In writing about this book, it is difficult to avoid writing about another of Albert Manucy’s works, The Houses of St. Augustine: Notes on the Architecture from 1565-1821, first published in 1962. For years the earlier book has served as the definitive architectural history of the Spanish colonial period in Florida. It was a work built largely upon eighteenth-century evidence. Manucy culled information from plat maps and documents to reconstruct the appearance and layout of houses in St. Augustine. He had many extant houses to use as models and Houses of St. Augustine soon passed into the annals as a local, regional classic.
This new book, although a companion piece, is a very different endeavor. It contains Manucy’s ideas about what St. Augustine looked like in the sixteenth century. With no standing architecture to draw on, his reconstruction of houses is far more conjectural than in his previous work. In my opinion, however, this is one of the books strengths. Manucy, who died shortly after completion of this book, knew St. Augustine from combined years of research in architectural history, social history, and archaeology. Most scholars of St. Augustine have, through years of research, acquired the ability to “see” the sixteenth-century town as a theoretical construct. Manucy had the uncanny knack of being able to see it in its full dimensionality. In Sixteenth-Century St. Augustine, he resurrects the town as it probably looked, sometimes offering different variations of a building to cover the ambiguity of the records.
Evidence for sixteenth-century Spanish architecture in Florida is rather meager. There are two sixteenth-century maps depicting the town of St. Augustine, descriptive accounts of early life, and Jean Ribault’s illustrations of life among the Timucua Indians. Archaeologists have provided some additional information, in the form of posthole patterns, lot sizes, and spatial arrangement in St. Augustine and its sister town of Santa Elena. From these data, Manucy writes a speculative but nonetheless detailed visualization of domestic and public architecture. He does this by interweaving his narrative with excerpts written by Spanish settlers, priests, and English raiders, by translating the sometimes cartoonlike images on early cartography into realistic renditions of buildings, and by describing, step-by-step, how buildings were put together. His prose is often informal and conversational. By the end of the book, however, he has provided an object lesson on how to interpret pictorial evidence from the architectural historian’s point of view.
The book covers the design and layout of the original fortifications (eight different forts predating the current Castillo de San Marcos); interprets indigenous and early colonial housing; and then provides reconstructions of houses for different social classes. Throughout, Manucy draws on his knowledge of local materials and house plans, his research into archival records, and his study of vernacular architecture in Spain. An appendix provides additional details on methods of Spanish timber-frame house construction.
Although the book will primarily attract students of Florida history, there are good reasons why its appeal should be broader. For one thing, the house types that Manucy discusses—timber-frame and tabby—have received scant attention in standard works on the architecture of Spanish America. In addition, Manucy’s illustrations exhibit an excellent draftsmanship, with a solid knowledge both of construction techniques and the social dimension of domestic space. His depictions of houses convey realism and immediacy. Scholars of the early Spanish Caribbean and the borderlands will certainly want to examine his house plans and profiles for comparison with domestic architecture in other regions.
