Creole and vernacular architecture: embryonic syncretism in Caribbean cultural landscape

Abstract

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. As the largest English Caribbean island, Jamaica had one hundred and sixty-one years (1494–1655) of Spanish governance; and in the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad had two hundred and ninety-nine years (1498–1797). Drawing evidence from sixteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century archival iconography and documentation across the wider Americas, this paper identifies and discusses a common Caribbean urban and rural cultural landscape. 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. Gottfried Semper displayed a Caribbean ‘hut’ from the island of Trinidad at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, extending the syncretic manifestation from the ‘primitive hut’ architectural treatise to the birth of modern architecture. 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.