In a period of intense building activity between the end of the Second World War and the era of Independence, modern movement architects in British West Africa developed the approaches of “tropical architecture” to deal with conditions that differed from the British metropolis. This thesis outlines the key events, buildings and texts of this period, and investigates climatic thinking in the work, amongst others, of Fry and Drew, James Cubitt and Partners, The Architects’ Co-Partnership, and Kenneth Scott in the Gold Coast and Nigeria. Drawing on discourse analysis and post-colonial criticism, this thesis questions the identity of climatic thinking in tropical architecture. In contrast to the popular conception of climatic responsiveness as a neutral approach, the study builds up an understanding of its use in tropical architecture as a form of modernist and colonial discourse, as well as discursive field in its own right. The thesis shows how institutional arrangements tied the practice and dissemination of tropical architecture to the spatial logic of the modern colonial system. Modern climatic approaches difference from local practices, displacing local subjectivities, practices and places, and installing solutions that were beneficial to colonial interests and that extended the project of modernism. The thesis concludes that climatic thinking in modern architecture in West Africa was not neutral, but rather operated as a discourse in the development of colonialism and modernity. This past prefigures its contemporary influence on the architecture of post-colonial contexts.