long. Schools have given society an architect obsessed by “rational” solutions and abstract, figurative, reductive architecture, whose works have earned the nicknames of “matchboxes”, “half oranges” or “crates”, in which ordinary people find no reference to their everyday culture or to their history. The break with these parameters, which are understood by the public, in my opinion, has led to the production of a type of architecture that, even when it comes up with effective solutions from the point of view of climate, can hardly be considered as tropical architecture. In architecture, throughout history, the solutions have been consonant with the influence of the different prevailing cultures: indigenous architecture gave way to Hispanic, African, and French architectures and the process continues to this day with modern and postmodern architecture.
Contemporary Architects Rescuing Traditional Architecture
The image of the tropical dwelling must respond to the combination of the cultures absorbed, in accordance with our special characteristics as a social group, situated in a specific tropical environment, whose architectural values, without being entirely our own, have acquired a configuration that is ours. The use of color, the diversity in the use of materials, the understanding of urban and private space, and the informality characteristic of our people: all of these things are values that concern us and have a bearing on the idealization of the tropical house. To end with the stereotype I used at the beginning would be to limit the concept of the tropical dwelling to its physical implication –climate, which, by denying cultural aspects would, in large measure, distort the concept. If I had to make a comparison with a familiar tropical “situation”, I would compare the tropical dwelling to a well–known article of male attire: the chacabana, which is cool and informal, but nevertheless lends dignity to the one who wears it.
vast field of circumstantial moving sand and peremptory, shifting dunes that kept on changing horizons. Intentions became global in the effort of examining panoramas, and even some achievements were attained, mostly technical and technological that, in turn, fostered behavioral reforms which became palpable in the actual buildings, thereby favoring experimental substitutions that were being tested throughout the region. Towards the end of the 19th century, and with the geopolitical expansion to the US, particularly, after the opening of the Panama Canal, the broadening of the American concept of urbanization arrived in the tropical Caribbean basin with its new materials, forms and spatial models, thus securing its influence at the time of the First World War by means of a growing military hegemony that radiated throughout the complete basin. Both worlds became one in the process of developing the rising industrialization of
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Dominican Popular Architecture
When insufficiently understood and wrongly interpreted, progress and development may turn into a delusive duality. For that reason, we, who, through our years of academic training, professional practice and public discussion have become committed to preservation, have expressed our preoccupation a number of times. Trying to assess an array of cultural manifestations with the adequate level of subjectivity, but keeping an approach as objective as permitted by the object and the circumstances, an army of quixotic practitioners has been following the trail of national identity that the 20th century allowed us to discern upon the surface of a