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Tropicalisation / Triptyque

The term tropicalisation is used to describe the state of Westerners who have lived in the Tropics and who have difficulty readapting to their home country.

In urbanism and in architecture, tropicalisation can also mean a form of construction in large urban regions located between the two imaginary lines known as the Cancer and Capricorn tropics.

Tropicalisation, until recently considered exotic, has become a dominant concept due to the importance that these tropical cities have acquired in the last few decades.

It is completely contrary to the new urban and architectural paradigms of contemporary cities.

Tropicalisation can consist of, according to the practitioner:

defying the “artificial abyss” of contemporary cities;promoting human experience over landscape viewing;
favouring entropic systems, the corruption materials;
showing the passage of time and ageing;
favouring the exuberant and the immoral;
not being afraid of the hybrid or the clumsy;
adopting the study of sustainable unfamiliarity as a creative means and the limit of knowledge, or lack thereof, as a facet to study;
preferring the wild to the technological;
forget the verdict as to being good or bad taste;
privileging experimentation and improvisation;
considering each project as a living being;
designing projects that are more creature than creation;
seeking for projects to acquire a certain autonomy, for them to be foreign to their designers, for them to escape.

In policy and empty form:

enveloping architecture with lush vegetation;
abandoning air travel altogether rather than finding non-polluting ways to fly;
evoking primitive myth over nostalgia.

Famous names in tropicalisation: Hélio Oiticica, Oswald de Andrade, Suely Rolnik, Roche & Sie, Lina Bo Bardi, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Neri Oxman, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Paul Virilio and Claude Parent.

Extract from the Yearbook of the National College of Architecture of Versailles. Triptyque, 2011