Cultural expression, and cultural productions played a critical role in the formulation and evolution of a Caribbean identity on the route to self-governance and sovereignty (Raymond, 2013). It expression was seen as a reaction, and a dismissal of the colonial ideology and its associated structure. Cultural production of the period sought the affirmation of an identity, local to the Caribbean; and sought its expression in themes to be found in Caribbean literature, theatre, dance and folks culture at the time.
The tenets of modern architecture in the 1950’s and onwards, and its eventual pervasion throughout the Caribbean, was initially through the works of the first generation of local architects, who were educated overseas and returned to the Caribbean in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and brought with them the aesthetic doctrines of modernism and tropical modernism. According to Raymond (2013), tropical modernism expressed an appropriate means of deploying an architectural language that was universal and modern, but at the same time, sensitive to the realities of life in the tropical belt. However, tropical modernism did not effectively address the ideas of the local or regional beyond the mediation of climate (Raymond, 2013). Essentially, the rhetoric of architectural production of the mid 90’s did not wholly address the notion of Caribbean identity.
Tropical Architecture
The Caribbean and the wider tropical geographical region is subsumed in a multiplicity of sorts. The Caribbean in particular, is layered with multiple realities and subjectivities. Stagno (2001) tells us that the sensuality that pervades the atmosphere infiltrates the intellect of the tropics and influences reasoning, pointing to a way of thought dissimilar to that of Occidental cultures. The tropics, and the Caribbean in particular is the consequence of a hybridisation of multiplicities: a colonised territory in which the incoming occidental mode of thought only partially transformed the existing culture. Stagno (2001) further states that the primary mode of thought of the occidental empires, which centred on the consideration one’s being, cogito, ergo sum, cannot hold firm ground in the region of the tropics, where the primary mode of thought is relational.
The arrival of modernist ideologies in the Caribbean, though initially conceived as a pursuit towards the global and universal, was inevitably filtered through the lenses of the tropical context, consequently creating a tropicalist architecture.
The Growth of Tropical Architecture
Tropical architecture has traditionally been taken to mean an architecture adapted to the tropical climate. However, after the Second World War, some architects building in the tropics started to view this definition in a critical manner and rethink its limited and narrow scope. They began to conceive of architecture not only in terms of sun shading and ventilation devices, but also as an extension of the mind, a cognitive tool, that expressed the values of a particular people and time in the way that film, art and music do. This critical rethinking is what distinguishes…a mere tropical architecture from a tropicalist one. (Lefaivre, Tzonis & Stagno. 2001)
The work of Wilson Chung articulated an architectural expression, founded through the terms of modernity (Pigou-Dennis, 2017) and adapted to the Jamaican locality. Through his work, Chung sought to address the issues of climate, technology, social housing and Jamaican identity on a global scale. Marvin Goodman eschewed placelessness in favour of a sensitivity to tropical climatic themes at the residential scale and H.D. Repole investigated the integration of public concerns through the implantation of liveable streetscapes (Lawton, 2005).
Stagno (1997) tells us that an architecture for [the tropics] is an architecture that is above all, an architecture of adaptation in which recognition of the importance of the natural and built environment is crucial. Local lifestyles and available resources are also key components to this architectural language as well as a crucial consideration of tropical thought, a tropical way of being; and in the context of the Caribbean, a way of being imbued with the multiplicities of Caribbean space and thought.
Conclusion
For the Caribbean, modern architecture represented the opportunity to enter a dialogue on a global scale, to demonstrate technological advancement — a signal of the Caribbean’s participation in universal culture (Raymond, 2005). However, the realities of Caribbean space meant that the tenets of modernity, with its roots in Cartesian though, could not be simply imported to Caribbean space, whether intentional or not. The sensualism of tropical space, as Stagno (2001) states, refuses to acknowledge the cogito ergo sum, and posits Alejo Carpentier’s statement in opposition to Cartesian logic: we feel therefore we exist. This mode of being in effectively transfigured the concepts of modernity, consequently producing a modernism that was at the same time local and global.
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