The Victoria and Albert Museum is a glittering treasure trove of imperial loot, still named after the conjugal figureheads of one of the bloodiest networks of global subjugation in history.

Can it really be the right place to consider the all too brief architectural flowering of an era which laid legitimate claim to the description ‘post-colonial’? One of the many achievements of the judiciously curated Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence exhibition — originally exhibited as part of the 2023 Venice Biennale — is to fold its problematic location into a persuasive and nuanced narrative of creative innovation in the dog days of the British empire, which is at once site-specific and of universal application.

‘I think the English have a grand job to do for the world,’ wrote the architect Maxwell Fry to his wife and colleague, the architect Jane Drew, from his wartime posting in what was then The Gold Coast, but would soon become independent Ghana. ‘Never grander than at this time, even if it is the last and final grandeur.’ Sustaining the fantasy of a benevolent imperial mission to the last in the teeth of a gale of less philanthropic realities, Fry and Drew persistently displayed what the exhibition commentary terms ‘the deeply ingrained preconceptions of colonial officials.’

Fry and Drew’s influential 1956 handbook Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone insisted that ‘there seemed to be no indigenous architecture’. The idea of a tabula rasa was of course wishful thinking from a couple of gung-ho would-be modernists whose experimental inclinations had been held back by the imperial motherland’s frosty response to the new gospel of Walter Gropius (with whom Fry had collaborated on three buildings between Gropius’ arrival in the UK in the 1934 and his disgruntled departure for the US three years later, describing England as an ‘inartistic country’) and Le Corbusier, whom Fry and Drew would later enlist at the Indian government’s request to build the model Indian city of Chandigarh.

The doctrines described by the splenetic vorticist Wyndham Lewis as ‘cod-liver oil to the sweet Anglo Saxon palette’ met with a warmer reception in West Africa. Here, a cash-rich colonial office was looking to shore up the creaking foundations of British imperial power by investing in the kind of splashy new educational facilities that might inculcate a proper level of gratitude in subjects with designs on becoming citizens. Fry and Drew rose to the occasion with canny stratagems as ‘passive cooling’ — positioning buildings so short solid walls facing east and west blocked the strongest sun, allowing north and south facades to be left open using brise soleils (semi-permeable screens that block direct sunlight) — and adjustable slats to facilitate cross ventilation.

The Architectural Review acclaimed the success of their ‘African Experiment’, and the pristine breeziness of Fry and Drew buildings including the University College in Ibadan caught the eye of the Prime Minister of newly independent India. Jawaharlal Nehru was looking for a suitable architectural style to express the confidence of his new progressive, secular state — ideally one free from the visual signifiers of empire. The apparent ease with which tropical modernism made the transition from colonial imposition to house style of national self-determination was all the more remarkable given the initial continuity in personnel.

A hand-drawn Christmas card Fry and Drew sent home from Chandigarh a short while later depicted the two British architects waving cheerily from a giant construction site in the foothills of the Himalayas under the inscrutable gaze of an anonymous (and casually orientalised) man in a turban. ‘We found in India,’ Drew blithely recalled later, ‘that it was cheaper to use seven hundred people to excavate than to employ an excavating machine. Le Corbusier’s High Court and Secretariat were built with the aid of donkeys, men, women and children.’

Nehru had foreseen a brighter future for those who had voted for him than the supply of faceless cheap labour for moonlighting British modernists. As well as encouraging Indian architects working abroad to return home and help build ‘the temples of modern India,’ his insistence that Chandigarh and other large-scale construction projects should become a ‘living school’ for Indian architects bore fruit in the emergence of a new generation of homegrown practitioners with more sensitivity to their own cultural context.

The Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology — led by Balkrishna Doshi — would send students out into rural villages to explore aspects of their architectural heritage beyond the purview of European dogmas, and the crackle of retrospective tension between Doshi and his former employer Le Corbusier over their collaborations in Ahmedabad is just one of a number of well-presented examples of such creative friction. Star Gropius trainees Habib Rahman and Achyut Kanvinde outgrew their master to especially productive effect.

A similar dynamic played out under Kwame Nkrumah in the early days of Ghanaian independence, where the symbolic importance of large-scale construction projects like Black Star Square in Accra (built on the former colonial playing fields) was given a practical underpinning by the requirement for leadership by Ghanian architects, in this case Victor Adegbite. The exhibition’s spotlight on Ghana’s indigenous tropical modernists — men like Theodore Shealtiel Clerk, who oversaw the construction of the model manufacturing city of Tema, and Ghana’s chief physical planning officer Peter Turkson — celebrates the promise of a genuinely naturalised form of modernism, whose rogue decorative flourishes would not need to be plucked heedlessly from their cultural roots.

Needless to say, such an architecture of the non-aligned would have had to overcome massive political obstacles: there is no mention here of the widely accepted suggestions of CIA involvement in the military coup which toppled the increasingly authoritarian Nkrumah a year before the opening of the grandiose International Trade Fair complex in Accra that would become his most spectacularly problematic monument. However, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Bushra Mohamed and Christopher Turner’s superb half-hour film in the final room does manage to give a human scale to the epic moment of Pan-African possibility whose beautiful ruins are today fetishised on Instagram. And with much of Nehru’s secular modernist legacy too having already fallen victim to the bulldozing force of Hindu nationalism, the need to preserve the memory of these lost visions of a better outcome is all the more urgent. This exhibition is a moving eulogy for a fleeting alliance of building materials and political aspiration — you’ll believe concrete can sing.