary colors, predominantly on
European techniques and aims that would change those
shaded structural components and interiors, answered to
African conditions. A typical expression of the contradic
both African and modernist precedent. Wherever possible
tions in their position becomes apparent in a statement in
they employed local craftsmen and/or artists. The outstand
Tropical Architecture that praises "new community life based
ing instance was their Community Center in Accra
less on family and communal sanctions, since the new divi
(1955-56; project designer, Theo Crosby). Here the United
sion of labour must be accepted as a necessary element of
Africa Company (Lever Brothers), long associated with the
westernized production, but introducing skills and crafts by
exploitative manifestation of commercial colonialism, com
missioned striking carved wood door panels from an

restored."31 They accepted the inevitability of westernized unidentified local sculptor and a mosaic mural by Kofi
means of which self-respect and personal dignity may be
divisions of labor while viewing it as a means to restore Antubam (Figure 4). Antubam is the only artist named in
African integrity. Modernism, in their view, was a force that
would allow Western modernity to mediate indigenous cul
full, doubtless because of his association with the British.
He had been trained in the United Kingdom and became
ture toward the creation of African political and cultural
senior art master at Achimota and board member of two
independence. It would also provide a formal and aesthetic

framework for an authentic African architecture.
other neo-British institutions, the Arts Council of Ghana
and the Museum and Monuments Association. In spite of
194 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
economic restraint, several schools were decorated by

Africans, including murals by the local artist P. Buedes in
the hall of Sultan Bello College at University College

Ibadan (1950), and the carved timber trusses of the science
and technology addition to the Church Missionary Society's
Adisadel College at Cape Coast, Ghana (1950-52).

The diminution of racial prejudice, or more equitable
recognition of African citizenry, underlay the architects'
adaptation of the Anglo-American Neighborhood Unit plan
for African urbanization.34 The Neighborhood Unit plan

had first been formulated by the American Clarence Perry
and then incorporated in the MARS London Plan.35 Dating
from their earliest work in West Africa was a 1945 scheme
1W* ??Im ?&*I*g
single ivOOM omm immtim?n& Ltct-mm
?8S1CNY&. Tfr-itlgfr. :?llM,::?^l?-'?el?
for the coal mining town of Enugu in Nigeria (Figure 5)

that delineated plans for new African compound housing.
Fry used both text and diagram to indicate how his adapta
4 *i**twtf?.
SMMLf *?
tion of the Neighborhood Unit scheme could be attuned to

the local topography. But the limited funding precluded the
building of community facilities he and Drew considered

basic to their version of the Neighborhood Unit. They were
SfCTION THR.OUGH R?>AD ALOMC .HtLUM?

SHOWING ANTt-EROS?Ot*t P?*f?C.IEt?T?<??A
able to resist the cruder prefabricated or standardized hous

ing solutions promoted by British firms, thereby displaying
an empathy for local custom shared with the more enlight

ened senior colonial officials.36
Both Fry and Drew felt confident that experimental

form could accommodate differing indigenous aspirations,
as exemplified by the slender elliptical floating dome they
constructed on the campus of the Wudil Teacher Training
College (1953-54) for the Muslim students from the adja

cent northern Nigerian region. In collaboration with Denys
Lasdun, they modified the domical motif for the Ghana

National Museum in Accra (1955-56); the functionalist
INGLE R.OOM OWN OWU??Ul? L*?A?

)E SIC NEO FO?. LfVIi- S*??lSl: * s?tl?
geometrical exhibition and administrative space was sur

mounted by an 80-foot-wide stressed-skin aluminum dome
(fabricated in Britain) supported on a reinforced-concrete
ring beam (Figure 6). The museum attained a distinct
Figure 5 Maxwell Fry, blueprint of lost plan for African compound
housing, Enugu, Nigeria, 1944
appearance by its mixture of old convention in the form of

the dome and new idiom in the use of modern materials
Here the application of modern imported materials and

technique was further inflected by association with the
indigenous art production on display.
Fry and Drew, in company with the officials of British
extended residence and travel in West Africa before becom

ing engaged in the design and building of the new capital of
colonialism, acknowledged indigenous knowledge, but, like
Punjab at Chandigarh in association with Le Corbusier and
modernism itself, they were culturally anchored elsewhere,
Pierre Jeanneret (1951-54).3H Subsequently, they exploited
in their case in London, still an imperial center.37 Most of
improved airline service to supervise local branch activities
the final drawings for their educational and commercial
from their permanent London office. Yet despite their ori
projects in West Africa were completed or checked in the
entation toward London, they respected inherent cultural
London offices of their own firm, that of their engineers

Ove Arup and Associates, or that of their quantity survey
difference in the belief of the possibility of resolution

through design. In contemporary papers, Fry compli
ors, Widnell and Trollope. They enjoyed the advantage of
mented the "astonishing adaptability and skill of African

v.
lU"
Figure 6 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Denys Lasdun, Ghana National Museum, Accra, Ghana, main fa?ade, 1955-56
workmen" who, in collaboration with the chiefly local

Italian contractors, operated under documents based
"firmly on the R.I.B.A. form of contract slightly modified to
suit local conditions."39
The Educational Commissions of Fry and Drew

in West Africa
Fry expressed a profound belief in the transformative power
of education in his book Fine Building, in terms of alleviat
In May 1955, Drew published a long article on their
ing both socioeconomic disparity and individual personal
West African work in Architectural Design. She anchored
growth.42 This belief informed his collaboration with Drew
their design strategy in necessity, stating that they had redi
and their associates in designing the considerable number of
rected modernist functionalism to the pragmatics of the
schools, teacher training colleges, and institutions of

advanced education they built across the British West
economic, social, and geographic situation attending the

educational commissions. Those pragmatics determined
African colonies but chiefly in the Gold Coast (see Figure
their recurrent use of mono-pitch roofs, long low blocks,
1). Their clients were not only the colonial authorities but
and traceried wall systems, coupled with "an attempt... to
also the various religious denominations active in mission
design in a way which without in any sense copying African
ary and charitable work. Besides far exceeding prior institu
detail, gives a response which is African." She continued,
tional and governmental construction in quantity and
explaining that her wider consciousness of place seemed to
quality, the buildings were intended to serve religious as
"call forth the moulded forms which are rhythmical and
well as secular ends. Despite enforcing British pedagogy and
strong, not spiky and elegant, but bold and sculptural. The
Anglo-American linguistic and cultural media at the
west can only bring western concepts, but the western man
expense of indigenous individual and collective identity

making, denominational schools surreptitiously nurtured
liberational attitudes and opportunities. Nkrumah, for
designing in Africa, and for [their idea of] Africa, is bound
to be affected not only by climatic but also psychological

factors."40
To this argument for an African modernism through
example, in company with all the first generation of African
political leaders, was trained in a missionary school and
contextualization, Fry added further complexity in his arti
completed his advanced education in the United Kingdom.
cle "European Importation," published in the section
Fry and Drew were thus associated with the socializing and
"Building the New Africa" in the December 1962 issue of
sometimes oppositional and liberalizing objectives of the
Progressive Architecture. Having noted the dramatic transi

tion from manual to mechanical construction and the cli
churches as well as with the less radical objectives of the
matic imperative, he wrote that "an architecture filling the
circumstances of the region has been established in the

more highly developed parts of it and [this architecture] can
take the load of further development."41 How Fry and Drew
arrived at an architecture that could be claimed to fit "the
metropolitan and local colonial governments contemplat

ing the gradual devolution of bureaucratic control to
selected members of the population.
Longer residence in West Africa allied Fry and Drew

with their clients and, to a lesser extent, users. Their main
circumstances of the region" can be understood more fully
patrons were the Roman Catholic, Scottish Presbyterian,

and Methodist churches. Within their ranks and those of
by examining their educational commissions.
the colonial officials there was growing recognition of the
196 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
need to institute comprehensive systems of African educa

tion, albeit as based on British and transatlantic models as
the architectural idiom. They generally acknowledged the
need to rethink theological and colonial responsibility with
particular reference to the sociopolitical status of the gen
eral population.
School (see Figure 11), the residential and teaching facilities
at University College Ibadan, and Amedzoffe School in

Togoland. The relatively bolder formal expression of the
facilities at Opukuware, Kano, Holy Cross, Adisadel, and
Mfantsipim suggest that they were designed closer to May
1955, when Drew published the long article on their West
Despite the tremendous task of reforming previous and
African work in Architectural Design.
continuing paternalism, neither religious nor colonial
Architecturally their educational designs avoided par
patron commanded substantial resources, adding a further,
ticular reference either to indigenous or colonial conven
if generally stimulating constraint. Fry later recalled his
tion, prefiguring the ahistorical strategy adopted for
excellent personal and creative relationship with Thomas
Chandigarh.47 When they began their work, there were few
Barton, director of education in the Gold Coast. Barton
substantial educational buildings in West Africa with the
encouraged Fry and Drew to experiment with designs that
exception of Achimota College. In several cases, Fry and
combined local labor with imported materials and tech
Drew also had the advantage of new sites. This allowed

them to organize their buildings around the prevailing
niques especially concrete, bituminous, and aluminum

products but also asbestos, then regarded as providing both
topography and climate, and around their interpretation of
a safe and effective panel system.43 Another major constraint
each institution's function. The limited budgets available
was geographical location. Fry and Drew built in the humid
even for University College Ibadan tested their conviction
tropical coastal strip as well as the dry tropical uplands, and
in the diversity of effects achievable through the use of
from the hillside site of Mawuli Presbyterian Girls' School modular planning and standardized materials, plus the
at Ho in Togoland (1946-48) to the Ashanti forest clearing
visual variety introduced by the movement of the sun and
of the Roman Catholic Boys' School at Opukuwara, near weather patterns. Those factors resulted in a set of design
Kumasi, Ghana (1954?55), from the coastal region of the
Wesley Girls' School (1946) to the arid plain of the Kano

Training College in northern Nigeria (1955).
Fry and Drew built eleven new secondary schools and
teacher training colleges, made additions to five others, and
principles running through all the commissions, like the use

of reinforced concrete and sandcrete construction.
These principles reflect Fry and Drew's interpretation

of modernist praxis as the integration of formal and func
tional requirements with environment so as to develop spe
constructed the campus of University College Ibadan,

which included several significant edifices, among them
cific expression of purpose and structure mediated by an
Trenchard and Mellanby Halls (Figure 7). Two commis

sions were in Togoland. The ten that were in the Gold
viewer responses. This first entailed the acceptance of the
Coast were located throughout the colony near Accra, near
of concrete and contemporary, imported building technol
Takoradi, in the Cape Coast region, Kumasi, and at Meli,
ogy. One example of such technology with a modernist
abstract aesthetic capable of multiple rather than singular

superior durability (in the face of both climate and insects)
near Mampong.44 Five commissions, including the
iconic significance was the elevation of buildings at

University College at Ibadan, were in Nigeria.45 The new University College Ibadan on pilotis in the New Arts
institutions were built chiefly on sites removed from exist
Building (Figure 9), anticipating a design element adopted
ing settlements, the one exception being Holy Cross Boys'
for the Academic Quadrangle at Simon Fraser University
School, erected on a swampy site in the central area of
in British Columbia by Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey

Lagos (Figure 8). The remainder were located in each of Massey in 1963. Their confidence in the capacity of new
the predominant geographic regions of British West Africa,
from the coastal mangrove swamps to the forested inland
form and technique to signify West African custom and
belt, savanna, and northern desert area.
Bello College at University College. The hall comprised a
Although the programs were driven by the colonial

authorities, the commissions were divided between secular
and religious institutions. Those managed by Christian
denominations were Methodist, Presbyterian, Scottish
identity is most sophisticated in the dining hall of Sultan

shallow reinforced-concrete dome rising from slender ellip
tical ribs over semi enclosed screen walls (Figure 10).
Their method next embraced the specific natural set

tings and conditions in the various regions of West Africa.
Mission, Church Missionary Society (Anglican), and That aspect entailed confronting no less than co-opting
Roman Catholic.46 The precise chronology of these com
missions is not accurately documented, but Fry stated that
the commissions began in 1946-47 with Wesley Girls'
nature; Fry, indeed, likened the heat, humidity, sunlight,

insects, and soil erosion to enemies that could be overcome
only through design. Consequently, their overriding prin
i F.H?îjii^ti^^p* l^j^
Trenchard Hall
Figure 7 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Associates, University College, Ibadan, Nigeria, 1948-57, views of Trenchard Hall
Figure 8 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Associates, Holy Cross Boys' School, Lagos, Nigeria, ca. 1955
tin
198 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
Figure 9 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and

Associates, University College Ibadan,
New Arts Building, courtyard, 1955-56
Figure 10 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and

Associates, Sultan Bello College,
University College Ibadan, Ibadan,
Nigeria, dining hall, 1950
:=sl!|plte;P^R
Figure 11 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and K. M. Greenwell, Wesley Girls' School, Cape Coast, Ghana, elevation, 1946-47
ciple was orientation of all structures to the prevailing
breeze. Next came the creation of maximum cross-ventila
tion and shading. Their solution included pierced external
walls, pergolas, and the use of double-skinned roofs. In

addition, they placed individual buildings along contour
lines to take advantage of vista as well as breeze, and to
increase the apparent monumentality and actual scenic
diversity. The remaining principles comprised the estab
fronting the chapel at the highest and central section of the
Wesley Girls' School (Figure 11). The emphasis on abstract

form rather than culturally specific symbolism prevented
the exclusive appropriation of its signification by the colo
nial or the colonized. Another occurs at the Women's
Training College at Kano, finally completed in 1960 four

years prior to Nigerian independence (Figure 12). The
Domestic Science facility comprises a severe circular build
ing with removable screening topping a wide canopy
lishment of a sense of secure community together with a

balance between architectural cohesion and functional sep
pierced by a ventilator and butted into the adjoining dining
aration; the provision of clear systems of circulation and
hall. Its features recall some aspects of African building and
user identification determined around point-of-entry and
cooking while implanting a more rationalist, Euclidean idea

of technical and social process.
positioning of major administrative and communal spaces;

and the creation of focal elements within each complex.
Fry and Drew's ethos and design principles are readily
These last three design principles are exemplified by the
apparent in five of their major commissions, three of which
erection of the water storage tower at the asymmetrical core
of University College or the belfries of several of the reli
figured prominently in the official colonial and touristic lit

eratures. The illustrations of their educational architecture
gious schools and colleges at the highest elevation.
in this article are taken from publications over which they
principle determining their educational commissions. This
exercised editorial authority. Wesley Girls' School, one of

the earliest commissions, involved reconstruction on a new
is the search for a transcultural architectural language pred

icated on the belief that modernist abstraction and func
district. For this project the architects pioneered an open
A simplified formal vocabulary demonstrates one other
site on a ridge outside the urban center of the Cape Coast
tionalism not only claimed pre-contact African design as a
ended rectangular plan that carried the resonance of the
progenitor but also promoted communication across cul
British collegiate quadrangle but also the irregular, if more
tures. One instance of such visual congruence of different
compact, compounds preferred by several West African

peoples (Figure 13). The longer sides were formed by
conventions was the combined belfry and water tower

200 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
Figure 12 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew,
^^^^hh^^^ and Associates, Teacher Training
^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ College, Kano, Nigeria, view of
HB^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HJI^PI^^F Jane
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I I I .^^^RM?I k- m- Greenwell, Wesley Girls'
^^^ ^^^^^^H[H I ^^^^^^^^^B I i A^HP plan view the
1 I-J X.,,,.. :- _ _ -.- ^ _.. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ H|^Kiii':ii:^:y
^JK|JSiiiÂif?t!-HiMi--wî *MI
room,
and
staff
apartments
three-story dormitory blocks facing
each
other
across
a long from eac
features
were an
electric generation
courtyard. The third side comprised
single-story
classrooms
linked to staff quarters and a three-story

roof collection
administrative
piped to a covered r
block joined to a combined chapel/belfry/water

tower
of 300,000 gallons
and struc
linked to a wa
ture. This component acted as communal

and
architectural
At Apowa
College,
the uneven site
focus. The tower contained approximately

dispersal of buildings,
14,000 gallons
which was co
of water that served practical needs

inant
while
profile
symbolically
of the evok
chapel-cum-
ing the Christian waters of life. attached

The functional
belfry. reconstitu
By contrast, the to
tion of religious imagery is likewise

College,
evident
in the
in the
dryGreek
tropical north
Cross tracery pattern of the ventilating

invited wall
Fry of
andthe
Drew
chapel.
to adopt a sch
It is composed of concrete mullions

and transoms
that
gle-story
facilities
inrecur
two parts (Fig
along the dormitory and classroom

rectilinear
blocks. These
while
elements
the other was p
extended
to the
covered ways that
front deep balconies that cool the
residential
accommoda
tion and enliven the fa?ades of the
court.buildings.
The plan retains
teaching
a hierarchical arrangement of religious,

The most
teaching,
complex
and
plan
comwas for U
munal spaces. A further variation Ibadan
is introduced
the
use
of
(Figureby
16).
The
College
was
local stone contrasting with the side

graythe
panels
old and
town
white
and or
close to the
Tyrolean (applied) cement finish site

structure.
was of sufficient extent to susta
At Aburi, atop a ridge betweenborne

the Accra
sewage
plain
system
and for
in West Africa
est belt, the layout was narrower

concentrated
due to the prevalence
on developing
of
the m
ventilation,
but
this
was
at
the
cost
rock outcrops (Figure 14). This resulted in a more compli
cated if visually interesting arrangement

between the of
constituent
buildings,
parts of th
including the extrusion of washrooms/latrines,
Kenneth Mellanby,
a common
talked them into
THE WORK OF MAXWELL FRY AND J
?? I ?ntf TwMlttP TwfttoMwtf O *? ? , Afeo*
wp C Cta?mmm Ot? i**&*% *<mm<<i> *, %*#* Hamm?
WCNwwMM/tlfc CK, **m ?** Ortw. U* l^lrr?
ft, ?Ml
ta
sft* *,,
Figure 14 Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, assisted by E. J. Armitage and G. Gottier, Teacher Training
1948-50
202 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
PFWflfMtil CoHefty KlWNMfl

Thi? is an important noo-denomin?tioiut secondary
school for about joo boys, built on southward sloping
land along curving contour tine*. Entry is under a
library, and the design is built on an extensive arc of
two-storey teaching blocks closed by the dining room

and united by radial dormitories.
The extent of building land was confined by a reservoir
reservation on the upper boundary and ted to the
present layout thai secures level ground for the
teaching block by adapting to the Une of the contours.
Classrooms and laboratories having to face south are

protected by wooden sunbretkers held or? the windows
and keeping direct sun from the desks. Construction is
in reinforced concrete frame with sandcrctc block
infilling, cement rendered and painted? ami
considerable use is made of precast grilles for sun

protection and privacy.
The hall has reinforced concrete trusses and a timber
roof covered in sheet aluminium.
Bthw left: mrtdseatu waffs ret (Ussrmm klacJb.
Rtgbt: ??kJmxfr?m /ht amrtJ way /??ard? ter dormitory
hUch.
Figure 15 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and F. S. Knight, Prempeh College, Kumasi, Ghana, 1954-55
Figure 16 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Associates, University College Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, plan, 1947-57
between the five residential colleges (each accommodating
Architecture in the Humid Zone, he wrote: "Architecture in
160 undergraduates), teaching halls, and library. The final
the humid tropics is a collaboration with nature to estab
plan ran the buildings in an axial agglomeration predomi
lish a new order in which human beings may live in har
nantly aligned east-west to catch the prevailing southwest
mony with their surroundings." After referring to their own
breeze at an angle. A campus effect was achieved by placing
tropical design and that of others in Africa, the West Indies,
the buildings around three sides of large playing fields and
and Florida, they affirmed: "Modern architecture, and its
open space, the shorter range containing most of the

administrative and pedagogic functions. These included
extension into town planning, has above all this task of

interpreting applied science in humanistic terms. Of mak
Trenchard Hall, a handsome blend of the Impington
ing industrialism fit for human use; buildings that enable
College Hall and the contemporary Royal Festival Hall in
life instead of degrading and destroying it; and of creating
London (1950-51; Leslie Martin and Peter Moro with everywhere, out of the disparate and anti-social manifesta
Robert Matthew), Mellanby Hall, and the Arts Theatre.
tions of machine production and centralised power unities
The functional prominence of this precinct was enhanced
of resolved thought and feeling in the form of buildings,
by construction of the five-story library and twelve-story groups of buildings and larger aggregations in which life
tower, each with strongly patterned wall apertures (Figures may know its bounds and flourish."50 Their idealistic read
17, 18). The books were housed in the amply ventilated

upper floors above the service floor, also elevated above
ing of modernism resonated with the more progressive

colonial and church officials intent on change in British
grade to counteract the adverse effects of humidity and
West Africa. Where widespread education, especially at the
insects. The tower performed a centralizing and locating
primary level, "will be the symbol of technocracy," choices
role across the variable terrain of the site. In designing the
in favor of concrete products and structural system, new
residential colleges, the architects increased the propor
materials, and standardized modular organization became
tional, planar, and volumetric complexity of their design but
the symbolic built referents to enlightened colonial policy.
retained a standard ten-foot module. For example, they Fry and Drew's use of Evode roof-concrete waterproofing
detached such service components as external stairways to
and rejection of imported prefabricated buildings evinced
heighten aesthetic effect in conjunction with increased
a sympathy to local conditions paralleled in the employment

of local artists and craftsmen such as Antubam or the mural
diversity of ornamental pattern in the screen walling. Their

wedding of decorative effect, neither African nor European,
to practical construction produced a distinctive version of

contemporary British modernism, termed New Eclecticism
by the architectural historian and critic J. M. Richards.
ist Buedes.51
The African presence, they believed in 1956, was pro
tected through the transformative processes inherent in
modernism. Writing of their Apowa school, Fry and Drew
commented: "What is taking place in the tropics is cause
Modernist and Social Praxis in Fry and Drew's

Texts and Buildings
for rejoicing. Once more mankind is on the move towards
new objectives, and peoples who for centuries have lived
under the shadow of one or another form of surveillance
In Graham Greene's novel A Burnt-Out Case (1960), the now undertake the management of their own destinies and
protagonist is a disillusioned architect named Querry, who
shoulder the compelling responsibilities of government."52
was visiting Africa with the idea of working at a leper Writing the introductory essay on West Africa in New
colony. He accords only pure aesthetic agency to mod
Buildings in the Commonwealth (1961), Fry associated their
ernism: "I wasn't concerned with the people who occupied
work with the redress of the imperial project.53 The
my space?only with the space. My interest was in space,

light, proportion. New materials interested me only in the
Colonial Development and Welfare Act called for "the ear

liest start to be made on education, in the widest sense of
effect they might have on those three .... Materials are the
the word, of peoples who had hitherto been entirely sub
architect's plot. They are not his motive for work. Only the
servient to the primary producing needs of dependent
space and the light and the proportion."49
colonies." Fry and Drew's schools and colleges made the
By contrast, in all their writings Fry and Drew under
most of local labor, topography, climate, and materials to
scored the societal grounds of their modernist practice. The
provide for "an advance on the widest technological front"
value of technological and natural process to individual and

social betterment was the common theme in their books.
mation of tribal into modern social economy was not only
enabled by imported expertise and systems. The transfor
In the preface to the book Fry finished with Drew at the
desirable but inevitable due to irreversible international
end of their West African educational work, Tropical
developments.
204 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006

T&tCUKfSS*
Tat Uw;/fM Ar
?Wtft *mt*i***?? mm frmto?mm pt3*rwtt.
wr
~RBr
n t~r_y.
/.-.! ,**t jK**
Figure 17 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and G. S. Knight, University College Iba
library, 1953-54
THE WORK OF MAXWELL FRY AND
'*"' *m?f
Figure 18 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and Associates, University College, Ibadan, view of administration wing and central tower, 1948
Fry thought that democratic town-planning should

become the "major instrument of government" to ensure
intended to represent and enact the reconfiguration of colo
nial and metropolitan political performance. Fry and Drew
equitable urban expansion that accommodated African liv
tested the assumptions of modernism while seeking to mod
ing patterns. He was thus gratified by the training of large
ernize both African and colonial custom. They assumed that
numbers of African architects and planners in Britain but

also at the Kumasi and Zaria Colleges of Technology, each
European abstract aesthetic and functionalist form could

surpass both African and colonial convention to enable
with examination procedures authorized by the Royal
them to fabricate spaces for the political and sociocultural
their former African employee T. S. Clark, who had risen to
interchange necessary to a legitimate new postcolonial

accord. Their search for and relative success in finding
the post of chief executive architect of the Tema Town
design solutions for such hybrid spaces is evident at many
Institute of British Architects. He celebrated the success of
Corporation and first president of Ghana Society of

Architects (a chapter of the R.I.B.A.).
The adaptation of imported form and technique to
registers of design sensitivity.
Fry and Drew's practice applied the inclusionary logic

of the functionalist approach within the modernist project
local conditions and vernacular practices in the construc
to contain the conflictual forces subsequently defined in the
tion of new educational buildings constitute an invention
post-colonial discourse.54 That discourse was begun in the
206 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
same decade as the educational projects by thinkers such as Macmillan's phrase "freedom from the cramping artificial
the African Fritz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Masks ities [and] fetters of conventionalities" (which he believed
(1952).55 Another early contributor was the journalist-his
would enable British commercial exploitation of natural
torian Basil Davidson, who collaborated with the Nigerian
resources) anticipates Fry and Drew's awareness of the
scholar Adenakon Adem?la to edit The New West Africa.

greater scope for experimentation offered by conditions in
Problems of Independence in 1953.56 Yet Fry and Drew had West Africa.62
embraced, through extended residency and genuine

interest, some part of the notions of interchange and
Later colonial texts move away from unabashedly self

confident paternalism toward a vision of eventual partner
hybridity later theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi
ship directed toward the creation of self-government. The
Bhabha.57 The context-driven siting, structure, and com
promotional activities of the Empire Marketing Board, estab
position of their schools, colleges, and university demon

strate Bakhtin's assertion that "in all aesthetic form, the
lished in 1929 with Elspeth Huxley as press officer, were

largely assumed by the semiofficial magazine Crown Colonist,
organizing force is the axiological category of the other, the
launched in 1931 and renamed New Commonwealth after
relation to the other, enriched with the axiological surplus

of the vision."58
1951. Its editorial policy, set by the founding editor, W. E.

Simnett, can be summarized by a statement he made in The
British Way and Purpose prepared in 1943 by the directorate of
Publicizing and Critiquing Modernism in British
West Africa
Army Education. In the section titled "Citizens of Empire,"

Simnett averred: "We no longer regard the Colonial Empire
as a possession' but as a trust or responsibility. . . . self gov
Fry and Drew's vision of social transformation enabled by
ernment is better than good government, and we are pledged
modernism is paralleled in the discussions of modernism to train the Colonies in self-government."63 By November
1952 the editor of New Commonwealth could declare:
and social transformation in the literature of British colo
nialism. In the February 1944 issue of Crown Colonist, a
"Imperialism has gone; colonialism is going and has already
magazine closely associated with the colonial project, a pho
changed into trusteeship preparatory to partnership."64 The
tograph of Fry was printed with this caption: " the well
authors of The Nigeria Handbook, printed from 1953 by the
known architect who becomes Town Planning Advisor to

the British West African colonies."59 The colonial endorse
colonial Federal Government for the Crown Agents for

Overseas Government and Administration in the United
ment of the modernist idiom becomes apparent in many Kingdom, ascribed an almost messianic mission to the cur
publications promoting the colonial cause, and in exhibi

tion guidebooks, magazines, and official reports. Such texts,
whether epistolary, touristic, propagandist, historical, or fic
rent "social, economic and political advance," one "so great

[that] it is tempting, in one's impatience for tomorrow, to
regard to-day as merely the transition from the history that
tional, provide a diagnosis of changing attitudes toward the
was yesterday."65 The combination of economic develop
British imperial cause and the role of modernism in it.
ment, constitutional reform, and Africanization through
Many official and semiofficial texts expressed an opti

mism similar to that of Fry and Drew about the efficacy of
accelerated education was defined as key to change in the

postwar era.
modern architecture in particular and English technical
British colonial literature both informed and contested
expertise in general to foster what they defined as progress
such statements of colonial policy. An example of an author
in West Africa and elsewhere in the British colonies. Fry
occupying a liminal position in relation to colonialism is
and Drew's own writing about the success of their educa
Elspeth Huxley, already noted as the first press officer of
tional projects and the progressive effect of modernism at
the Empire Marketing Board. Huxley, like Fry and Drew,
times echoed the standard and unselfconscious rhetoric jus
occupied an intermediary position, not merely between col
tifying the colonial project that was applied by earlier and
onizer and colonized, but also between those espousing pro
contemporary colonial apologists. In his Red Book of West
gressive or conservative views of colonial devolution. Much
Africa: Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial
of her writing coincides with the period of Fry and Drew's
Facts, Figures and Resources (1920), Allister Macmillan educational work and covers the ideological and experien
described colonizers in romanticized terms: "Men of tial spectra of the architectural embodiment of policy and
courage and discernment, strong in purpose, straight in value. In addition to autobiographical and documentary
deeds."60 These colonizers would be "making sure, with narratives set in Africa, Huxley published her lengthy
care and knowledge of the progress that will be for the wartime correspondence with the academic colonial
undeveloped peoples working out their destiny."61
reformer Margery Perham.

As biographer of a leading proponent of white colo
realized the extent to which new architecture in the African
nization in her East Africa, White Mans Country: Lord
colonies was in the vanguard of British design. When at

University College Ibadan she discerned a bold cultural
purpose embodied in Fry and Drew's "large flat sur
Delamere and the Making of Kenya (1935), and one-time polo
correspondent for the East African Standard, Huxley was

often associated with British colonial opinion.66 Yet in 1944
faces . . . sweeping horizontal lines . . . walls . . . imagina
she accepted Perham's advocacy of gradualism. Huxley,
tively treated not by an added decoration but by patterns
whose parents were involved in developing Kenya, began punched into the concrete: patterns of crosses, squares and
her correspondence with Perham in 1942. Their letters petal shapes repeated over whole sides of buildings most
were published as Race and Politics in Kenya, with an intro
arresting to the eye [that were] spacious and have unity."69
duction by Lord Lugard. The trigger was a letter to the
She recognized the authenticity of the modernist's search
Times that acknowledged the "sudden dramatic end of an
for a novel language of architectonic expression, which in
epoch in our colonial empire as the beginning of a new

chapter which can be even more honourable and glori
the case of Fry and Drew's educational work was directed
ous."67 In imagining that new chapter, Huxley and Perham
toward representing and enabling African advancement.

She further commented: "But to the eye these scholastic
anticipated the often tortuous attempts by colonial officials
temples are arresting because they are original and try to
and British politicians to fabricate constitutions that mar
lead into an African architecture that will be permanent and
ried the so-called Westminster model?broad suffrage, par
notable."70 But her writing also illuminates the problems
liamentary rule, legal regulation, and an independent civil
that were exacerbated by the architectural fabric and the
service?with African tribal traditions of chiefdom, kinship
progress it represented. In A New Earth: An Experiment in
loyalty, and barter economy, complicated in East Africa by
Colonialism (1960), writing about British East Africa, Huxley
the problem of privileged white settler enfranchisement.
noted that such New Towns as Ngecha in Kenya exchanged
In this correspondence, Huxley's position was the more
vernacular huts for standard concrete and brick houses.
progressive with regard to Africanization. Through articles
However, she did not take it for granted that such exem
in the leading British newspapers and talks broadcast by the
plars of progress were necessarily beneficial. Her book was
British Broadcasting Corporation, she came to be regarded
about "progress striding through a part of Africa, where he
as a disruptive figure by British colonials. Her critical posi
is on the move at breakneck speed," but she also asked
tion led her London publishers?responding to the exten
"whether the giant is an angel or an ogre."71
sive public interest in Africa?to commission her to write a

African travelogue that would serve as a catalyst for changes
However empathetic to African customs and cultures,

the discourse of colonial development and then devolution
remained imperial in the same manner that liberational
in British policy.
Huxley thought that British colonial educational policy
modernism projected distant metropolitan authority onto
curred with Fry and Drew in believing that the very func
African conditions. Even by the time that Fry and Drew

completed their educational commissions in 1955-56, the
combat the subjugating parochialism of the British colonial
African architectural profession. Non-African paradigms
regime as well as the constrictions of traditional African
predominated in the educational system intended to facili

tate Africanization.
would foster authentic African cultural practice. She con
tionalism and abstraction of the modernist idiom could African voice and gaze were only minimally present in the
social order. In her 1954 travelogue Four Guineas: A Journey

Through West Africa, she described Fry and Drew's additions
to the Presbyterian St. Andrew's Teaching Training College
But Fry and Drew acted with a relatively limited appre

ciation of the extent to which their policy or process contin
at Meli as "a cluster of bold, angular and rather harsh ued forms generated or assimilated by the imperial system
that had always operated as much through cultural as eco
Maxwell Fry buildings, the inner walls imaginatively
coloured in pastel shades, the outer ones as white and hard nomic and military means. Such blindness also character
as good teeth," and those to St. Monica's Roman Catholic ized Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who would unwittingly implicate
School at Mampong as "startling" (Figure 19).68 Her modernism with colonial erasure of indigenous culture in
phraseology reflects a lack of expertise in architectural crit
his introduction to New- Buildings in the Commonwealth.
icism and history, but it evokes the visual effects through
Modernism, he wrote, had spread rapidly in the dominions

and colonies, "where there was no tradition [so that] the
which Fry and Drew effected substantial, if problematic,

colonial reformation.
Huxley believed that the very internationalism of the
modernist idiom counteracted colonial convention, and she
new world [could] be acclaimed with ease."72

Pevsner shared Fry and Drew's belief in the transfor
mative and inclusionary potency of an abstract formal
208 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006

The work of Fry? Drew, Drake and Latdun

What Maxuvil Ft? mi Jfmt Drew
umito India towmkm tkeCktm?gar?t
prytct, Dmp Lm?m mtd Ijnisty
btaktttmt into thtpartiutship. The
umk m (ht ?lbwmg p*&s h tht
pm?mi tf Ike *m parixers?ip.
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Figure 19 Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and K. M. Greenwell, St. Monica's School, Mampong, Ghana, dormitory block and plan,
1952-53
language, as well as a fundamentally positive view of social,
time extract from our body-politic as a dentist extracts a
cultural, and technical change. Such persistent hegemonic
stinking tooth all those decadent stooges versed in text
force in the British regime was strongly felt by Kwame
book economics and aping the white man's mannerisms and
Nkrumah, who distanced himself from the argument for
way of speaking. We are proud Africans. Our true leaders
the mediation of Western modernity with indigenous cul
are not those intoxicated with their Oxford, Cambridge or
ture as a means to establish African independence. In his
Harvard degrees but those who speak the language of the
pamphlet Towards Colonial Freedom (1962), which he began
people. Away with the damnable and expensive university
writing in 1945 when studying at the London School of
education which only alienates an African from his rich and
Economics, Nkrumah asserted that "any humanitarian act

[by a colonial regime] was merely to enhance the primary
ancient culture and puts him above his people."77 Such

duplicitous criticisms of colonialist authority for the pur
objective ... the economic exploitation of the colonised."73
pose of legitimating corrupt postcolonial autocracy are not
A further level of critique emerges in the anticolonial,
dissimilar to the colonial appropriation of radical modernist
if still late liberal humanist texts of Basil Davidson.

Davidson's critical accounts of European and British inter
aesthetic and social theory to sustain its political control.
The congruence of the textual and architectonic fabri
ism in prior Western histories and anticipated the lines of
cation of colonialism is expressed directly in the African

texts of Graham Greene. His work evokes the conflictual
inquiry pursued successively by Frantz Fanon, Edward Said,
geopolitical and sociocultural conditions on both sides of
and postcolonial scholars.74 Davidson had already detected
the colonial divide that Fry and Drew encountered in West
ventions challenged the positivist justification of imperial
negative consequences in 1953, when he and Adenekan Africa, which are also evinced in the wider literature of
Adem?la scrutinized the aftermath of the 1943 Colonial British colonial devolution. Greene formulated his critical
Development and Welfare Act and the short-lived
assessment of British colonial attitude and society on his
Colombo Plan of 1951 in the book they edited, The New first trip to Africa in 1936, recounted in the travelogue
West Africa: Problems of Independence. Davidson and Adem?la
demonstrated how the marketing boards that had financed
Journey Without Maps (1946). There he notes the inherent
paradox of reformist colonialism: "We're supposed to be
the educational program encouraged inefficient production
there for the good of the ruled. The economies were nearly
and limited the development of indigenous processing and
all at the expense of the coloured men."78 In that sentence,
'modern' in the sense that West Africans use corrugated
complex confusion between ideas of authority and liberal
iron for their roofing, dress in Lancashire cloth, go to the
ization that confronted those colonial officials, including
manufacture. The British West African colonies "became Greene states a fundamental reality and anticipates the
pictures . . . ride tricycles . . . and travel in lorries and Fry and Drew, who sought to enact African social and
trains?but also in a more important sense?that the West
political development. In his subsequent novels The Heart
African economy has become closely tied up with the
of the Matter ?nd A Burnt-Out Case, Greene related the anx
economies of Britain and the U.S.A."75 Writing in the after
ieties within, and constraints acting on, colonial subjectiv
math of the Sharpeville Massacre of 1961 in South Africa and
the collapse of much African democracy and economy,

Davidson rejected the positivist legitimation of the reformist
colonial practice in which Fry and Drew participated.
Another evocation of the paradoxical factors at play in

the changes represented by Fry and Drew's modernist edu
cational commissions is provided in the fiction of the

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. A graduate of colonial
education programs for which Fry and Drew designed,
ity together with the onset of changed colonial policy

precipitated by World War II.79 His writing reconstructs,
and deconstructs, the social conditions Fry and Drew

endeavored to improve through urban and architectural
fabrication.
The protagonist of Greene's The Heart of the Matter is a
colonial police officer named Scobie who is partly character
ized in terms of architectural design. The measure of Scobie's
life and inner space appears in Greene's austere description of
Achebe disclosed the incommensurable factors within late
him: "Scobie built his house by a process of reduction."80 The
British colonial policy and even Fry and Drew's idea of
phrase bears comparison with the German modernist archi
modernist design.76 The disclosure is sharpest in Achebe's
tect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's dictum "maximum effect
satire of the political landscape of the newly independent

Nigeria in his nov?AMan of the People (1966). At one point
his main character, Odidi, reads a letter published in a local
with minimum means."81 The stability of Scobie's moral fab

ric is similarly framed by Greene's metaphor of planning, the
modus operandi of the modernist theory of societal recon
newspaper concerning the government response to a slump
struction through design. When Scobie first meets Wilson,
in the staple coffee bean market: "Let us now and for all
an employee of the powerful United Africa Company, he
210 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
describes himself: "I've always been a planner. You see I even war architecture in the context of the modernist project: "It
plan for other people."82 By contrast with the rapacious Kurz
is quite true that architects all thought that they could
in Joseph Conrad's short novel Heart of Darkness (1902),
improve the world and politics were really irrelevant to the
Scobie seeks egalitarian regulation comparable with the mod
planning of the world."86 Practice in West Africa and India
ernist ethos. Scobie values effective function instead of sym
had not confirmed their original faith in the transformative

force of modernist architecture.
bolic displays of ritualistic superiority. He does not live in one
of the hillside bungalows removed from places of colonial

commercial or bureaucratic rule and African habitation. He
has little pleasure in the expatriate society of the colonial club.
Conclusion
unreflective colonial agents. When his personal life collapses,
Comparing the architectural and the broad literary fabric

of British West Africa reveals the anxieties and the altruism
Scobie's faith in his reformist position also collapses. "I don't
shared by reformist agents of late British imperialism who,
He seems anxious and melancholy by comparison with more
want to plan any more," he says.83
Looking back in 1969, in Art in a Machine Age: Critique
including Fry and Drew, managed the devolution of colo
nial power. That process had been enabled by the social
of Contemporary Life Through the Medium of Architecture, Fry agenda of the modern movement. The technocratic aspect
recalled that he and Drew had been the "witnesses and the
agents of very great changes, some of which we could only
of modernism, including its use of new technology and

materials, appealed to those seeking radical national and
regret. We found few building materials we could use, no
colonial reconfiguration and to those wishing to justify the
building industry, no codes of building practice worth the

name, and little architecture we could emulate. But every
continued operation of colonialism. While Fry and Drew

can be numbered among those colonial reformers, the
where in the huts, villages and mud-walled towns of these
socioeconomic and cultural system under which they com
trusting, gentle people are found the beauties of a once
pleted their educational commissions in British West Africa
closely-adjusted culture that was melting away before our
restricted the liberating force of their designs. The power of
eyes."84 This realization that the reformatory dynamic of modernist abstract functionalism to transcend climate,
the modern movement and decolonization further under
political, and cultural variation proved less potent than they
mined the potential for African autonomy corresponds with
and many contemporaries supposed.87 Indeed, their own
the increasingly strident deconstruction of the colonial and writings reveal a level of reflexivity evident in the contem
modernist projects expressed by Africans. In 1979, Fry
porary literature that coincided with the beginnings of the
delivered a lecture on his view of modernist design at the
postcolonial critique.
R.I.B.A. He reminisced extensively on the West African

educational commissions in relation to the determining
influence of climate, people, and vegetation. He also
acknowledged the limitations of modernizing practices, pri
Nevertheless, Fry and Drew's West African architecture

represents a significant contribution to the migration of mod
ernism. Besides setting a precedent for a series of British firms
(notably Architect's Co-partnership [A.C.P.], James Cubitt,
marily architectural. His rhetoric was less one of achieve
and Godwin and Hopwood), their West African architecture
ment than engagement. "It was a search for harmony amid
attained remarkable consistency.88 Their designs mediated
violent contrast and conflict, as full-scale laboratory of trial
the conditions of site and climate with the pragmatics of
and error, in which unlike a Building Research Station, we
imported building techniques and materials toward the
paid for our mistakes."85 In the final assessment, the legacy
attainment of a variable yet consistently modernized African
of modernist decolonization was more mutable interven
tion than transformation. The rhetorical fabric of post-1945
architectural idiom. Their design principles yielded func

tional institutional spaces and a hybrid aesthetic that signi
British policy and the architectural fabrics designed to facil
fied the idealistic objective, if also constrained effect, of the
itate its reconfiguration unraveled, like the leading protag
modernist project and colonial reform. Their educational
onists of Greene's African novels, by interventions and work compares in design innovation, if not in numbers, with
conditions antipathetical to their emancipatory project.
The clutch of modernist ideas Fry and Drew deployed,
the school-building programs in Britain. And they devised a
distinct architectural idiom comparable with the regional
constructed primarily in aesthetic rather than political modernism that flourished in the by-then autonomous
frames, could only partially engage economic and cultural
British dominions exemplified by Harry Seidler in Australia,
structures sustaining the colonial regime and its aftermath.
Ernst Plishcke in New Zealand, and John B. Parkin and
Fourteen years after Fry's R.I.B.A. lecture, Drew supple
Associates in Canada.89 University College Ibadan in Nigeria
mented his retrospective reflexivity in evaluating her post
remains one of their major architectural works and at the

forefront of both modernist praxis and British higher educa
tion reform.90 Notwithstanding the inherent political and

aesthetic constraints of such colonial modernism, Fry and
Drew did "make an architecture to fit the circumstance of
educational building" in British West Africa.91
Planning and Urban Design: Principles and Policies (London, 1997), esp. 68-70;
see also Arthur Korn, History Builds the Town (London, 1953), 83, 89, and
Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, '"Cities More Fair to Become the Dwelling
Place of Thy Children': Transcendent Modernity in British Urban

Reconstruction," in Iain Boyd Whyte, ed., Modernism and the Spirit of the
City (London, 2003), 181-208.
8. Royston Landau, "Jane Drew," in Adolf Placzek, ed., Macmillan

Encyclopedia of 'Architects (NewYork, 1989), vol. 1: 598-99.
9.1 discuss the impact of women on modernism in "The Fe-male Spaces of
Notes
Modernism: A Western Canadian Perspective," Prospects 26 (2002),
1. My research for this article was funded by a grant from the Social
767-800. See also Marilyn Friedman, "Glamour ? Mo Mo: Women's Roles
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a fellowship
in the Modern Movement," and Mary McLeod, "Undressing Architecture:
from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation. It forms part of my study of the
Fashion, Gender and Modernity," in Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde
interactions between late British imperialism and modernist architecture
Heynen, Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement
and planning. I benefited greatly by correspondence with John Baker, sen
(Rotterdam, 2002), 327-38 and 213-326, respectively; and Hilde Heynen
ior partner in Cubitt and Hanen active in West Africa during the postwar
and Gulsum Baydar eds., Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Production of Gender
era. I am most grateful to former JSAH editor Nancy Stieber and the
in Modern Architecture (London, 2005). Fry dedicated his Art in a Machine
anonymous readers for their astute criticisms and helpful suggestions for
Age: A Critique of Contemporary Life through the Medium of Architecture
the clarification of my argument.
(London, 1969) to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.
2. H. A. N. Brockman in the introduction to Stephen Hitchens, Fry Drew

Knight Creamer Architecture (London, 1976), 6. The work of British archi
tects in West Africa, including Fry and Drew, is discussed in Mark Crinson,
Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot, England, 2003), 13 7-56.
10. Three British examples are Richard Sheppard, Building for the People
(London, 1948); Frederick Gibberd, Town Design (London, 1953); and

Percy Johnson-Marshall, Rebuilding Cities (Edinburgh, 1966). Fry was some
what less positive in Art in a Machine Age, commenting that "the technical
3. The interconnections between the colonial and the modernist projects
problem [of high-density economical housing] has been solved but at the
are examined in Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social
expense of much texture, contrast and rhythm, by means of which architec
Environment (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Jean-Louis Cohen, Casablanca:
ture communicates with us" (152).
Colonial Myths and Modern Ventures (New York, 2002); and in the British
11. Edwin Maxwell Fry, Pine Building (London, 1944), 115.
imperial context by John Lang, Madhivi Desai, and Miki Desai, Architecture
12. Ibid., 150.
and Independence: The Search for Identity?India 1880 to 1980 (Delhi, 1997).
13. F. M. Bourret, ed., Ghana?The Road to Freedom 1919-1951 (Lagos,
The issue of interface between indigenous and colonial practice is exam
1960), esp. 26-34. On British West African colonial policy, see also Michael
ined in Thomas Metcalf, "Architecture and the Representation of Empire:

India, 1860-1910, Representations 6 (spring 1984), 7-36, and in several recent
Crowder, The Story of Nigeria (London, 1978).
14. Ibid., 27.
articles published in the JSAH, ranging from by Swati Chattopadhay,
15. Ibid., 216.
"Blurring Boundaries: The Limits of'White Town' in Colonial Calcutta,"
16. Detailed accounts of these programs appear in The Nigeria Handbook
to Ikem Okoye, "Architecture, History, and the Debate on Identity in
(Lagos, 1956), and Huxley included some information in a travelogue she
Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa," and Shirine Hamadeh,
wrote: Elspbeth Huxley, Four Guineas: A Journey through West Africa
"Ottoman Expressions of Early Modernity and the 'Inevitable' Question of
Westernization," JSAH 59 Qune 2000), 154-79; 61 (Sept. 2002), 381-96;

and 63 (March 2004), 32-51, respectively.
4. The interrelation of architectural with literary fabric reflects Hayden
(London, 1954). On the broader policy context, see also Basil Davidson,
Africa in Modern History: The Search for a New Society (London, 1978).
17. The Colonial Development legislation and its effects are related in
David Fieldhouse, Black Africa 1945-60: Economic Decolonization and Arrested
White's argument in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Development (Cambridge, England, 1985), and Michael Havinden and
Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987). Another model of diverse analy
David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies
sis is Michel-Rolf Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
1850-1960 (London, 1993). Another instrument of late imperial policy,
History (Boston, 1995). The interrogation of literary sources to disclose the
inflected with reformist but also legitimating objectives, was the British
cultural projection of power is central to postcolonial discourse; the criti
Council, on which see Frances Donaldson, The British Council: The First
cal approaches are well represented in Ismail Talib, The Language of Fifty Years (London, 1984).
Postcolonial Literatures (London, 2002), and summarized by L?ela Ghandi,
Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, 1998). Modernist
claims to universal relevance are examined in Rhodri Windsor Liscombe,
"Perceptions in the conception of the modernist Urban Environment:
18. Bourret, Ghana, 211-13.

19. This commission is discussed with illustrations in Hitchens, Fry Drew
Knight Creamer, 119-20.

20. Fry recalled having an excellent personal, and thereby creative, associ
Canadian Perspectives on the Spatial Theory of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt," in Iain
ation with Barton. Ace. 264, Box 2, folder 2, Fry Papers, Royal Institute of
Boyd Whyte, ed., The Man-Made Future (London, 2006).
British Architects, London (hereafter R.I.B.A.). The depth of change of
5. For more specific information about Fry's career, see Alan Powers,
official colonial policy is marked by the laudatory review in the Crown
"Edwin Maxwell Fry," Dictionary of Art (London, 1993), and Edwin Maxwell
Colonist [15 Qan. 1956), 1: 34] commending Julian Huxley and Phyllis
Fry, Autobiographical Sketches (London, 1975).
Deane's Future of the Colonies (London, 1956) and current efforts "to help
6. Fry's prewar residential design is examined in Gavin Stamp, ed., The

Modern House Revisited (London, 1996), and Jeremy Gould, Modern Houses
the Colonial peoples and adequately to secure self-government and equal

ity of standards of life." Julian Huxley was best man at Fry and Drew's wed
in Britain 1919-1939 (London, 1977).
ding in 1944.
7. The MARS plan is contextualized in Eleanor Morris, British Town
21. Race and Politics in Kenya, A Correspondence between Elspeth Husxley and
212 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006

Margery Perham (London, 1944), 229. Huxley would later publish an objec
35. Contemporary "insider" views of the MARS plan appear in Korn,
tive study of British immigration policy and attitudes, Back Street New History Builds the Town, 83, 89 (see n. 7), and Edward Carter, The Future of
Worlds: A Look at Immigrants in Britain (London, 1964), in which the
London (Harmondsworth, England, 1962), 169. See also Morris, British
Commonwealth was described as "A sort of mummy case in which we have
Town Planning, 68-70 (see n. 7).
embalmed an empire that's dead" (51).
36. In Tropical Architecture, Fry assessed prefabricated housing units to be a
22. The text is in Creech Jones's papers in the library at Rhodes House in
"gift of doubtful value, serving still further to separate them [indigenous
Oxford: Mss. Brit. Emp. S332, Box 47. Two other relevant archives are, at
Africans] from their upbringing" (26). The Colonial Office was lobbied by
Rhodes House, that of A. E. S. Alcock, director of the Planning Board of the
several British manufacturers, including ARC ON and W. J. Simms Ltd., to
Gold Coast, Mss. Afr. S 666, among which is the text of a paper "Winds
promote their prefabricated units. But the colonial building liaison officer,
of Planning Change?Africa," ca. 1960, declaring that from 1944
George Atkinson, on several occasions indicated the climatic and social
Reconstruction had "become part of imperial policy"; and at the British
unsuitability of such imported systems. For example, on 28 Aug. 1953, he
Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, the papers on housing and
wrote the following memorandum: "Broadly speaking, neither I nor the
town planning assembled by J. B. Heigham, permanent secretary to the
Ministry of Trade and Commerce in the Gold Coast, 2000/166/649. On

Jones's career, see Lionel Wckham Legg, ed., Dictionary of National Biography
1931-1940 (Oxford, 1949) vol. 8, 524-26, and on the political context, see
Peter Clark, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990, 2nd ed. (London, 1998).
technical officers in Crown Agents and Colonial PWDs [Public Works

Departments] consider that for the average run of government building,
including housing, the 'export house' can not compete in cost and efficiency
with the local product." Public Record Office, Colonial Office (hereafter
P.R.O., CO.), 859/310.
23. Fry, Art in a Machine Age, 141 (see n. 9).
37. Modernism's primary location in the Atlantic sphere is evident in the
24. Talk on the firm's West African work, 1979, Ace. 264, Box 2, folder 2,
framing of standard studies, exemplified by Alan Colquhoun, Modern
Fry Papers, R.I.B.A.
Architecture (Oxford, 2002). The main studies on modernist design in Africa
25. This episode is recorded in Ace. 264, Box 2, folder 1, Fry Papers,
are Udo Kultermann, New Architecture in Africa, trans. Ernst Flesh (New
R.I.B.A., also containing material on his contacts with colonial officials
York, 1963) and New Directions in African Architecture, trans. John Maas
regarding school building in West Africa; references to individual commis

sions are in Box 1, folders 2, 4. During his leave, Fry also visited Gropius
in Boston.
(London, 1969). See also Nobuyuki Ogura, "Early Modern Movement in
East West Africa (Its Adaptation to the Climate)" (diploma thesis,

University College London, 1985), which addresses Fry and Drew's educa
26. The expatriates included E. J. Armitage, T. G. Bell, Z. Boronwiecki, G.
tional architecture; and DOCOMOMO Journal 28 (Mar. 2003), on the mod
Gottier, K. M. Greenwell, G. S. Knight, N. Starrett, and R. J. Silvester.
ern heritage in Africa, which includes an article by the British-born
This list is based on the archival records in the Fry section of the Fry and
Nigerian resident architect John Godwin, "Architecture and Construction
Drew Papers, R.I.B.A., and relevant publications from their articles in
Technology in West Africa in the 1950s and 1960s," 51-57; Hannah Le
Hitchens, Fry Drew Knight Creamer (see n. 2) and the entries on Fry in the
Roux, "Modern Movement Architecture in Ghana," 62-67; and Ola Uduku,
Encyclopedia of Architects and Dictionary of Art, the former adding Ashanti
"Educational Design and Modernism in West Africa," 76-82.
Secondary School, not cited by Fry and Drew. Their work outside the edu
38. The main histories of Chandigarh underplay the importance of Fry and
cational area over the period 1946-56 comprised, in approximate chrono
especially of Drew in its construction, including Norma Evenson,
logical order, the Leventis Store in Accra; the Co-operative Bank,
Chandigarh (Berkeley, 1966); Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: The Making of an
Longmans Green [Publishing] House and British Petroleum Head Office

in Lagos; branches, warehouse, and employee apartments for the Bank of
West Africa in Swedru and Tema, Ghana; the rebuilding of the original fish
Indian City (Delhi, 1999); and Vikram Prakesh, Chandigarh's Le Corbusier:

The Struggle for Modernity in Post Colonial India (Seattle, 2002).
39. Ace. 264, Box 1, folder 2, Fry Papers, R.I.B.A.
ing village at Tema in a series of residential clusters respecting local social
40. Drew, "Recent Work," 139.
practice; the Takoradi Bank in Takoradi and Community Center in Tarkwa,
41. Progressive Architecture 43 (Dec. 1962), 83; the issue also includes sec
Ghana; the Onitshe Market in Onitshe and the Ahmadu Bello Stadium in
Kaduna, Nigeria; and the Ghana National Museum in Accra.
tions on University College Ibadan (88-90) and the work of other archi
tects?British, French, and American (89-100).
27. The monograph is Hitchens, Fry Drew Knight and Creamer. Drew's arti
42. Maxwell Fry, Fine Building (London, 1944), esp. 3.
cle is "Recent Work of Fry, Drew & Partners and by Fry, Drew, Drake &
Lasdun in West Africa," Architectural Design 25 (4 May 1955) vol. 5, 137-74,
44. The educational commissions in Togoland were Mawuli School at Ho
while Fry wrote "West Africa" for James Richards's New Buildings in the
and the Teacher Training College farther north at Amedzoffe, and those in
Commonwealth, introduction by Nikolaus Pevsner (London, 1961), 103-6;
the Gold Coast were, in alphabetical order, Aburi School and Teacher
"European Importation," Progressive Architecture, 41 (Dec. 1962), 83-85;
Training College near Accra; Apowa Teaching Training College near
and "Architecture and Planning in the Tropics," Optima 19 (1969), 52-60.
Takoradi; additions to Adisadel and St. Augustine Colleges and Mfantsipim
28. Contemporary commentaries on their work at Chandigarh are in Ace.
School in the Cape Coast region; Opukuware Boys' School and Prempeh
264, Box 2, folder 1, Fry Papers, R.I.B.A.
College (coeducational secondary school) near Kumasi; additions to St.
Monica's School and St. Andrews Teacher Training College at Meli, near
30. Drew, "Recent Work," 139.
Mampong; and a new complex for Wesley Girl's School in the Cape Coast.
31. Fry and Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone (London, 1956),
26.
Secondary School at Sekondi; the Womens' Teacher Training College and

Wudil Teacher Training College, both near Kano, in the northern province.
3 2. Fry, Art in a Machine Age, 12.

33. Fry stressed climatic and cultural factors in his article "Architecture and
Planning in the Tropics.
46. Besides University College, the nondenominational group included

Wudil, Prempeh, Amedzoffe, Mfantsipim, and Sekondi. Those managed
34. The term was coined by Clarence Perry and defined in his book, The
Neighborhood Unit (New York, 1929).
45. The other four schools in Nigeria were Holy Cross School in Lagos; the
by Christian denominations were Methodist (Wesley Girls' School);

Presbyterian (Mawuli and St. Andrews); Scottish Mission (Aburi); Church
Missionary Society, Anglican (Adisadel); and Roman Catholic (Apowa, Holy
Cross, Opukuware, St. Augustine, and St. Monica).
64. New Commonwealth 23, no. 11 (1952), 455; the issue included the report
on University College Ibadan (480-81).
47. An interesting commentary on the cultural politics of the commission
65. The Nigeria Handbook (Lagos, 1953), 39.
was made by the Canadian high commissioner, C. A. Ronny, after a visit in
66. Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 29, 91 (see n. 22).
September 1958: "The buildings are very modern and are certainly not in
67. Elspbeth Huxley and Margery Perham, Race and Politics (London, 1944), 15.
keeping with the style of the buildings of other cities in India. This is per
68. Huxley, Four Guineas, 134, 136, respectively (see n. 16). St. Monica's
haps as it should be in a city built after independence. The old style public
was commissioned by the Sisters of the Order of the Holy Paraclete centred
buildings reminiscent of the imperial past could not have represented as
well the republican presence." Record Group 56, Box 11, file 101-10-13,
National Archives of Canada.
48. Hitchens, Fry Drew Knight Creamer, 103 (see n. 2).
at Whitby in Britain.
69. Huxley, Four Guineas, 183.
70. Ibid., 136.

71. Elspeth Huxley, A New Earth: An Experiment in Colonialism (London,
49. Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case (1960; London, 1961), 50. Querry
1960), 9.
comments on the hospital at the leper colony: "It reminds me of something
72. Pevsner, introduction, New Buildings, 12 (see n. 27); Fry's essay, "West
in one of our new satellite towns. Hemel Hempstead, perhaps, or
Africa," appears on 103-6.
Stevenage" (187).
73. Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom (London, 1962), 27. See
50. Fry and Drew, Tropical Architecture, 20 (see n. 31).
51. Correspondence between the London metal-faced boarding manufac
also Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame
Nkrumah (London, 1989).
turer, Aluplex Ltd., and Drew in the winter of 1944 is held in the CO., one
74. See n. 55, and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). See also Bart
dated 7 Dec. asking "Mrs Maxwell Fry" to investigate potential use. P.R.O.,
Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts. Practices. Politics (London,
CO., 859/123/8.
1997), and Gayatri Spivak,y4 Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History
52. Fry and Drew, Tropical Architecture, 201.
53. Fry is quoted in Richards, New Buildings, 103 (see n. 27); other quota
tions appear on 104-6.
of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
75. Basil Davidson, in Davidson and Adenekan Ademola, eds., The New West
Africa: Problems of Independence (London, 1953), 56. Davidson extended his
54. Related concepts of the cultural analysis of colonialism are discussed in
deconstructive criticism in his capacity as director of the Centre of West
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of
African Studies at the University of Birmingham and through a series of
Culture (Chicago, 1988) and Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner, eds.,
books culminating in Africa in Modern History: The Search for a New Society
Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds
(Berkeley, 1999). See also Andrew Benjamin, Tony Davies, and Robbie Goh,
(London, 1978).
76. A biography appears in Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series (New
eds., Postcolonial Cultures and Literature: Modernity and the
York, 1995), vol. 47, 1-9; see also Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe:
(Un)Commonwealth (New York, 2002). The literary origins of British colo
Language and Ideology in Fiction (London, 1991). Achebe's socialization into
nialism are discussed in Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal
the colonial system probably corresponded with that narrated in Patrick
Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge, England, 1998).
Chamoiseau, School Days, trans. Linda Coverdale (Lincoln, Nebr., 1997).
55. Fritz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (1952;
London, 1967), and The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(New York, 1962).

56. Davidson's career and influence are summarized in entries in The
Academic Who's Who (London, 1976) and Who's Who 1996 (London, 1996).
77. Chinua Achebe, Man of the People (London, 1966), 4.

78. Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (1936; London, 1946), 41.
79. The literature on Greene's thought and writing, predominantly as a

supposed Roman Catholic novelist, is extensive, and includes Robert Evans,
Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations (Lexington, Ky., 1967); Terry
monic cultural practices of colonialism exemplified by Valentin Y.
Eagleton, "Reluctant Heroes: The Novels of Graham Greene," in Harold

Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: Graham Greene (New York, 1987); and
Mudimbe, author of Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Cates Baldridge, Graham Greenes Fictions: The Virtues of Extremities
Such writings formed a basis for the subsequent deconstruction of the hege
Knowledge (Bloomington, Ind., 1988) and La d?pendance de l'Afrique et les
(Columbia, Mo., 2000).
moyens d'y rem?dier (Paris, 1980).
80. Greene, Heart of the Matter (1948; London, 1954), 7. The formulation of
57. Bakhtin's works include Marxisme et la philosophie du langage, trans.
the British West African colonies, especially Sierra Leone, as dystopic space
Marina Yaguello (Paris, 1997), and Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A
beginning with the writings of Richard Burton but including those of Greene,
Critical Introduction to Sociological Practice, trans. Albert Wehrle (Baltimore,
1978); and his influence is examined in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin:

The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzick (Minneapolis, 1995). Bhabha's
is traced in Richard Phillips, "Dystopian Space in Colonial Representations
and Interventions: Sierra Leone as 'the White Man's Grave,'" Geografiska

Annaler. Series B. Human Geography 84B (2002), 3-4, 189-200.
publications include Nation Narration (New York, 1990) and The Location of
81. Form G, no. 1, "The Office Building," quoted in Philip Johnson, Mies
Culture (New York, 1994).
van der Rohe, 3rd ed. (New York, 1978), 88.
58. Quoted in Todorov, Bakhtin, 99; an interesting application of the prin
82. Greene, Heart of the Matter (1948; London, 1954), 84.
ciple as related to colonial regime appears in Nicki Levell, Oriental Visions:

Exhibitions, Travel and Collecting in the Victorian Age (London, 2000).
59. Crown Colonist 14 (Feb. 1944), 2, 113.
83. Ibid., 227.

84. Fry, Machine Age, 141 (see n. 9).
85. "The Modern Movement," Ace. 264, Box 2, folder 3, Fry Papers, R.I.B.A.
60. Allister Macmillan, The Red Book of West Africa: Historical and Descriptive,
86. Interview, 1986, Ace. 264, Box 1, folder 5, Fry Papers, R.I.B.A.
Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures and Resources (London, 1920), 16.
87. See their 1984 narration of their careers organized by the R.I.B.A. Ace.
61. Macmillan reviewed the mainly religious educational facilities for the
264, Box 2, folder 5, Fry Papers, R.I.B.A.
African population. Ibid., 6, 35-38.
88. The work of other British firms in West Africa in this period was also
62. Ibid., 16.
widely reviewed in the professional journals, one example being Architectural
63. W E. Simnett, British Way (London, 1943), 127-28.
Digest 19 (July 1962), an issue on Africa.
214 JSAH / 65:2, JUNE 2006
89. The commissioning of universities and technical colleges in the Colonial
Empire, notably in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), West and East Africa, and the West
Indies, preceded higher education construction in Britain; see Stefan
Illustration credits
Figure 1. Architectural Design (May 1955), 137, 139
Figures 2, 4, 6, 8, 16. Fry Drew Knight Creamer Architecture, 54, 113, 122-23,
Muthesuis, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (New
95, 62, respectively
Haven, 2000), esp. 62-64.
Figure 3. Copy of lost plans formerly at the Library of the Foreign and
90. Respectively discussed in Stephen Dobney, ed., Harry Seidler: Selected
and Current Works (Mulgrave, Australia, 1997); Justine Clark and Paul
Walker, Looking for the Local: Architecture and the New Zealand Modern
(Wellington, 2000); and Harold Kaiman, A History of Canadian Architecture
Commonwealth Office, author's collection

Figure 5 Blueprint of lost plans formerly at the Library of the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, author's collection

Figures 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18. Fry Drew Knight Creamer Architecture, photo
(Toronto, 1994), vol. 2, 797-800.
graphs by Corry Bevington, 66, 69, 77, 91, 106, 66, respectively
91. Progressive Architecture (Dec. 1962), 85.
Figures 11, 14, 17, 19. Architectural Design (May 1955), photographs by
Richard Lannoy, 142, 102, 161, 166, respectively
Figure 13 Fry Drew Knight Creamer Architecture, photograph by Richard
Lannoy, 100, 101

The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew

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Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa: The Work of Maxwell Fry and Jane

Society of Architectural Historians, University of California Press are collaborating with

Modernism in Late Imperial British West Africa

RHODRI WINDSOR LISCOMBE

One significant episode in the transoceanic

tion of modern-movement architectureWorld

completed by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in West

(1946-5 6). * The architects designed or enlarged

Togoland (Figure 1). These buildings formedSchool

sanctioned modernist design in their practice

Africa illustrates the movement's global dispersal through

the networks associated with the British

This moment of intersection between modernistcontinue

British imperialist practice also corresponds withstanding

gence of a textual fabric in the form of fictional,

historical, and touristic literature on the colonial

prise. A comparative analysis of the architectural

textual fabric of the British colonial regime reveals

ing recognition of the colonial subject, an increasingly

authority such as Fry and Drew, and the limitations

The comparison?using visual and literal materials

principles to local conditions, they were constrained i

and 1934, respectively.6 His desire to realize the m

idiom modified from the main German and French

at the conservatism of British architecture anddesigned

thralls of the General Strike of 1926, the collapse

THE WORK OF MAXWELL FRY AND JANE DREW, 1

Figure 2 Maxwell Fry and Walter

arnnrrir.?^^am^ : ' - ' V--^^tfi^^^^^^^^^^B

Fry was on detached service to West Africa in 1944 to

as a civilian and as commissioned officer in the Corps of Royal

infrastructure intended for the strategic development of

Engineers. The plan was modeled around graduated traffic cir

agricultural and mineral resources. He was appointed town

culation and a sequence of Neighbourhood, Town, and

planning advisor, with Drew initially as his assistant, to Lord

Borough Units that combined modernist zoning with Garden

postings held through 1946. That year, they established a

Neighbourhood Unit component would reappear in the town

practice centered in London, but continued to work prima

Coast and Nigeria, including Accra, Benin, Enugu, Onitsha,

Drew. She, like Fry, was a graduate of the Architectural

rily in West Africa over the ensuing decade to complete

their commissions. West Africa offered Fry and Drew a

integrity and vigor of expression. Here the pair would

Association, where they would help found a department of

become imbricated with the web of colonial relations that

tropical studies in 1957, and like Fry was motivated by the

had grown from decades of British policy, in particular that

belongs among a remarkable cadre of feminists active in the

and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.9 These women were enabled by priv

British West Africa: Colonialism and

ileged birth to take advantage of the professional opportunities

opened by the world wars and by modernist polemic, if not

The provision of education in British West Africa must be

always practice. Fry and Drew married in 1942.

In 1941, while working on the MARS plan, Fry drafted

interpreted against the context of colonial policy promoting

the devolution of legislative power to Africans in conjunc

tion with colonial economic development. During World

modern-movement design.10 In it, he synthesized his con

conscripted for military service or resource development