Architecture 104: Architecture and Identity
What Our Built Environment Says
Klas nan sesyon.
Architecture helps tell us who we are.
The houses we admire, the materials we associate with success, the colors we choose, the spaces we preserve, and even the ways we use streets and sidewalks reflect ideas about family, beauty, status, community, and belonging.
Haiti fits in with the larger canon of Caribbean architecture.
What Does “Caribbean Architecture” Mean?
There is no single Caribbean architectural style.
Across the region, Indigenous, African, European, and later global influences met tropical climate and local ways of living. This created architecture designed around heat, rain, airflow, shade, outdoor living, and community.
That is why certain features appear again and again across Caribbean islands: galleries, courtyards, shutters, high ceilings, bright colors, decorative woodwork, open windows, and spaces that blur the boundary between indoors and outdoors.
Haiti is part of that larger Caribbean architectural story while having its own distinctly Haitian expressions of it.
The Architecture We Value
What people choose to build can also tell us what they associate with progress.
Over time, concrete homes became associated with permanence, wealth, security, and modernity. A kay tè might be viewed as something a family hopes to replace, even when its materials and design contain generations of knowledge about the local environment.
At the same time, Gingerbread houses that were once dismissed by some as old-fashioned are now celebrated as important examples of Haitian architecture.
Architecture therefore tells us not only how we live, but what we aspire to.
The Street Is Also Architecture
To understand Haitian architecture, we also have to look beyond buildings.
A street is not simply a way to move from one place to another.
A machann may establish a regular selling spot along it. A mechanic may work beside it. Children may play there. Neighbors may sit outside and talk. Tap-taps stop and create gathering points. Businesses extend onto sidewalks and roadsides.
Par Rency Inson Michel — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94466164
The boundaries between residential, commercial, public, and social space can be fluid.
The same principle we saw in the lakou and the galri appears again: space becomes defined partly by how people use it.
This is one of the threads connecting Haitian architecture to the wider Caribbean. Architecture is not only the structure.
It is the relationship between the building, the climate, the street, the yard, and the people who bring those spaces to life.
Lekòl lage.