In November 2024, the third edition of the International Biennial of Tropical Architecture was held in Le Port, La Réunion, for three days of conferences, debates and exhibitions about architecture in intertropical geographical areas. French architect Philippe Madec, guest of honour at this year’s event and patron of La Réunion School of Architecture, looks back on this event, a time of exchange and a call to ‘build community’.

---

Philippe Madec

Created in 1988 as a branch of Montpellier School of Architecture, a year after the Brundtland report [titled Our Common Future, this report was first published by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired at the time by Gro Harlem Brundtland. Ed.], and now the 21st French national school of architecture, La Réunion School of Architecture has a long history of teaching sustainable architecture based on bioclimatism. When the International Biennial of Tropical Architecture was created, all the choices of interventions and projects selected were based on this commitment, and constituted a formidable panel of exemplary architectures in terms of eco-responsibility, alternatives that have already been realised, in all the tropics around the planet: Ecuador, Vietnam, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Indonesia, Australia, Sri Lanka, Réunion, Martinique and Mayotte.

Benevolence for Nature, for human and non-human living beings, the importance of the landscape, respect for cultural diversity and biodiversity, careful use of what is already there, and the skilful use of natural, bio- and geosourced materials, such as water and plants, were all reflected in projects and achievements that demonstrated a happy sisterhood and brotherhood.

The Tropics are exemplary. Different from the West and the East, the Global North and the Global South, they speak of our continuous global unity. In this biennial, it was the ‘mundiality’ of the great Martinique philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant that was at work: ‘This state of bringing together cultures lived in respect for the Diverse’.

Rejecting globalisation and its utopian murder of peoples, species and constructive cultures, saying no to the impoverishment of our great earthly common good that is diversity – this is not just a matter for the architecture to resist; it is also about its tenacity, firm and sovereign. In his essay Encore un moment…, French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin sheds light on this condition: ‘Should we renounce all universality for fear of abstraction and error? On the contrary: we are in the era of humanity’s common destiny. […] The universal is concrete’.

Last November in Le Port, a jubilant profusion of diverse atmospheres, materials, forms and architectures has ‘bubbled up’, all historically and geographically adapted to so many different societies, cultures and climates. Recognising the sumptuous, fragile and scattered diversity of human settlement requires a historic change in the way we look at our physical being, our presence. This biennial made it possible. It deployed a concrete universal.

---