CONSTRUCTING THE NEW WORLD
Legacies and possibilities within the built environment of modern Caribbean landscapes
Didier William, 125th St. Photo by Constance Marsh/Courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes Gallery
While architectural modernism, in particular, continues to be celebrated for its progressive social and political agenda, what the modernist rhetoric of progress and innovation obscures is its dark side, namely, its inherent homogenizing, authoritarian, and segregationist dimensions. These modernist conceptions are still present in contemporary architecture and urban planning, where, in the name of modern architecture, entire communities, forms of life, and historical sites are erased. A critique of modernism alone is not enough, having already been conducted by postmodernism. The task of the present is, additionally, to imagine architectural forms of demodernization. Therefore, for all those who are living in modernist structures, it is time, within the larger struggle of decolonization, to focus our efforts on undermining and destabilizing the very foundational modernists’ values, categories, and epistemologies that continue to permeate our realities, irrespective of geographical location and North/South divisions.
Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, David Joselit, Pamela M. Lee; A Questionnaire on Decolonization, 2020
BOOKS: NON-FICTION
Fernando Luiz Lara, Felipe Hernández (2021). CENTER 24: Decolonizing the Spatial History of the Americas. University of Texas at Austin: CAAD Publications
This collection of essays presents an innovative and provocative set of concepts to understand the spaces of the Americas through local lenses. The disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter; however, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge in these fields originates in another continent and is external to the lived experience in such regions. The book introduces seven new concepts that have not been sufficiently addressed, and would make a significant contribution to the field: namely, gridded spaces; spaces of agriculture; space as image; watered spaces; spaces as labor; racialized spaces; and gendered spaces. This book, thus, introduces a broader conceptual framework to foster the analysis of the spatial histories of the Americas.
Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, [1974] 1991).
Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields.
The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy.
Herbeck, J., (2018) Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP), LIverpool University Press.
Construction of identity has constituted a vigorous source of debate in the Caribbean from the early days of colonization to the present, and under the varying guises of independence, departmentalization, dictatorship, overseas collectivity and occupation. Given the strictures and structures of colonialism long imposed upon the colonized subject, the (re)makings of identity have proven anything but evident when it comes to determining authentic expressions and perceptions of the postcolonial self. By way of close readings of both constructions in literature and the construction of literature, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean proposes an original, informative frame of reference for understanding the long and ever-evolving struggle for social, cultural, historical and political autonomy in the region.
Moré, G (Editor), Bergdoll, B (Introduction) (2010). Caribbean Modernist Architecture: Archives of Architecture Antillana/ AAA034. Museum of Modern Art
In February and March 2008, the International Program and the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized the Museum's first symposium on the modernist architecture of the Caribbean and bordering Latin American countries, in collaboration with the Caribbean School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Kingston, Jamaica. Topics included regional and international legacies, preservation, environmental sustainability and urban planning, as they relate to modernist architectural history and contemporary practice. The presenters were leading architects and local architectural historians. This illustrated volume presents papers from this symposium by Silvia Arango, Mervyn Awon, Marcus Barinas, Carlos Brillembourg, Jackson Burnside, Jean Doucet, Belmont Freeman, David Gouverneur, Ronny Lobo, Louise Noelle, Mark Raymond, Bruno Stagno and L. Mark Taylor, in both English and Spanish.
Winks, C. (2021). Postcolonial Ruins, Reconstructive Poetics: Caribbean Urban Imaginaries. In R. Cummings & A. Donnell (Eds.), Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020 (Caribbean Literature in Transition, pp. 102-117). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This analytical survey of key texts in contemporary urban Caribbean fiction and poetry from Kingston, Port-au-Prince, Havana, Santo Domingo and Pointe-à-Pitre explores several themes this literature holds in common: the postcolonial (or, in the case of Cuba, post-revolutionary) breakdown of the urban fabric and its attendant covert and more often overt violence, seen here in relation to the haunting and haunted after-lives of the plantation complex, along with the lived textures of daily life, with its unstable interplay of social anomie and possible emancipatory alternatives.
Tzonis, A., Stagno, B., & Lefaivre, L. (2001). Tropical architecture: Critical regionalism in the age of globalization. Chichester: Wiley-Academic.
Tropical Architecture presents a selection of essays by architectural historians and theoreticians on key issues in tropical architecture today. Alongside these are examples of work (both architectural and urbanist) from leading tropical architecture practitioners - including emerging practitioners and established architectural stars. Contributors include Ken Yeang, Michael Pearce, Charles Correa and many more.
DIGITAL PROJECTS
DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Research
https://www.decolonizing.ps/site/
The artistic practice of DAAR – Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti – is situated between architecture, art, pedagogy and politics. Over the last two decades, they have developed a series of research- projects that are both theoretically ambitious and practically engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. In their artistic research practice, art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts.
Puerto Rico Syllabus
https://puertoricosyllabus.com/syllabus/infrastructure-everyday-crisis-sb/
The materials gathered through the Puerto Rico Syllabus help place the current moment within the larger political, social, and economic history of this U.S. territory and illuminate how both the crisis and its proposed solutions are impacting the daily lives of millions of Puerto Ricans both within the territory and across its growing diaspora
FILM / VIDEO
Caribbean Voices: Contemporary Architecture Practice in Puerto Rico (2022)Tulane Architecture
Itohan Osayimwese is Associate Professor of the History of Art & Architecture and affiliate faculty in Africana Studies, Urban Studies, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. Her research engages with theories of modernity, postcolonialism, and globalization to analyze built and designed environments in nineteenth and twentieth-century East and West Africa, the Anglo-Caribbean, and Germany.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
Anderson, W (2021), Decolonizing the Foundation of Tropical Architecture, ABE Journal [Online], 18 http://journals.openedition.org/abe/9215;
There had long been architecture in the tropics, and then there was “tropical architecture.” As a conjuncture of modern architecture or international style and late-colonial developmentalism, formal tropical architecture flourished after World War II in West Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. The obvious, though usually neglected, antecedents could be found in the settler colonial tropics, especially in northern Australia and parts of Latin America. “The matter of tropical architecture has always been a subject of discussion in North Queensland,” observed an Australian reporter in 1898. 1The goal then was to aid those deemed “white” in efforts to acclimatize to the supposedly depleting tropical environment. Through stipulation of diet, clothing, physical activity, and housing, whites might achieve comfort in a place allegedly deleterious to their race. 2In late-colonial developmental projects, mostly after World War II, these racialized medical schemes for ensuring thermal comfort and labor productivity, predicated on disciplining white bodies and social relations, were further extended to reform the “colored” colonized too. Thus, while the new tropical architecture could be envisaged as a strategy associated with formal decolonization, it was also, like other development programs, a means of disciplining and managing subject populations, mobilizing and inserting them into the lower levels of global capitalism. Making people comfortable in the tropics, as Hannah Le Roux and others have argued, was closely allied with making tropical populations submissive and productive.
Copeland, H., Foster H., Joselit, D., Lee. P; A Questionnaire on Decolonization. October 2020; (174): 3–125. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00410
The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum's structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word's emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization.
Escolano, V (2005). A European Glance through the Mirror of Caribbean Architecture .Depósito de Investigación Universidad de Sevilla Docomomo N°33, 87. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/51396207.pdf
The modern movement’s architecture is an ample garment covering a multitude of cities on the five continents; it bears witness to a historical stage convulsive yet also intermingled with innovative propositions that allowed cities from every latitude to live the paradox of realizing their specific modernizing project according to the disciplinary rules of a pluralistic and common international system. Latin America developed this fascinating. The Caribbean region, in its insular lands, actively partakes in the difficult integration process, although Brazilian and Mexican achievements were prevalent in this process. Investigating the Caribbean and its architecture is nonetheless interesting to appreciate some of its singular realities.
Gonza, E., Tennant, L (2014). The ‘‘Color’’ of Heritage: Decolonizing Collaborative Archaeology in the Caribbean Monmouth University Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology & Heritage, Vol. 3 No. 1, p. 26–50 http://www.gonzaleztennant.net/pubs/Gonzalez-Tennant-The_Color_of_Heritage_(2014).pdf
This article explores the intersection of postcolonial theory and archaeology as it relates to the process of collaboratively investigating Afro-Caribbean heritage. Decolonizing archaeology involves asking uncomfortable questions regarding fundamental aspects of archaeological practice. The author examines the possibility that historical archaeologists sometimes miss collaborative projects due to a site’s assumed racial classification. The grouping of sites around the perceived ancestry of its inhabitants may restrict the ability of archaeologists to craft collaborative projects with various publics in postcolonial locations like the Caribbean. Recent research on Nevis provides a case study demonstrating how groups develop deep affinities for locations and how these affinities may cut across lines of color. The author’s goal is not to critique other approaches, but to challenge his own practice of archaeology by reflexively constructing a cosmopolitan past, one which reflects increased agency for groups feeling connected to a site regardless of any externally-defined racial affiliation.
Green, Patricia Elaine (2022) Creole and vernacular architecture: embryonic syncretism in Caribbean cultural landscape, The Journal of Architecture, 27:1, 21-43, DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602365.2022.2047761
Tracing across the complex histories of dominions and influences converging on the Caribbean territories, this paper examines certain common historic threads that persisted into the contemporary Caribbean cultural landscape and its architecture. By the 1834 English emancipation declaration from enslavement, this landscape acquired architectural syncretism at the encounter between the Indigenous buhio, or bohio, and the arrival of Columbus in 1492. This encounter has since then propelled creole and vernacular manifestations of distinct architectural forms from Indigenous, European, and African peoples across the period of plantation enslavement. While ascribing the roots of these styles to Caribbean traditional architecture, this paper demonstrates the value of such architectonic syncretism and the connection with the development of modern architecture, and furthermore, the agenda of sustainable development.
Horst, H. A. (2011). Reclaiming Place: The Architecture of Home, Family and Migration. Anthropologica, 53(1), 29–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41475727
This article examines the significance of place, home and belonging among Jamaican return migrants. Drawing upon detailed case studies of return migrants who migrated to the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s and moved back to Jamaica to retire over 25 years later, it explores how returnees design and use their homes to attain the dream and realities of return. Through an analysis of the structure arid design of homes that returnees spend their lives imagining and building, I reveal that, for returnees, home is not just a place, but also becomes a site for imagining several key relationships in returnees' lives that are ultimately fundamental to the act of reclaiming place.
le Roux, H (2003) The networks of tropical architecture, The Journal of Architecture, 8:3, 337-354, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1360236032000134835
The concept of tropical architecture is one that was constructed in the 1950s to link the work of modernist practitioners in a number of locations outside the West. Despite this enmeshment of the peripheral sites of practice with the colonial metropolis through communications, tropical architecture was seen as something other than colonial architecture. The changing political and economic opportunities at the end of the colonial period prompted architects to develop a post-colonial identity for architecture, which was done through the representation of their approach as one that could transcend national boundaries.
Niell, P (2018) Caribes: Designing a Digital Database for Caribbean Architecture and the Problem of Overlapping Spaces, Journal18, Issue 5 Coordinates. https://www.journal18.org/2414. DOI: 10.30610/5.2018.7
Historical complexity, spatial overlap, the perishability of architecture, and the relatively marginal and fragmented state of the field of Caribbean architectural history in U.S. academia call for the development of a digital resource. Contending with the degree of cultural complexity presented by the Caribbean proves difficult; also challenging is the effort to recapture built environments in places where heat, insects, hurricanes, earthquakes, and demolitions for modernizing projects often prove fatal for historic architecture and efforts at architectural conservation. To these ends, the author has turned to the Digital Humanities as a potential solution in the creation of Caribes: A Digital Database and Virtual Research Interface for the Study of Caribbean Architecture and Landscape.
Pigou-Dennis, E. (2017). Island Modernity: Jamaican Urbanism and Architecture, Kingston, 1960-1980. Urban Island Studies. http://islandstudiesjournal.org/files/UIS.16.pdf
This paper explores peripheral modernity in the island of Jamaica. Jamaica’s self-perception of being an island, as evidenced in texts and imagery, is not one that is peripheral, bounded, limited, small, or isolated. Although there has been a practical, literary and visual connection with the sea, the sea has not been portrayed as a separator but rather as a conduit and connector, no different from a continental coast. The process of modernization of Kingston, the island’s capital and main port city, strongly reflects this ‘un-islanded’ or ‘continental’ self-perception, challenging the notion of peripheral modernity. Kingston was not imagined as a periphery at all by those who embraced and implemented the modernization project. Kingston’s geographical position, as a mainland port on a relatively large island, by Caribbean standards, facilitated the imagining and implementing of modernity following continental models. These arguments are built on an examination of the separate but interconnected ideas and practices of architect Wilson Chong, and the architectural firm Shankland Cox, using technical reports and periodical articles as primary sources.
Raymond, M (2013). Locating Caribbean Architecture: Narratives and Strategies. Small Axe 1; 17 (2 (41): 186–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2323391
Architecture is a form of cultural production that evolves as a response to fundamental human needs and desires and to the economic, social, and political circumstances that triangulate broader culture. If in mapping our understanding of the location and nature of Caribbean architecture our purpose is critical clarity, we may wish to consider it not purely through the tired perspective history or style habitually used but as a dynamic component of Caribbean culture, an operation mediated and influenced by the individual, the local, and the global.
Rosario Pina, Gricelys (2015). Caribbean modernisms.The discourse on the modern dwelling in four architectural magazines, 1945-1960. PhD thesis. : DOI:10.6092/polito/porto/2618309
The dissertation examines the relationship between modernity, dwelling and architecture in the Caribbean through an analysis of the postwar disciplinary debates in four architectural magazines Arquitectura (Cuba), Proa (Colombia), Arquitectura/México (Mexico) and Integral (Venezuela). The complexity of the debates on the house shows how the definition of what was modern was not limited to the professional domain, but was simultaneously a cultural, political and disciplinary construction.
Solano-Meza, N. (2020). Aesthetics of Comfort: A Third Moment in Costa Rican Histories of Tropical Architecture. ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe. https://journals.openedition.org/abe/8146#quotation
Abstract Histories of tropical architecture in Costa Rica could be constructed around three moments: the settlement of the United Fruit Company (ufco) in 1889, the visit of Otto H. Koenigsberger, director of the Department of Development and Tropical Studies during the opening of the School of Architecture of the University of Costa Rica in 1970, and finally, the constitution of a set of formal principles and images guiding the work of many architects in Costa Rica and justified by the need to provide comfort—or sensory contentment—in the tropical climate: an aesthetics of comfort. Although it is often considered a technical term, in our work, comfort operates also as a historical and aesthetic concept. Our research suggests that the aesthetics of comfort has been disseminated through journals and exhibitions since the 1990s, while also absorbing experiences from the two previous moments. Consequently, it cannot be separated from histories of colonialism, extractivism, hygiene, and interventionism. It is present, although in different forms and with different purposes, in the work of architects such as Edgar Brenes, Victor Canas and Bruno Stagno. In the media, their prominent achievements are presented as the result of responsiveness to nature, building technology, site adaptation and the ability to offer contentment. From our analysis, we claim that the aesthetics of comfort functions as a validation mechanism, one that praises technical knowledge and formal adaptation but tends to ignore histories of colonialism and knowledge production.
Webb, Dewayne (2023), Tropical Architecture - An Architecture for Jamaica, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tropical-architecture-jamaica-dewayne-webb/?trackingId=KBVqMgnDTCC3JTuZVszsjA%3D%3D
“Architecture, should, as prescribed by the tenets of Critical Regionalism, be situated within in its context; what Stagno described as an Architecture for a Latitude. Architecture designed for a latitude is, above all, an architecture of adaptation. It must necessarily recognise the importance of the natural and built environment, the available resources and technologies, and the local lifestyles. In the case of the tropics, it must, in addition, take into consideration tropical thought and its accompanying magic – the radiant sun, the transparent and ever-changing sky with its pristine light that at times becomes dismal and dramatic, the blue-green hue of the hills, and many other elements that are characteristic of the tropical latitude. Tropical Architecture therefore is not a visual identity with recognisable symbols but instead it is a language, a language that provides an approach to designing and constructing within the tropical region.”
SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES
Surveys texts of Caribbean architecture:
Buisseret, David. Historic Architecture of the Caribbean (London: Heineman, 1980)
Crain, Edward E. Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994)
González-Pérez, J. M., Irazábal, C., & Lois-González, R. (eds.). The Routledge handbook of urban studies in Latin America and the Caribbean : cities, urban processes, and policies. New York, NY : Routledge, 2023
Lewis, John Newel. Architecture of the Caribbean and its Amerindian origins in Trinidad. Washington, D.C. : American Institute of Architects Service Corp., [1983]
Segre, Roberto. Arquitectura antillana del siglo XX (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2003).
Architecture of the indigenous Caribbean:
Alegría, R. E., Ball Courts and Ceremonial Plazas in the West Indies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983)
Oliver, J. R., El centro ceremonial de Caguana, Puerto Rico: Simbolismo iconográfico, cosmovision y el poderio caciquil Taíno de Borinquen (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1998).
Rouse, I., The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
For colonial architecture of the Caribbean:
Gordon, S. & Hersh, A., Searching for Sugar Mills: An Architecture Guide to the Eastern Caribbean (Oxford, UK: Macmillan, 2005).Montás, E., Casas coloniales de Santo Domingo = Colonial Houses of Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Voluntariado del Museo de las Casas Reales, 1980)
Nelson, L., Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016).
Rigau, J., No Longer Islands: Dissemination of Architectural Ideas in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1890-1930. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 20 (1994), 236-251; and Rigau, Puerto Rico 1900.
Ross, Marion D. “Caribbean Colonial Architecture in Jamaica.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 10, no. 3, 1951, pp. 22–27. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/987447. Accessed 20 Apr. 2023.
Weiss, J., La arquitectura colonial cubana (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro; Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional; Sevilla: Consejería de Obras Públicas y Transportes, Junta de Andalucía, [1972] 1996);
For modern architecture in the Caribbean:
Weiss, J., Arquitectura cubana contemporánea: colección de fotografias de los más recientes y característicos edificios erigidos en Cuba (La Habana: Cultural, 1947)
Rigau, J., Puerto Rico 1900: Turn-of-the-Century Architecture in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1890-1930 (New York: Rizzoli, 1992)
Segre, R., Coyula, M., and Scarpaci, J.L., Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis (Chichester: Wiley, 1997).
Welcome, L, Class Status and Identity in the Trinidadian House: A Semantic Reading of the Typical Trinidadian House, Across Class levels, with Emphasis on Facade Design (2013). Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses. 2. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/archuht/2