Deep inside the workshops of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a specialist is painstakingly dabbing the back of a torn drawing with a cotton bud. After spending hours carefully removing strips of ageing sticky tape, she is delicately repairing the paper properly, to reveal a dashing modernist building emerging from a jungle. This glamorous courtyard complex features a round pool of water encircling a dancefloor, accessed by little bridges. Above it, a cantilevered glass box hovers on stilts – or pilotis. It has an air of international modernity, like it could be the party pad of a cocoa baron.
When the Ghanaian architect John Owusu Addo sketched this chic vision in the 1960s, he could never have imagined it would one day be on show at the V&A, London’s illustrious repository of British colonial booty. The patched-up drawing will feature in Tropical Modernism, a show that aims to highlight lesser-known figures who took up the colonial architectural style and made it something entirely their own during the early years of independence in India and parts of Africa.
