Speaking, Gesturing, Drawing, Building: Relational Techniques of a Kreyol Architecture

Abstract

The vernaculars and creoles—architectural and linguistic—used to produce most of the global built environment continue to be delegitimized as ways of knowing, building, and inhabiting. This dissertation recuperates these voices in an ethnohistorical examination of building practices in Leyogann, Haiti in the 2010s. Shared mediums of communication provide an inclusive lens through which to analyze the design practices of architects, builders or bòsmason, and residents. I ask how such diverse actors communicate design ideas within and across social hierarchies. While using media in common, the enunciation of design ideas via hand drawn plans or digitally drafted drawings, via French or Kreyòl, via justifications of normativity or aesthetic quality correlates with the class position and training of architects, bòsmason, clients, and self-builders. Communication is relational and mediated, in this case, by speech, gesture, drawing, and building; therefore, it manifests differentials of power often marked by nationality, language, gender, and race. I theorize Kreyòl architecture as a process of on-going creolization that encompasses difference and contradiction to produce a more inclusive narrative of building culture. Architecture in Haiti, often figured as absent or scarce by international observers, has a long history of indigenous, colonial, postcolonial, modern, and neoliberal building practices informed by social and political phenomena. I begin to fill this lacuna without replicating historic forms of exclusion by considering, at once, the house building practices of university-educated architects, of contractors with vocational and jobsite training, and of self-building homeowners. This dissertation draws on fieldnotes from ethnographic observation, audio recordings, interviews, reports, photographs, online media, text exchanges, and documents from libraries and personal papers to interrogate how people produce residential architecture in western Haiti. I situate my study in Leyogann, a city peripheral to the capital of Port-au-Prince but at the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake to destabilize preconceived narratives of architecture as restricted to a cosmopolitan elite. The analysis of quotidian building practices reveals a more fluid field of relational and contingent design practices than those codified by the discipline of architecture. Haitian architects, like their international colleagues, face contradictions between professional ideals of serving the public good and daily practices occupied with instrumental drawing and coordination. They experiment with different forms of communicating their value and expertise to clients but serve a minority. In turn, bòsmason become designers in practice as they build houses for clients designing in-situ as they resolve client imaginaries with project constraints. Misalignments in design intentions and expectations arise when actors communicate in disparate registers marked by their social positions. The negative outcomes of such miscommunication are demonstrated in the design and redesign of post-disaster housing. Intentional or not, design imbues symbolic meanings in houses communicating both belonging and exclusion. At its best Kreyòl architecture describes the liberatory function of home as people are related through complex topographies of land, history, politics, and ancestry. This dissertation elides typical categorizations of style or pedigree and to legitimate the design practices of people historically excluded from, or marginalized within, the discipline of architecture. Understanding how architects, engineers, contractors, and residents in Leyogann conceive of houses and how they communicate their priorities elucidates the fraught relationships in design and construction. Apprehension of creolized bodies of knowledge and design strategies also establishes a base from which a safe, joyful, and dignified built environment can be imagined.