[excerpt] 

Climate responsive design was central to the Third Worldist practice of Tropical Architecture during the 1950s and 1960s. However, climate responsiveness, which meant designing a building climate specifi cally so that it could function with minimum or no mechanical conditioning, seemed redundant to European and North American architects. In particular, Peter and Alison Smithson, who established themselves as the new generation of British postwar architects with the Hunstanton School in 1949, were critical of the climate responsive design method of Tropical Architecture. In 1960, in an article titled “The function of architecture in cultures-in-change” in the journal Architectural Design, they addressed the problem of generating architectural form in the tropics, which were going through rapid modernization. They wrote:

It is no good looking to the climate and the physical environment to give the form of the building. Technically, a glass box and a massconcrete cave can produce the same comfort conditions, if one can afford the right mechanical equipment. It all depends what you are after. The shape of the culture can only be built up by separate individual form-giving decisions towards a common ideal – however vague this ideal may seem at the present.

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