nineteenth centuries. This meant that a path was opened toward the consolidation of a dream –naïve perhaps, but in the end, a dream– that made possible the subsequent strengthening of an incipient nationality that emerged from the blast of the winds that were blowing from the American north and was inspired by the liberal trends that a fundamentally Andean America was starting as a sign of libertarian alert in its geographical environment. Only when there was peace did it begin anew to build the architecture that would be popularized in wood and, in its resistance and maintenance, it stockpiled as many materials as it could get hold of. Industrialization would still be a long time in arriving to the most popular sectors. Cities were not really
learned, the impoverished inheritances and the vanished wealth. It saw a movement from democracy to the total loss of sovereignty, and from there to a long dictatorship. Then a brief dabbling in democracy that was nipped in the bud to favor unforeseen regressions that culminated with new interference and aggression against sovereignty; from there, once again, back to the transition process for the return to democracy; and around the end of the century, we approached governability. In the interim, important searches were encouraged in the council that controlled architectural education in university classrooms. From one single state university, gradually it went to a private, multiple-university, which was included in cultural processes where it had great formative decision-making power. Although the
cities; they were small villages with houses with dry, combustible, thatch roofs. Masonry and brick demanded a type of relatively durable construction and the very few institutional buildings that represented the rising standard of living were scattered throughout the urban geography in towns that had experienced late growth. Modernizing the country by covering the big, run-down colonial houses with renderings of passing styles assumed a manner of hiding the historical heritage. We were on the threshold of the twentieth century but we continued to be a village society that ignored its cultural heritage, since too much time had been dedicated to libertarian struggles and to emancipation. In the process, materials from abroad were being added. Height, which was a limiting factor, was gradually being overcome. The twentieth century was frenetic. The cultural coming and going was tremendous, the traumatic thoroughfares, the lessons
pioneering stimulus for university educational independence was encouraged in El Cibao and promoted by the religious power of the region, it was only in the Dominican capital city where private leadership germinated, which was only possible because of the social and economic importance of its agents. Two events mark those times: the development of tourism as a panacea for national economic growth; and the creation of a movement promoting culture that would have heritage architecture as its sole incentive. In the public university, a political movement called “reformist” had been brewing, which hoped to eradicate the remnants of dictatorship that remained intact in the academic world at the same time that it took up the anti-establishment standard against governmental dictates, held by direct descendents of the decapitated dictatorship. The split produced a private
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Dominican Popular Architecture