This inviting book was assembled by Edward E. Crain, an “architectural educator.” After retiring as professor of architecture at the University of Florida, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica, where he helped set up the Caribbean School of Architecture. His objective here is to present an illustrated book that collects the “significant historic architecture” of the entire island Caribbean, including the Bahamas. The timespan runs from the Amerindian occupants to World War II (thus omitting, alas, the architecture of the Cuban Revolution), and the contents, illustrated mostly for the modern periods, include 64 color plates and 450 black-and-white items. The pictures occupy at least half the space, so that the text, because it addresses some 130 topics, is reduced to a page or less for important items and enlarged captions for the rest. (In chapters 1 and 2, the author presents 22 identical Caribbean maps, many of which designate a single voyage or a tiny island like Grenada. Space might have been saved for additional sketches from the prephotography period.)
Carping aside, this panoramic collection, given its space constraints, smoothly blends historical background with analysis of building styles. Three of the ten chapters generalize for the area as a whole under the topics of early Caribbean and first explorations, sugar plantations, and “miscellaneous buildings” (schools, theaters, hotels, banks, markets, and so on). The remaining seven topics are each divided among 17 geographic units; namely, 8 English islands, Spanish islands (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic), French islands (Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Martin), and “others” (Curacao, U.S. Virgin Islands). The list is a bit ticklish, but at least the author resisted including the entire 50 or so inhabited Caribbean island societies.
As one browses, one thankfully finds the lists treated not in catalogue fashion but in a way that enlivens the architectural notes with human interest and historical sidelights and that carefully links text and pictures. One is absorbed into a complex comparative challenge devoted to historical background, residences (small, medium, and large), military facilities, public buildings, and religious structures. The book will interest readers from many fields. And because Crain’s volume is limited to exteriors, some may enjoy comparing it to Caribbean Style by Suzanne Slesin et al. (1985), which focuses on interiors and is even more richly illustrated.
My chief reservation regards the author’s decision to group the islands “according to the European power that exerted the most significant [architectural] influences. In each chapter, English islands are investigated first.” Perhaps Crain’s Jamaican background led him to favor British style and culture. But if so, his preference is misleading when it comes to history. By 1500, nearly two centuries before the English, the Spanish had built urban centers of stone-still standing on Hispaniola—followed there and elsewhere by cathedrals, universities, fortifications (including two Cuban forts built by Antonelli), and other edifices. Crain himself notes that when the Spanish left Jamaica, the newly christened Spanish Town simply appropriated the original layout of St. Jago de la Vega.
More important still, not only did the Spaniards pioneer the adaptation of European architecture to the Caribbean but, under the example of Governor Nicolás de Ovando (Santo Domingo, 1501-9), they devised a scheme for designing town centers and for functionally connecting urban and agrarian domains. So suited was it to the Spaniards’ colonizing purposes that they adapted it, along with the mission complexes, from California virtually to Cape Horn. The other Euro-Caribbean territories, preempted as they were by the Spaniards and overshadowed by the settlement process of continental North America, played no such role. Our author wields the historical microscope with style and aplomb. The telescope he neglects.
