Collectively, the papers in this themed section argue that the meanings associated with tropicality are not a priori but, rather, grow from sets of bodily practices and situational contexts. Tropicality in such terms is a politicized approach as opposed to something natural. Thus, tropical architecture, which seems to connect with and connote the natural environment, is conversely a complex cultural construction that has been subjected to various networks of power marked by race, gender and class.

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Rejecting the essentialization of the tropical built environment, the papers attempt to critique existing discourses of tropical architecture that have defined the field as unproblematically essentialist or nostalgic in relation to local climate and tradition, or alternately objectified its forms as exotic artifacts for passive consumption. Contributors reconsider how tropical spaces in their documented or narrated formats may operate as modes of criticism and/or transform the ways in which we understand tropicality. For example, Chee’s paper also proposes that the tiger anecdote transforms one’s architectural knowledge by decentring it from architect to user, or storyteller, thus reinforcing the idea that tropicality is a mobile rather than fixed construct since the animal story performs this space anew through the inevitable variations which accompany each narration.

 

Ultimately, this themed section strives to map out the expanded field of tropical architecture with particular attention to its tenuous conceptual scaffolding. It exposes a multidimensional territory constituted by a complex web of material facts and buildings, discursive ideas and their languages, as well as competing imaginations and ideologies. The work of situating the multiple contexts of tropical architecture needs to be done for it is this work which constructs and defines anew the category we call ‘tropical architecture’ in its manifold built, drawn, documented and narrated forms.