Abstract
An examination of the architectural value of the Japanese Embassy in Mexico, designed by Kenzo Tange, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Manuel Rosen Morrison, which is in danger of being demolished. The context of mid-century Mexican architecture is addressed in order to situate this work within its historic moment, thus confirming its importance. This building was the result of an intellectual encounter between one Japanese and two Mexican architects, who exchanged ideas, concepts and criteria, resulting in a building with an innovative formal design, due to the use of reinforced concrete, and the flexibility of its structural concept, which allows it to be adapted to different uses. This article is essentially based on the archive of the architect Manuel Rosen Morrison, held by the Archive of Mexican Architects at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Faculty of Architecture.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Kenzo Tange, Japanese Embassy in Mexico.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 62-69
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.4X21D76S

Abstract
Parallel to the discourse of Tropical Architecture and the work of UK architects in the British colonial territories in the Middle East, Africa, and India after the WWII, climate adaptation designs or devices such as brise-soleil, perforated cement bricks, sun shading screens, courtyards, etc., started to emerge in modernist buildings in Asia. This article is a preliminary survey of these cases in Hong Kong and Macau since the 1950s. It discusses how tropicality was used in response to the post-war revisionism of Modern Movement that placed emphasis on local identity and culture.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Hong Kong modern architecture, Macau modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 56-61
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.9U06Q3RS

Abstract
Preis, who was a Viennese émigré and refugee architect with no early experience designing for tropical climates, went on to become one of the most prolific mid-century regionalist and modernist Hawai‘i designers. Although he is best known for his award-winning design for the USS Arizona Memorial (1962) - one of the ships infamously sunk in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Pries’s earlier institutional and residential commissions are arguably his most compelling. His Viennese roots directly influenced Pries’s approach to design in Hawai‘i. By engaging numerous precedents from Vienna, he eventually forged a novel idiom for Hawai‘i domestic design. This article will examine the interiors of two of Preis’s more than 100 single-family houses – the Scudder Residence (now the Scudder-Gillmar Residence) (1939-1940) and the Dr. Edward and Elsie Lau Residence (1951) – in order to highlight some of the ways in which Preis transported Viennese modern design ideas of the first three decades of the 20th century some 7,616 miles from Austria into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. His interior designs for these houses evidence strong relationships with the ideas of earlier Viennese modernists about spatial planning, the aesthetic uses of materials, furnishings, and color. Perhaps more than any other influence, Preis’s Vienna experience culminated in modern architecture that was as sensorially pleasurable as Hawai‘i itself.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Alfreid Preis, Hawaiian modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 48-55
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.1WCECYVH

Abstract
Modernism in tropical in Australia is testimony to the tenacity and optimism of individuals and communities in the vast, “empty north” of the continent, but also reflects a young nation’s strategic and commercial need to develop and make viable this region in the years following WWII. As practitioners, academics and public servants, the Modern Diaspora, introduced and promoted Modernism as a climate responsive solution to building in the tropics. The result is work that is inventive, frequently of modest material means and expressive of its tropical circumstances.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Australian modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 40-47
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.9ECAUPWN

Abstract
The French architect and urban designer Écochard, was one of the numerous architects that designed buildings and cities for newly independent nations in the post-war era of decolonization. Many of these young nation states were in search for urban and architectural projects that would explicitate a “proper” model of modernization that differed from that of the former colonizer. This essay argues that the principles of tropical architecture would play a key role in representing and monumentalizing such an alternative model of modernization.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Michel Écochard, African modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 32-39
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.JJRX94UU

Abstract
Otto Königsberger was a German émigré architect who worked as the state architect in princely Mysore in British India in the 1940s. Upon emigration to London in 1951, he subsequently became an educator of Tropical Architecture (1954-1971) at the AA School of Architecture. This paper examines how Otto Königsberger’s career can illuminate “global” as a paradigm in Modernist historiography.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Otto Königsberger, Indian modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 26-31
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.55NZT8G6

Abstract
This paper investigates how the notion of “tropical architecture” was established in Angola by looking at the local development of scientific knowledge on climate during the 20th century. It focuses on the processes that gave rise to a growing understanding of the geography and climate of the country, namely through the creation of local research institutes. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, increasingly more climatic data was collected in the country. This data was later combined with studies in building physics, giving rise to original research developed by the lea. Local institutions, such as the Public Works Department of Angola (DSOPA), disseminated this knowledge, eventually influencing not only the design methods of local architects but also the development of specific products in the construction sector. The lea became a research and education organization of great relevance in Angola during the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as a symbol of modernity and the quest for scientific knowledge.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Vasco Vieira da Costa, Angolan modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 18-25
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.MF8WQP70

Abstract
While orthodoxy was consolidating its hold on modern architecture in the 1930s, fresh new ideas from the periphery began to widen and question its limiting vocabulary. This study looks at projects emerging before the end of that decade that paralleled the much publicized work of Le Corbusier and Brazilian innovators in developing ideas for taming the sun in warm climates. The story focuses on a forgotten speech given in Rangoon which enthused about a soon to be forgotten but effective method of solar control and triggered a yearning for architecture widening its scope to engage with attributes of national identity.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Colonialism, Myanmar modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 6-17
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.7LQWCQXU