On “Borrowing” and “Othering”

In 1940 engineer Egide-Jean Devroey (1894-1972) presented a report to the members of the Institut Royal Colonial belge entitled Habitations coloniales et conditionnement d’air sous les tropiques. Like various other publications of his, Devroey’s report was, first and foremost, instrumental in nature. It aimed at servicing colonial agents in the field, who were confronted with infrastructural challenges of all kinds in the Belgian Congo. It provided them, first, with a solid survey of the knowledge available on the application of air-conditioning in buildings, grounded in state-of-the-art research in the fields of climatology and building physics. Here Devroey drew heavily on expertise developed in France and the US by, among others, Missenard and the American Society of Heating and Ventilation Engineers. Second, the report showcased air-conditioning technology  emerging on the global market as well as a series of ‘best practices’ of edifices incorporating both mechanical and natural ventilation techniques to build in a climate-responsive way. To that end, Devroey confronted images and discussions of buildings in the Belgian Congo with examples taken from, among others, Italian-ruled Libya, Portuguese-ruled Angola or the Dutch Indies. In this paper, we will give specific attention, however, to how Devroey drew heavily on the research on building in the tropics by the German architect Friedrich Vick (1904-?) and his 1938 book entitled Einfluβ des tropischen Klimas auf Gestaltung und Konstruktion der Gebaüde in particular.

Confronting both reports, as well as the later work of Vick, we intend to unveil a so far overlooked dialogue between Belgium and German research on the topic, but also highlight how both Devroey and Vick “borrowed” from a specific set of practices that display networks of knowledge exchange along trajectories that do not follow strict colony-metropolelinkages. By assessing these books also from a postcolonial perspective, we furthermore aim to unpack the still common notion that climatology and building physics constitute neutral domains of scientific knowledge. Indeed it is crucial to understand how the definition of thermal comfort in the tropics was rather heavily informed by normative assumptions of settlement, race, labor and productivity, which were part and parcel of extractive (colonial) economies. In line with what scholars like Jiat-Hwee Chang and Daniel Ryan have recently proposed, this paper then argues that it is timely to assess climate design in relation to “Its Others” and bring a colonial history-perspective to the history of building services and techniques like air-conditioning.