The Essence of Puerto Rican Historic Architecture

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THE ESSENCE OF PUERTO RICAN HISTORIC

ARCHITECTURE

Arq. Jorge Ortiz ColomInstituto de Cultura PuertorriqueaPonce, Puerto Rico

0. Introduction

Puerto Rican historic architecture has been a victim for decades of a vile though unintendedreductionism into its merely Spanish colonial aspects. Though by itself not unimportant, thecreolization of southern Spanish building traditions has been quite felicitous especially in theunique geographical and climatic siting of the walled city of San Juan, Outside this compact,elegant ensemble, Puerto Ricos historic buildings take on multiple and varied personalities to anextent unrecognized by even Puerto Rican preservationists themselves. Especially downplayed is

the influx of African emigrants, non-Spanish European nationalities, specific regional syncretisms,and even forms and spatial solutions adapted from the smaller islands to the east and southeast.

It can be convincingly said, along the old saw that PR is the smaller of the Greater Antilles, whichis true at least dimensionally, that it is also the largest of theLesserAntilles. The southeastquadrant of Puerto Rico, facing across a wide stretch of Caribbean the (formerly or presently)French, English, Danish and Dutch islands, seems to be literally a continuation of the buildingtraditions of down-islanders. Half-hipped roofs, shingle-covered cabins, tray ceilings, woodstructures built with the precision of a shipwrights, dormers, outside kitchens... these are (or,unfortunately, were) found in this portion of the Island.

Generally speaking, until the arrival of the Americans in 1898 PR was not so much an unified

nation or ethnic group as much as a collection of export-oriented towns and regions opening upinto the numerous harbors and inlets through which agricultural raw material - like muscovadosugar and high-quality coffee as toasted beans - were exchanged for other types of food,manufactured and consumer goods, and equipment and machinery to keep agriculture andagro-industry going. San Juan also was an administrative and military center with the requisitepublic buildings and fortifications, also executed with the same technical vocabulary of the civilianstructures.

1. San Juan

Despite its superficially Spanish ambience, San Juan architecture displays very climate- andsocially-specific solutions to living in a dense tropical city. Placed in a barrier islet that closes the

north end of a large bay, the old city is continuously swept by a persistent marine breeze. Thecomfort problem is to channel these winds to render the living spaces habitable. This is largelyrealized by very high ceilings 4 to 6 meters (13 to 20 ft) is the norm. The patios act as ventilationshafts for air exiting the inner spaces. The use of materials is crucial. Walls are near-always madeof brick, dried by the sun or low-temperature wood or coal fires or ofmampostera (i.e.:rubblework, the terms will be used alternatingly), a mixture of calcareous rock, whole or brokenbricks, mud, lime and other inorganic fillersE1. The mampostera system defines structurally

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Jorge Ortiz Colom, Arquitecto Conservacionista Preservation Architect I.C.P. January / Enero2003

Guayama / Ponce, P.R.

amorphous walls, but the opportune placement of rows of brick every 40-50 cm (16 to 20 in)reinforces the walls and grants them solidity. Whether of adobes ormampostera, the wall materialis very susceptible of quick erosion by wind and rain-borne water, so it is preventively plasteredwith a mix of freshly slaked lime and sand.

These are breathable walls that tolerate partial penetration of humidity from the outside, which in

reaction to the suns heat evaporates absorbing heat and effectively cooling the walls. To increasecross ventilation inside, openings between spaces are invariably doors, which take on numerousfunctions. The rooms of San Juan houses, which are individual spaces mutually interconnected,normally opening to the street or to the inside yard, open into each other by means of door likeopenings whether arched or flat on top and the only aisle like connectors are seen in the stairhalls and the galleries that open to the yards. To make a window, a door is made with a protectiveopen railing: this ensemble is known locally as an antepecho. Solid windowsills are less frequent,in some buildings nonexistent.

The manufacture of the doors is complex and shows their function as a sophisticated climateregulation system that transcends its original purpose as an access regulator for people. Invariablyset in pairs, San Juan doors are made in relatively resistant woods such as Spanish cedar [acajou],

fiddlewood, Spanish elm [cypre or spruce], rarely locust [courbaril]E2 or imported, resinous pines.

These will have slim (40 mm = 1 in) jalousies that can be operated by opening a small accessdoor (postigo) and frequently glass in the upper panel or in a transom. Transoms are also made offretwork or horizontal fixed narrow shutters, and there are also simpler ones made of straight orturned wood pieces. They usually cover the rounded top of arched openings.

To increase available space and to catch scarce water (piped aqueduct water was not availableuntil 1897), San Juan houses have invariably flat - actually, very slightly sloping roofs known astechos de azotea (terrace roofs, henceforth mentioned here as azotea roofs). A covering ofhydraulic cement made out of lime, sand and either ashes or ground clay (usually taken frombroken bricks or vases) rests on top of several layers of roofing bricks of 25mm = 1in. thickness.

These in turn rest on purlins held up by closely spaced beams of balata or bullet woodE3 set inpockets on the walls. However, until the end of the 19th century there also existed some houseswith gable and hip roofs covered by the more traditional barrel clay tiles. [The shape of these isdetermined by the use of the human thigh as a mold.]

The norm was to leave these ceilings exposed below and this has become part of the charm of OldSan Juan houses. Floors are covered with clay or marble tiles, the latter in random or checkerboardpatterns. If not on ground floor, they have the same structural system as roofs. Walls are almostalways plastered, and following some found evidence, in the better houses they were commonlypainted with geometric and naturalistic motifs, probably as exuberantly as the known practice inCuban townhouses.

San Juan houses are generally very austere; their beauty is more akin to their proportions and tothe quality of interior spaces with their subdued lighting and vertical amplitude. The mainornaments seen are cornices, both inside to bolster the bullet wood beams, and inside to splashwater outside from the walls and thus protect them. Cornices are first roughed by projectingnormal and thin bricks in their general outline, and finished with lime plaster and the use of wood

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or cut metal molds. Some can include garlands, dentils, or Greek inspired geometric motifs. Wallopening surrounds are also projected and express the inside reinforcement of the openings, which isbrick. Opening lintels include straight archesquoin shaped bricks sustained by gravity andtheir peculiar shape, and arched lintels, half-round more frequently in San Juan but some ellipticalor segmental ones are also seen.

Blocks are built fully to the street line, and being these streets relatively narrow the tall house wallsshade them. Projecting second or third story balconies with brick-on-wood floors and anindependent small roof known as a tejadillo serve as a means of contact between the private andpublic realms and as an efficient way to shade walls. Their balustrades are made of turned pieceswith wooden base panels, and the evident inspiration is similar balconies seen on Canary Islandand some mainland Spanish towns.

Inside sheer walls on the simpler houses sometimes ring courtyards, but more common is the use ofarcades and projecting inside balconies, in a few cases covered with panes of jalousie shutters butmostly open. The inside balconies act as galleries to link rear rooms of the houses. In moresubstantial places like Fortaleza, the governors residence, shuttered galleries are further enlivenedby the use of colored glass pieces.

This architectural style was so successful that it also influenced the early-20th-century concreterow houses, which had to assume the proportions, height and even details of their older neighbors.Some exceptions stand out like the former Gonzlez Padn building with its ribbon windows andopen concrete frame, and the 10-story Banco Popular art deco tower with its oceanlineresquecurves and massing. A few more modern intrusions in the old blocks also were erected before 1950and modern austerity and asymmetry can be found next to the traditional houses. But the pre-1900houses make up about two thirds of the total of nearly 900 buildings of the Old City, in factmaking it have more integrity that Old Havana or the older part of Santo Domingo.

Streets in San Juan are relatively narrow and as said before shaded by the tall walls of the flankinghouses. In the late 19th century slag cobbles imported from Britain were used to pave the streets,

until then unsurfaced (bare earth and mud when wet) or at places covered with bricks or wood.Their network runs in a grid that rises northward on a hill and some steeper inclines are made inslate-covered steps. Canary Island slate is used for sidewalks, plazas and some private courtyardsin the city. Other outer surfacing materials are brick, concrete obviously a 20th century responseand argamasa, a mixture of cement, brick dust, stone and clay fragments. The latter is easy toset up, mix and surface and has been a favorite of recent open-space restorations.

As a pre-utility city, San Juan has not taken kindly to the accoutrements of modern living. Thoughold iron water mains and brick sewers run beneath the streets, electricity and telephone are strungon short poles jury-rigged to parapet walls on top on houses. The aerial landscape complicateswith satellite TV dishes (cable doesnt want to install here), domestic accessories like heaters (solarand electric), the occasional clothes-drying perch and all sorts of small penthouses built to take

advantage of expansive views to the harbor alive with cruise ships, ferries, cargo ships and myriadboats. Some of these penthouses (called miradores) are original, others have been sanctioned bythe Institute of Culture, but still many are improvised, sometimes clandestine jobs.

San Juan has come a long way from its physiognomy of the 18th century when, not yet built out toits fortifications, it was mainly made out of gable or hip roof houses with expansive side yards,only densifying in the southwest quarter by Fortaleza, the Cathedral and the Plaza de Armas,traditionally the citys main civic square fronting City Hall. The massive protecting walls made thecity grow up inside, first filling in and then up. At the close of the 19th century, the square mile


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sector had close to 20,000 inhabitants with its imaginable sequel of hygienic and social problems!

In this essay I wont go in detail in the fortifications and civic buildings that have been describedand reviewed in other scholarly and popular essays and descriptions. It should suffice to say thatthe latter category was built in the same technique that was used in private homes, albeit with moreclassical decoration and large, generous inside patios that could perform ceremonial functions. The

early 19th centuryIntendencia (General Staff) fronting Plaza de Armas, even after being victim ofa slipshod restoration in the early 80s, is probably one of the better examples. The former infantrybarracks known as Cuartel de Ballaj (1845) are also important, but the original upper floor androof structures were lost to an ill-advised renovation by the American military in the late 1930s,those elements are now made in quietly-spalling reinforced concrete. So it happened in the StThomas Aquinas convent (now Institute of Culture offices). The originally 16th-century buildingalso had its original brick-and-bullet wood floors changed to concrete.

The two older churches in the city (St Joseph and the Cathedral dedicated to St John) are amongthe very few buildings in the Western Hemisphere that include authentic late-Gothic structuralsystems. These are visible only from the inside and consist of impressive stone stairs, notaccessible to the public, and ribbed vaults made in local stone. Both churches however were

finished inside and out in the Spanish colonial mode using the structural systems previouslymentioned and simpler half-round vaults and domes usually reinforced by massive brick-and-stonebuttresses. There are three other churches in the old city, all of them vaulted: St Annes on calleTetun, the conventual church of St. Francis of Assisi in calle San Francisco - there was anadjoining parish church, razed in the first decade of the 20th century - and the interesting ChristChapel (on the intersection of calles Cristo and Tetun. A few houses and buildings have smallprivate chapels, usually only readable by the presence of domes on the roofs, as with the house incalle ODonnell and calle Fortaleza (actually art-decoed on the outside, but indeed its from the1800s).

Fortifications are massive stone and mampostera works usually roofed with vaults and whichderive their protective functions from their adaptation to the citys hilly geography and the sheer

height of the walls. Though hardly tested in battle and turned obsolete by the advance of post-1850military technology, these walls are the most memorable element of San Juans panoramas, andthey have been protected on the unesco world heritage list along with La Fortaleza.

Fortaleza has a remarkable split personality: the front to the civic, street side is a mildly exuberantpalace made with the traditional domestic vocabulary of the city. To the back, overlooking thewalls, it morphs into a medieval castle with twin crenulated towers and a near-blank wall, muchlike a transplanted castillo of El Cids time. On the roof of one tower theres a stone sundial stillused to tell time.

Summing up: San Juan tells in its architecture a stimulating history all the way from the 1500s of aSpain hardly putting its best foot in Renaissance modernity, all the way to mid-20th-century art

deco and early modern movement. In 1951 the district was legally designated a historic district,fortunately avoiding the nefarious effect of the bulldozer and ill-advised urban renewal, even whenthe outside-the-walls harbor warehouse district of La Puntilla did fall victim to a grandiose plan ofersatz-Sanjuanero apartments, partially executedmost of the area is nowadays a parking lot.However the old, neoclassical Arsenal complex of one-story warehouses and a chapel still standsfronting the Bay. It is used for exhibition space, offices and cultural facilities.

Old San Juan is no longer the trading and financial center of Puerto Rico this moved to theInternational-Style towers of Hato Rey, 4 miles southeast. It is still the cultural and political heart


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with numerous museums and galleries and the Governor of Puerto Rico still lives and works in thisquarter. Many government offices make their home here, specially theInstituto de CulturaPuertorriquea, overseer of the correctness of Old City (and elsewhere in Puerto Rico) restorationand heritage-recovery work.

2. Outside San Juan: Archidiversity

Neglected by Spain because of its lack of gold, but kept because of its strategic location, PuertoRico survived for 300 years making ends meet. The 300-mile-plus coastline was ideal for piratesand smugglers, and in fact contraband of spices, ginger, tobacco and foreign manufactures was away of life in most of the island. Its geographya large mass of limestone or volcanic-originmountains ringed by narrow valleys made Puerto Rico turn outward to other Caribbeancountries, making it a veritable carrefourof influences. PRs mixed blood population, even ifsomewhat whiter than its neighbors, is a typical Caribbean mlange of all nations of Europe,Africa and some indigenous Arawak (Tano) remnants. Aspects range from Nordic-type blonds tojet blacks, all of them speaking a common Spanish language (there is no pidgin or patois here)tinged with Arawak and African words and southern Spanish regionalisms.

a) - Indian Heritage

Arawak remnants are expressed in words (names of towns like Mayagez and Guayama) andcommon nouns like batey (a yard, also the usual name for plantation villages), macana (a club orbaton), orguaraguao (a type of tree famous for its quality wood, also a large eagle like bird), orguayacn (the lignumvit tree, so common in our islands)E4. Thanks to strict archaeological laws,much cultural remnants have been found, especially household or religious implements in stone orbone, burials, pottery shards, and rock engravings or paintings. Some built stuff has surfaced: theholes of old grass-and-stick huts called caneyes (square, for the chieftains) orbohos (rounded, forthe others); fortunately described by early Spanish chroniclers - and several impressive ceremonialparks where a ritual game superficially similar to soccer was played by contendingyucayeques(towns).

The Institute of Cultures 13th-century Caguana Complex west of Utuado consists of severalrectangular plazas framed by oblong stone monoliths, many engraved with images of nature orfecundity. One of these plazas, the largest, points to a limestone hill in the shape of a cem(triangular-shaped votive statue representing a god). The whole complex descends to the clear,swift waters of the Tanam River. Caguana is now an open-air museum that draws tens ofthousands of visitors yearly.

Two miles north of the city of Ponce there is the Tibes complex, about seven centuries older thanCaguana. Here some of the seven ceremonial patios are circular, and one is in the shape of a star.The sparse vegetation adds a sense of poignancy to the area. On the way from the reception centerto the plazas, there is a simulated Indian village of rounded boho huts.

Indian building techniques were appropriated by the early jbaros (peasants) and until circa 1950,square, hip-roofed bohos on stilts could be found at every bend in the countryside. Rustic trunksmade the framework, broad intertwined leaves like the bananas and some grasses clad the wallsand the roof thatch was made of a grass with long, lustrous leaves - known as the enea - and whichgrows yet abundantly along riverbanks. Nowadays all eliminated by the use of wood or concrete

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houses, there was no effort to rescue some examples of these huts to evidence an ancestral andhardscrabble way of life that was the stuff of daily rural existence for so long. Easily erectable,wholly biodegradable, and nearly free, the boho was a viable solution for landless peasants: if theyhad to move, they packed and left the house to return to the soil. Where they moved, they wouldfind the same building materials all over!

b) - African Influences

From 1520 to 1850 inhabitants of West Africa were dragged involuntarily to the balmy Caribbeanshores to work in agriculture, construction and manual labor. Puerto Rico was no exception: mostof its black population came from an assortment of countries along the Gulf of GuineaE5. Theywere diverse their identity was defined by their condition of servitude. They were anyway able torecover signs of identity. With goatskins on discarded rum barrels, and covert messages of revoltand conspiracy on body movements, the bomba dance is one of the better-known influences ofAfro-Puerto Ricans. Root crops, bananas, and many dishes are clearly African pigs feet stew,pigeon peas, mofongo (mashed plantains, in itself an African word), okra, etc. In fact, PuertoRican gastronomy is largely shared with the Afro-Caribbean countries, and many concoctions willbe recognizable to natives of other larger or smaller islandsE6.

Though the full form of African building vernacular did not make the Atlantic crossing, somevestiges diluted with European technique - were retained: these include the use of gable or hiproofs, compact rectangular shapes of residences, the use of broad verandas for shade andprotection, the inclination to paint and embellish in strong colors, and most strikingly the tendencyto group houses in compounds based on proximity and family links instead of the moreproperty-limit-influenced regular arrays favored by Europeans. These compound groupingssubsist, appropriately, the northeastern township of Loza; where over 80% of inhabitants are ofAfrican descent, mostly descendants of free blacks. Though the houses themselves are now theboxy modern vernacular with some older ones mixed in, several groupings in the Medianas(middle points), an area of sandy grounds and palm groves bordering the Atlantic coast east of thetown, exhibit that compound topology. This place is, however, being mutilated by modern

low-rise apartment blocks promoted by mostly white landowners and developers.

Southeastern PR is also largely black, but the presence of large agricultural latifundia hasprevented the growth of large compounds though much smaller ones can be found amongst theformer cane fields. In many cases the compounds have had to rescue unclaimed lands alongsiderivers and creeks, or even in the right of way of roads, and have assumed a curious, linear aspect.

c) - European Hegemony

Europe was the dominant economic and cultural influence in Spanish-colonial Puerto Rico. Theemphasis is inEurope, not Spain. As a neglected agricultural backwater, 17th- and 18th-centuryfreebooters and smugglers from Dutch, Danish, English and French islands would frequent the

islands unguarded Caribbean coast and establish relations with the old estanciero (estate owner)families. The estancieros farmed family operations with some outside help, cultivating easilymarketable raw materials such as tobacco, ginger, and hides without paying taxes or duties toSpanish authorities.

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Many of the estancieros were poor emigrants from southern Spain or the Canaries, disinheritedchildren of impoverished grandees, usually deeply religious in a popular way and with no formalschooling or culture. Some came as military in transit. All intermingled with the remnants ofaborigines and escaped African slaves, creating the rusticjbaro (an Indian word that eventuallybecame synonymous with peasant). And then some of thesejbaros or emigrants securedSpanish Crown land grants (there was then no private property) and others merely squatted and

improved unassigned parcels.

Rural European vernacular, alongside aboriginal techniques and native materials, condensed in thebuilding of the first generation of rural houses. Still, despite neglect and unsympathetic changes, atleast two of these houses stand near the town of San Germn, PRs second-oldest settlement. Theseare raised high in hardwood stilts, are roughly square in shape with a squared array of hewn postsserving as structure. The roof is a solid pyramid of Spanish half-round tiles, still in serviceableshape. Entry is from the side or the bottom, which was used for storing agricultural implements,some farm animals, and the height of the floor from the soil helped refresh and hygienize the house,protecting of course from ground-borne vermin.

Several late-18th-century chroniclers commented on these houses, seen scattered on the countryside

or grouped around town squares, as dovecotes (palomares)E7. The urban houses were in factweekendhomes for rural agriculturalist dwellers that descended on town to be able to go to churchor to the markets (also generally on Sundays after mass). The town squares were unkempt openspaces that were used to place market stalls or to stage volunteer militia drills. In them or facingthem would be the Catholic parish church - generally the only building in many towns at leastpartly erected in brick or stone. (But, in fact, many other churches were as wooden as the houses.)Nearby there would be another house, probably a wooden vernacular structure, assigned thefunction ofCasa del Rey (King's House), that is, seat of the government's representative, usuallya part-timer citizen with no salary or stipend to earn.

3. Plantations

Most of this sparsely populated ur-Puerto Rican life took place in either San Juan or the lowlandvalleys. The mountains, not very high but steeply sloped and covered with impenetrable vegetation,were a mysterious hinterland until the second half of the eighteenth century with initial timidattempts at colonization. Coffee reached PR's shores in 1757 and proved an ideal match with therain-misted, cool and volcanic soils of the Western Mountains of the Cordillera Central.

Cane had already reached the island in the 16th century, but the small demand for Puerto Ricansugar exports, and the lack of adequate infrastructure for irrigation and cultivation, had hamstrungefforts for its development. Even in 1800 sugar production in Puerto Rico was insignificant andmost of the product was for local consumption or for making rum in small quantities.

The enormous worldwide turmoil of the late 18th and early 19th centuries - French Revolution,

Napoleonic Wars and the Latin American Wars for Independence, changed Puerto Rican lifeforever. Shorn of most of its empire, Spain tried to make do with the remnants. In PR, this meantits reinvention as an agricultural colony to provide tropical products to Spain - and North America,for hard currency. The 1815Real cdula de gracias (Royal Decree of Grace) established generousland grants and incentives to moneyed emigrants that came to the island to develop agriculturalestates for export crops. A motley group of foreigners - white Venezuelan loyalists fleeing

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independence of that country, evicted Franco-Haitian planters, successful Dutch or Danish traderslooking for new investment opportunities, ambitious young Spaniards and other Europeans with nojob prospects in their countriesE8 - all came and set up large estates dedicated mostly for sugarcaneproduction. Then dozens of sugar mills with their distinctive towers and chimneys, navigating in asea of green cane, would rewrite PR's rural landscape. A fresh round of slaves and free laborerswould also come in to toil the fields. And the already residing free laboring peasants would be

forced by law to employ themselves in the fields under penalty of fines or jail.

Cane haciendas were built of locally produced brick and rubblework, with roofs of localhardwoods and tiles, later of tin as it could be imported cost-effectively. The use of hard wall andstructural materials had a double rationale: the valleys had a dearth of hardwood trees but a surfeitof good stone and clay; and since part of the sugar making process involved heat steam for theengines of the grinding machinery and heat for the coppers used for clarifying the syrup into sugar,many components of the factories had to be incombustibleE9.

Cane was ground in hardwood (later on, also iron) mills powered by oxen or wind. Still in someplaces of North-Central and South-eastern Puerto Rico truncated conical towers identical to othersfound in nearby islands like St Croix and Antigua stand on windswept elevations. And the

freshly-squeezedguarapo (cane juice) was heated in rows of coppersE10 (pailas), ladled by obligingslave or free laborers, solidified, dried in large closed warehouses and exported in cone-shapedloaves, or in barrels, as muscovado for the American and Spanish markets.

Some early central factories were built at this time- also using themasonry-with-gabled-wood-and-tin-roof system then prevalent. New machinery was brought fromthe USA but Puerto Rico-based planters favored mostly British equipment. Well-known Scottishmachine manufacturers from the Clydeside such as Manlove Alliott and Co., McOnie Harvie &Co., and Mirrlees, Tait & Yargan had numerous clients in Puerto Rico. There were alsoAmerican manufacturers like the West Point Foundry in upstate New York, and French ones, likeCaill & Cie. of Paris.

Thirsty sugar cane needed irrigation to be cultivated in the semiarid southern region. Thus, the firstplantations gathered by the regions few permanent rivers. Diversion walls were built inside thewater to channel it to brick channels to the fields. In some places the channels bridge secondarystreambeds, often with the majesty of Roman aqueducts like a fragment of the Ro Jacaguassystem in the Luciana estate in Juana Daz.

Estate houses increased in size and importance. Normally utilitarian though elegant responses toclimate, many were built of wood ormampostera and brick. Hard materials were more common inthe wood-scarce coasts, but in the coffee mountains these buildings became poems to the structuralpotential of native hardwoods. As with the formerestanciero residences, they were lifted bycolumns from the earth. Imposing bases of brick or stone would shelter utilitarian half-basements.

By this time a center-hall organization probably derived from vernacular European origins wasmodified for the tropics. This hall became a large living space, often two with a more private andfamiliar one on the back (known usually as the antesala or anteroom because it used to be theaccess in 2-story houses once the horizontal throw of the stairs was factored in). These living

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rooms were separated first by a wall and later on by a sometimes exuberant wooden partitionknown as a mediopunto (halfway point), made with different details of lathed, moulded, or jigsawed pieces, sometimes also hiding cupboards and other storage. Flanking on one or both sides,enfilade, the bedrooms, normally interconnected among themselves for more privacy. Usually tothe back there is an ell-type extension named the martillo orhammer, for service spaces,kitchens, storage and occasionally baths.

Verandas as discontinuous extensions of gable roofs were standard-issue on both front and backsides wraparounds, hip roofs, and continuous roofs over verandas were apparently more of aLesser Antillean (or US) influence in the east and southeast. The rear veranda became generally agallery for connecting service spaces, and could be partially closed by fixed and operable shuttersin the sun-rich South. Also a distinct component also of probable down-island influence is thefreestanding cookhouses found on some South-eastern estate houses most extant estate housekitchens in PR are inside the martillo. Baths in estate houses are usually 20th century alterations;if in any case they were inside theyd be placed as far back as possible as the latrines in LaressTorres estate close to the urban zone.

Techniques of wood construction reached their apex in these years. The quality of finishing,

dressing and profiling large wooden pieces and fitting them with complex joints and hardwood pinswas a nearly-arcane art, and the resulting products have held up well despite decades of neglect.Skills learned from Spanish and European master carpenters and the fine detailing of shipbuildingwere translated into solid, relatively hurricane-resistant construction.

Estates were mini-communities defined by large irregular yards around which the main buildings(estate owner and manager houses, crop production and storage facilities) would cluster. In caneestates these were known as bateyes from the Tano name for yards; in coffee plantations theseyards would be square or rectangular and made of brick and stone, surfaced with hydraulic plaster.These were calledglacis and would be used for drying coffee beans resting on tarps, unless itrained. The production and warehousing buildings would also present gabled roofs and solidpost-and-beam work, same as the adjoining planters houses.

The coffee processing machinery, much of it impressive in its size and inventiveness, was alsomostly built on-site with available quality woods, and much of it has resisted wood-eating pestslong after its abandonment. All this was roofed from the 1850s onward with imported corrugatedmetal (tin), which for decades was the only nonlocal material used in these structures. By the late19th century American and Canadian resinous pine was appearing mostly as a cladding material. Itwas brought undressed and finished locally.

Now the towns acquired the historic persona that defines them to this day. A complex hierarchy ofagricultural exchange centers intertwined by minimal dirt roads, usually passable only onhorseback, opened the hinterland and mountains to the new investments. Nearly 40 of the 70 townsin Puerto Rico were established in the 19th century. Export was barely legalmost

agriculturalists made revenue by selling directly to the St. Thomas traders, and Charlotte AmaliaCity in fact became Puerto Ricos de facto trading center. Doubtlessly, as evidence shows,architectural influences were also traded between the islands. The use of arched openings in VIhouses, and the use in PR of high hip and half-hip roofs, continuous verandas, and the similaritiesin woodwork detailing show the level of architectural exchange between the bustling ports of theSpanish colony and the Danish enclave.

Rural laborers either lived precariously in straw bohos scattered amongst the fields or in smallboxlike houses made of native or imported wood. These latter houses, roofed with tin and having a


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simple gable or inclined roof, could be transported on carts to whenever the owner could findemploy. (This has been seen in most Caribbean islands, for example, like the Barbadian chattelhouses). These had minimal architecture: the siding was shiplap and the doors and windows weremade of planks. Furniture was limited to folding cots, hammocks, and possibly a few rustic chairsand a table. In contrast the hacendado (estate owner) houses exhibited native furniture with wovencane matting-backed sofas, chairs, tables, armoires, side tables, four-poster beds, etc. made in PR

with fine native woods.

4. Consolidation of agricultural towns

Town planning principles were simple and based on the Spanish Laws of the Indies, with a regularlayout of blocks around a central square, a format capable of continuous extension and modularity.Adjustments for steep topography are common and the grids skew around rivers, creeks and ridges.Only one town Hormigueros, developed from a major hermitage and pilgrimage locus has aradial planning principle, centerd on the lower steps to the Monserrate Hermitage. It blossoms,notwithstanding the abundance of modern concrete boxes, into a tropical interpretation of aEuropean-type hillside village.

The most common type of house built in the towns outside San Juan was the center-living-space,wood frame, side-gabled house. Their distinguishing mark on the townscape was the long andcontinuous balconies serviced from the inside by several paired doors. Those on each end openedto the most important bedrooms, and the center doors to the living space frequently the dramaticmedio punto exposed to view by the curious passer-by. The distribution is like of the previouslymentioned estate houses, including the frequent existence of ell-type martillo extensions. A few onnarrow lots will have the living rooms to one side and the bedrooms to the other. To get privacythese houses are lifted at least 1 m (3 ft) from the street, so both privacy and street borne dust werecontrolled. Besides the rest of the house was lifted from the ground to improve ventilation andavoid vermin. This was done with hardwood or brick-pillar stilts, or with brick or rubble walls. Atthe front faade, this elevation was sealed off by a wall, almost always of hard material andsometimes decorated with mouldings and ventilation holes. In some situations, these bases acquired

considerable height and could become veritable basements. The now-demolished Piazza house inYauco had a base of nearly 6 ft (1.8 m) where wine was made with grapes grown on familyproperty.

Many times around, these houses became the second stories of mixed commercial and residentialstructures. The owner habitually resided on top of his business. The lower floor could be of brick,ormampostera, or in later examples concrete (to fireproof the first level with its combustiblemerchandise). The second living floor will usually open into a second-floor balcony overhangingthe public right-of-way. The regular rhythm of lower floor doors and the general symmetry of thebuildings helped facilitate construction and layout of the structures and also provided a clearfacade definition for the street. Even though the architecture was vernacular (learned as a craft,largely empirical and dependent on the capacity of the builder to visualize and imagine the

completed work), enjoyable and subtle variations can be seen even in the same town or city. Onecommon variation is those houses built out of brick ormampostera with a parapet roofdescending uniformly and hiddenly from the front wall. Hip roofs are also visible in many places,and still a very small quantity of these houses like San Lorenzos protected Machn House haveSpanish half-round tile roofs.

Balconies, the visible image of these houses, are quite varied in their treatment. In smaller andmountain towns, like, for example, San Germn, turned wood posts and balusters are common. In


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regional centers, iron substitutes wood, sometimes reaching a flowery exuberance as in YaucosCsari house, also a protected property. (There the balconies were in fact prefabricated in France.)Mayagez is defines by numerous brickcasas with imposing balconies in brick arches closed offby iron balustrades. Ponce has much iron balcony work with classical trim. More fancifulgingerbread is (now rarely) seen in the Southwest region, and also in the Anglo- Franco NordicAntillean influenced southeast and east coasts. San Juan is quite sober, and in fact in the late 19th

century some iron was integrated in balcony work. In some cases, these iron balconies can stillhave the label of their manufacturerusually British, but there were also local foundries to meetdemand.

Wood cladding can be quite varied. Clapboards arent merely the single-round-cut shiplap; somecan have quite complex beaded or variable-width profiles. As told previously, wood was shipped inbruto to the island and local sawmills or wood traders would profile cladding planks to order. Untilthe last quarter of the 19th century, structural wood was normally native hardwood, but thegrowing scarcity of this material would make imported posts and beams a niche. It is also knownthat quite a few prefabricated houses of American or British manufacture were also brought in.

Because of frequent devastating fires in the town centers, some towns had ordinances requiring

fireproof construction on buildings facing the plazas or at one or two blocks distance. This was notthe norm everywhere, for example in Lares, two-thirds of the downtown was made out of wooduntil the Feb. 2, 1945 fire - caused by a Candlemas ritual bonfire that went out of control -eliminated nearly 100 houses in the town square area.

The towns also had commercial buildings of wood or brick frame, the latter made similar to thestructures in San Juan, with regularly spaced double doors of solid wood planks or metal plate, butthe proportions, detailing and roofs were different. Many had geometric or neoclassical detailssometimes with some flair, and roofs were frequently of wood frame. On the upper portions of thewall,yeux-de-ufE11, small ventilating holes often detailed with mouldings and decoration, helpedmove stale air out of the warehouses. Imported cast-iron internal columns were used in some of thelarger buildings, and it is known that the Mayagez marketplace was shipped piece-by-piece from

France. Remnants of that disembodied structure are known to exist.

The large commercial structures were the warehouses for agricultural products in transit, and inthe same manner of building, limited processing facilities were constructed in the major tradingcenters. Coffee roasting plants existed near harbors; however, sugar was not further refined butshipped as muscovado brown outside the island where European or American refiners wouldwhiten it. But the molasses normally ended as rum, for centuries the Antilles favorite drink.Some of it was made in cities and other smaller producers were in the estates themselves. (Andsome of the molasses was used for building, craftsmen found out its superior quality as a cheap,easy-to-blend consolidator for mortars ormampostera, rubblework.)

The cities attracted qualified landless workers for the burgeoning trade, transportation and limited

manufacturing activity. They occupied smaller wooden houses on the blocks farther from the townsquare, usually gabled-roof houses on narrow, deep lots. Sometimes the land was rented or leased.If the lot size permitted and the person had sufficient resources, these houses would be miniaturisedversions of the typical urban side-gable houses, one or two rooms wide with a generallyrectangular plan. Sometimes they were so narrow that the shotgun arrangement (rooms linkedenfilade with each other) seen in parts of Southeast US and other Caribbean islands repeats itself

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here. Houses as narrow as 8 ft have been found in Ponce! Otherwise they would present the sameclimate tested solutions such as high ceilings, double doors with jalousies, front balconies,verandas, stilt-assisted elevations from the ground, etc.

In the urban peripheries, clusters ofbohos could be found where the partially employed occasionaland menial workers lived. Some of these clusters were urban and rural at the same time: the men

could go work at the nearby fields (which invariably at that time reached the very edge of urbanzones) and the women could do household jobs for the ladies at the town houses. There were casesin the larger towns where adjoining agricultural estates were subdivided for urban growth severalestate houses in Ponce are seen imbricated within the urban fabric. There was no concept ofestablishing buffers for parks or gardens, or for raising vegetables, herbs and other food staples.

Some towns grew sufficiently in the late 19th-early 20th century to the point that ensanches orextensions to the towns were platted by the city on former farms. They may even have, as in JuanaDaz, Lajas and Yauco, their own squares supplementing the older plaza. The practice of growingtowns by addition of new blocks, continuing the grid layout, persisted until practically 1948 whenthe first new post-war subdivisions were constructed on the old San Patricio farm southwest of SanJuan. From then, its a wholly different story...

Traditional landmark and civic buildings generally reflected all these years an extension of civilbuilding traditions, possibly with better quality of the commanding authorities had resources tobuild well. The Catholic parish churches, lying on or in front of the squares, show differentsolutions to the problem of congregating large numbers of people. Mostly built out ofmampostera, many use wide bullet wood-beam (ausubo) roofs, in some cases extending interiorspaces by employing 3-nave layouts. There are also impressive vaulted spaces in others. Poorerparishes made do with post-and-beam wooden churches, all of them lost to fire or hurricanes.

Town halls and casas del rey (offices for the representative of the colonial government) also werein front of, or close to the town squares. These were of conventional construction, their civicfunction possibly exhibited by a clock tower or front arcades. (Arcaded or covered sidewalks are

very rare in Puerto Rico, most shade and rain protection for passers-by is provided by theoverhangs of second story balconies.) The squares as such were multifunctional and in many townsfully open spaces. The volunteer militias would drill here, and they were also the venue of weeklymarkets for produce and consumer goods. In the cooler nights, they would be used for socializingin promenades where the dainty ladies of the town would march one way and the bachelorgentlemen the other way. In some coffee towns the plazas doubled as drying floors for coffeebeans! The one in Isabel Segunda (Vieques Island) has a huge cistern beneath to store water for thecitizens of this riverless island. By the 1880s and later, some civic amenities sprouted up likefountains, bandstands and benches. Trees were added to define small park like spaces. The bestkept example of these early squares is the one at Humacao, which acquired its presentconfiguration before 1920 and it presents two portions: an open esplanade in front of thequasi-Neogothic church, and a garden area with two transverse axes defining four garden areas

with a fountain at the center of each.

5. Urban variants, harbor settlements and transportation

The location of towns had to take into account protection from nature (especially floods afterintense rains) and at a time human threats, especially privateers and foreign invaders. Even whenafter 1820 Caribbean territorial claims were largely settled, latent instability in Europe madecolonial authorities quite wary. Many larger towns had nearby large stone forts near the entranceto the harbors or on commanding heights above them. The last major fort in Puerto Rico was the


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one made on top of the city of Isabel Segunda in Vieques Island (ca. 1845). It is a rectangularone-story building with an additional story below on one side and a semicircular room on the other.It is ringed by massive brick and rubble walls defining battlements and lookouts.

Another defensive tendency was to build the major towns somewhat inland, establishing a satelliteharbor settlement connected by a road. Ponce is located 3 km (1.85 miles) inland and Mayagez

about 2 km (1.25 miles). Both of these cities developed separate harbor settlements usually knownasPlaya (Beach), with large 1-or 2-story warehouse buildings made of fireproof brick, stone orrubble. These were the economic hearts of the cities: cane, coffee and other agricultural exportgoods were dispatched in exchange for imported goods like manufactures, equipment, clothing, andmany foodstuffs not produced locally. Passengers bound either for another Puerto Ricanharborside town, or for other Caribbean, European and American destinations, also sought boardon ships.

The cavernous warehouses would have massive hard-material walls on the outside, inside there dbe a forest of wide columns of hardwood, brick or imported cast iron. Roofs are of either azotea(near-flat brick on purlins and beams), or tin on enormous wooden trusses. Doors are of largewooden planks faced on at least one side by steel plate for fireproofing. On the upper reaches of

the walls, for avoiding stale air,yeux-de-ufproliferated and decorated them.

Houses of all kinds for people linked to the harbor trades would sprout close to the warehousedistricts. These were of an architecture similar to the houses in town but usually wood was theprevalent building material here.

One of these harborside towns, Arroyo in the southeast, separated from its mother townGuayama in 1855. As a gateway to the Lesser Antilles, especially St Thomas, during the secondhalf of the 19th century it evolved from a harborside settlement, like the one described above, intoa peculiar charming small city with substantial houses with American, Anglo- andFranco-Antillean influences, some still standing with some criolla houses also thrown in. Thesehouses face each other on Morse Street, the major thoroughfare, from generous landscaped front

yards delimited by iron-and-brick fences. Morse Street continues to the extensive valley where richsugarcane estates bolstered the towns wealth. Chroniclers remarked that Arroyo was a sort ofLittle Paris where the planters cruised on their carriages while the descendants of black slavestoiled the cane fields. The Lind familys Enriqueta estate, where Samuel Morse did the firstexperiment with the telegraph outside America, is today an exuberant overgrown ruin 2 miles (3km) to the northeast. A one-story, 3-opening Lind warehouse, with yeux-de-ufand curiouslywavy door surrounds, still stands in the harbor front - nowadays an auto body-repair shop.E12

The Cuatro Calles sugar estate, 2 km north of town, would later be a modern sugar mill known asLafayette honoring the French (actually Corsican) blood of its founders. Lafayette in the early1900s threaded a railroad spur paralleling Morse St. up to the docks, and Arroyos importance asa sugar port was briefly enhanced. Overconcentration of the industry, improvement of roads and

passenger railroads, and diminishing returns on sugar cultivation later caused the abandonment ofthis system and some remnants of Lafayettes former prosperity still lie scattered around thispicturesque settlement.

There were several second-order harbor settlements like those at Cabo Rojo and Fajardo that weremainly for local trade and fishing. These were somewhat casual groupings of vernacular houses

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lying along strands of soft beach where the days catch would be sorted and prepared for selling inthe nearby main towns.

Two major cities San Juan (previously described) and Aguadilla on the northwest were directlyon the waterfront. Aguadilla occupies a very narrow coastal shelf hemmed in by large calcareoushills riddled with sinkholes and caves. Aguadillas elongated blocks run north to south, and upon

them, a mixture of brick, concrete and wood buildings mostly made out in a simple vernacularwith geometric detailing (but sometimes very ornamented on the inside) holds fast to thepressures of development and severe neglect. In the north side of town there is a large formal parkwhere a spring (ojo de agua) pours water forth. The seaside street used to be lined by largewarehouses, but ill-advised urban renewal schemes have obliterated them and their potential forcivic and commercial use.

In many other towns building types, even when founded structurally on the vernacular explainedpreviously, would take specific variations given cultural influences by emigrant groups. YaucosCorsicans would prefer ornate neoclassic detailing, while Ponce would reflect variations fromCatalan-inspired modernisme, a French penchant for overly ornate fronts, or Anglo-Caribbean hiproofs with dormers. At Guayanilla, nearly all extant houses have front yards unlike most other

places. Fajardo used to have very deep hip roofed houses that seemed taken out from the British orDanish islands (but, unfortunately, nearly all lost by now). Isabel Segunda in Vieques Island is ashowcase for a small number of remaining houses and buildings some protected - that reveal adefinite influence from the nearly islands. The hip roofs of many have the precise skill of ashipwrights work.

Transportation infrastructure was very crude until the early 1800s, limited to a few shortacceptable roads with a couple of bridges of wood or masonry close to San Juan. Elsewhere theroads were of dirt - narrow, abrupt and strewn with puddles, rocks, and cracks. In someagricultural zones some stretches would be stabilized with rocks, limestone or brick. Through thelimestone hills of the north, however, some narrow horse-and-mule paths are impressively cutdirectly from the rock, like the Parrot Road (Camino de las Cotorras) south of Isabela in the

Northwest.

From then on, several roads would be built to connect, first, towns with harbors; and later on from1870 onward, different regions. The first interurban road, the Central Highway (124 km), wasbegun in 1875 and finished in 1886 (only missing one bridge). It runs between San Juan andPonce, winding itself through the mountainous interior up to 2500 ft at times. This road, plus othersegments elsewhere, totalled no more than 350 km by 1898. The rivers originally were crossed byfording them or crude wooden ferry bargesE13, later on wooden bridges would be built. Iron bridgeswere first brought to cross the PoncePonce harbor road in the 1870s, later on other similarbridges would be made on the Central Highway and other pre-1898 stretches. These box- or latticeside frame bridges were made in France or Belgium; some of these are still in service. Themacadamized surface was much better than what was used before, but didnt take kindly to

overloaded ox carts loaded with sugar or rum barrels. To facilitate repair, road keepers houses generous rectangular (with small extensions for kitchen and baths) azotea-roofed buildings oftraditional masonry construction, built of sometimes-exposed (a novelty) brick or mampostera,housing two road keepers, each one tending 3 km of road were located along these highways.Road keepers both did maintenance work and also served as traffic police, fining waywarddrivers on horseback, cart or buggy.

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Even so, the dearth of roads in the second half of 19th-century Puerto Rico made interurban travelhazardous by road. It was preferable to use an interurban steamer that covered PRs majorharbors. Though there were already substantial wharves and (wooden) docks in San Juan, otherdestinations had to use tenders to embark and disembark. The concomitant growth of theimport-export trade to North America, Europe and the other Antillean islands made the sea lanes

around Puerto Rico quite busy, and the increase in wrecks made necessary the erection of a14-lighthouse system around the island beginning in the 1880s. Eleven of these lighthouses wererectangular, azotea-roofed and with internal central towersE14. Variants were the gabled,side-towered one at Mona Island, fully made out of iron in France, reputedly by the Eiffelworkshop; the H-plan one in remote Culebrita Island; and the one integrated with El Morro fortressin San Juan. As with the road keeper houses, sometimes the rubble or brickwork was left exposed.Inside were the keepers quarters and the tower could be climbed through steel spiral staircaseswithout stepping outside, an advantage in the frequent foul weather seen during the hurricaneseason.

Between 1892 and 1908 a 260-km passenger railroad was built along the north, west andsouthwest between San Juan and Ponce (with extensions to Guayama in the southeast and

Humacao on the east) on a narrow 1-meter gauge. The single-track system was used for passengersuntil October 1953, and until 1957 for freight. It has left a legacy of remains like: traces ofrights-of-way through remote passages; steel and concrete bridges - only a very few extant; threeconcrete-lined tunnels: two in the Guajataca Valley between Quebradillas and Isabela in thenorthwest, another in the Cabo Rojo countryside; and about a dozen hip- or flat-roofed concretewall stations, most of them waiting for somebody to rescue them. San Juans dazzling 1912French-Renaissance heap of a terminal was razed in the late 1960s. And save for a single steamlocomotive with a tender and a couple of cars, rusting away in the Camuy Caves Park, all therolling stock was sold abroad or destroyed.

6. Twentieth-Century historic architecture

After the momentous change in sovereignty caused by the Spanish-American War, Puerto RicosSpanish-speaking, agrarian society was in the hands of a culturally and linguistically foreignentity. The US government and capital flooded the island with infrastructure that convertedBorinquen into a military bastion for modern warfare - and a vast sugar latifundium. Cane shot upthe slopes and was cultivated even in highland towns like Adjuntas and Jayuya. Harbors and roadswere vastly improved while the carless peasants looked in amazement. Two years of direct militaryoccupation (1898-1900) were followed by seventeen years of barefaced colonialism and later on,US citizenship for Puerto Ricans but hardly any economic or other political rights.

Two major infrastructure changes modified the landscape. The numerous small muscovado sugaroperations that dotted the coastal valleys were swept away by large and small central factories.Even many of the 38 established by 1902 also failed because of miscalculations on their market

and excessive debt. By the 1960s only some 25 were left. Presently (2003) there are only two andthese are inactive pending resolution of ownership issues with the government.

Most central factories were massive buildings constructed in steel and the newly introducedconcrete, with parts in more traditional brick techniques. Heat from boilers, used for the clarifyingand drying machinery and the production of steam to power the grinding mills, was convected to

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the air in high refractory-brick or concrete chimneys. These became standard fixtures in thelowland landscapes.

Around the central factories there were the houses of the administrators and upper management,and the factory offices. In most mills these were small groupings called habitually bateyes from theIndian word foroutside yard. Three settlements became veritable self-contained towns: Central

Fajardo (notwithstanding its proximity to Fajardo City), Ensenada in Gunica municipality, andAguirre in Salinas municipality. The first one has been partially rehabbed as a posh gatedsubdivision and another part is a campus of a private university; the second is quite mutilated andmay lose the remains of the mill if a mega-hotel project is proposed in the site; only Aguirre retainsa relative integrity even if many of the major structures are misused if not outright abandoned.

20th-century sugar mill houses are clapboard-on-imported-pine constructions usually recognisableby their netting-enclosed verandas. They do retain many tropic-adequate response like the lifting ofthe floor on stilts, relatively high ceilings, and the frequent use of wind-resistant hip roofs. Manywere interestingly made out with the traditional center-hall layout and ell-type service extension,much like the criollo houses of the previous century. In the cane villages, these comfortable housesshared spaces with concrete-walled office and store buildings. Later on during the century, newer

sugar plantation houses would be built fully of concrete and take on more rectangular shapes.

These houses would take different personalities depending on the hierarchy of their occupants.The larger houses for upper management and administrator were similar in grandeur to the estatehouses of the preceding era with generous livable verandas and accesory buildings for garages anddomestic service. There were simpler, smaller and narrower houses in smaller lots for techniciansand middle management, sometime only two rooms wide (one side living, one side bedrooms),though still keeping the front verandas. And at the bottom of the ladder there were the houses forthe ordinary sugarmill maintenance workers, rectangular, balconyless boxes on stilts, that in factcould be transported as they could be given as a retirement benefit to their occupants. Thesewerent too different from those used by the field workers. At least, however, like other companytown houses, they would get periodic maintenance paid for by the company. Aguirre residents

remember, for example, that there always was a reserve of vacant houses used for moving workersthat had their homes serviced. There was an annual closed-tarp fumigation for each house andevery three years the structure would be revised and termite-ridden or otherwise unserviceableparts of the house would be replaced by the carpentry and building trades staff of the corporation.In the company towns the houses would have specific hierarchy-related color schemes: thelower-tier houses would be painted gray in Aguirre and yellow-ochre in Ensenada. Middle andupper staff would get white clapboard houses. Unfortunately, when these corporations changedhands to their last, profit-moved private owners, maintenance was postponed, later eliminated.When the Government finally took over, it did not reinstate the old maintenance schedule.

Other elements of this era include extensive transportation and infrastructure works includingseveral hundred miles of new narrow-gauge cane railroads, docks at Aguirre and Ensenada, and

the still-used rum distilling and white-sugar refining equipment. Besides neo-vernacular,plantation style and neoclassic buildings also the Art Deco and modern styles are seen. The vastirrigation systems developed before 1915 and that serve hundreds of square miles in Southern PRhave scarcely been researched, they are a major component of the regions cultural landscape, notto mention their continuing use for irrigating other crops like vegetables, and for supplying waterto some communities and industries along the way. The irrigation dams at Santa Isabel, Guayabalin Juana Daz, and the earthwork dike in Patillas are integral parts of this system.

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and commercial buildings began a transformation. Commercial structures in towns followed thetraditional model of multiple-door faades with parapet walls, but the thinner walls gave themaway. Concrete was also favored for stilts and pilings even if the superstructure of houses waswooden.

Though the criolla and other 19th-century house styles continued to be built at some towns as late

as 1925, they were displaced by a more simple, pattern-book inspired architecture of dwellingswith rectangular floor plans, low gable or hip roofs, concrete balconies and sometimes walls andfloors, though most were clapboard-sided with plank flooring except in the balconies. These housesnot only appeared in towns and as modern homes in plantations, but many were built asweekend-retreat villas. Car-accessible places like Aibonito, Barranquitas and the Jjome sectorsouth of Cayey still showcase many of these quinta homes set in exuberant gardens.

Even when the center-living-room scheme persisted well into the beginning of theall-reinforced-concrete era of the 1950s, many of the newfangled houses built from 1910 used along front-to-back corridor to link rooms. It was frequent to place the dining room and kitchen inthe back. Many of these houses were set back from the street with front yards of varyingdimensions. Erecting tall towerlike extensions in the back expanded others.

Though apparent austerity and geometricity was the apparent rule in these houses, the use of widewindows with fixed colored-glass geometric inserts and pieces of turned or shaped wood actuallygave many of them great elegance. Climatic and technical lessons were not lost: they were liftedfrom the ground and the ceilings maintained a comfortable height, albeit not as high as in theSpanish era. Unfortunately by the 1930s as a weight-saving measure much lumber to build thesehouses was dry and thus susceptible to fast termite infestation. Much of the later wood framehouses (1930 to 1960) have been demolished and substituted for concrete for this reason. Duringthis period, both as new construction and retrofits to existing work, pressed cement hydraulic tileswith complex, multicolored geometric and floral patterns became very popular. This has been avery hardy flooring system: 80-year-old tiles have been reconditioned to near-new state, even inlong-neglected properties!

Civic buildings in concrete diversified their typologies. Purpose-built city halls, schools, hospitals,asylums and courthouses replaced the earlier venues, usually converted residences - or built withthe same technique. Though up to 1915 brick was commonly used, later on a large quantity ofconcrete structures with tin or flat parapet roofs became institutional foci of everyday life.Especially schools vehicles of an intense though failed attempt at Anglification andAmericanisation ofboricua life were erected usually on the outskirts of towns in watered downNeoclassical or Spanish Revival. A spate of intense civic building surged in the 1930s withpost-Depression government subsidies, replacing older venues wrecked in the violent hurricane of1928. The same situation occurred with private institutions like churches, Catholic and now alsoProtestant.

American hegemony introduced Puerto Rican architecture to swift transformations. Metricbuilding, already the norm by 1900, backtracked into the archaic Anglo-Saxon foot and inchsystem. US pattern books and standards were circulated amongst architects, civil engineers (the defacto architects outside the major cities) and contractors. Stateside training by either going there orby correspondenceE15 formed most or all of the practitioners in the cultivated tradition.Notwithstanding this situation, most of them practiced with considerable respect to prevalent

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tradition. Drastic formal ruptures la Bauhaus-De Stijl were unthinkable in this colonialcontextE16. Bungalow, neoclassic and later on Spanish revival actually a combination ofMoorish-romantic and American-Southwest mission vocabularies - became defining styles inresidential designE17.

Puerto Rican architects of the cultivated tradition have left an interesting legacy that has only

recently been reevaluated and intensively studied. Some of the exponents are:

a) Rafael Carmoega, Stateside-trained who was a major designer of schools and institutionalbuildings, also planner of the UPR Ro Piedras campus and chief architect of the neoclassical StateCapitol. Many Neoclassic and Spanish revival houses are credited to him.

b) Pedro de Castro, who learned his trade at Syracuse University in New York State. He wouldwork largely in the matured Spanish Revival and also did Art Deco work, nearly reaching earlyModernism before dying in an air accident in 1937.

c) Manuel V. Domnech, who studied engineering in Pennsylvania, designed great Neoclassicalheaps like the Armstrong House (1899) facing Ponces cathedral. This house has several building

innovations like the use of a brick vault on steel beam structure and a sophisticatedceiling-ventilation system. In the early American rgime Domenech would head public-worksefforts by the government and much building and civil works up to 1920 would bear his influence.

d) Adrian Finlayson, an American in government service, steeped in institutional Neoclassicism,who established the parameters for public-building design for the first three decades of the 20thcentury.

e) Martnez & Lzaro, trained in Venezuela with Beaux-Arts fundamentals. Executors of manyinstitutional and private projects in evolved Beaux-Arts and French Romantic styles between1910-1930.

f) Pedro Mndez, possible Puerto Ricos finest Art Deco architect. His masterworks are the actualfaade of the old Ponce marketplace and the protected Miami apartments in San Juan s Condadodistrict. He also built several movie theatres.

g) Antonn Necho[j]doma, a Czech trained in the US who evolved from the late Arts-and-Craftsbungalow style and historicism to Wrightian prairie-school forms; by his death in 1928 he wasbeginning to show evolution into a more tropical, idiosyncratic style. His work was split betweenlarge residences and institutional buildings for government and churches. uvre by him includeshouses like the restored Roig house in Humacao, a dead ringer for a Wright design (minus thechimney, redundant in the tropics); schools with characteristic band windows and geometricglass-inlay details, and the English Gothic style Methodist temples.

h) Francisco Porrata-Doria, another Ponce native whose long career would span from academicneoclassicism (the banks at Ponce, 1924-27) to the exuberant eclecticism in thehurricane-replacement parish churches in Ponce Diocese in the 1930s, art deco, early ModernMovement and even neocolonial pastiche, a mindset akin to the much-later Postmodern school.

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i) Francisco Valines, mostly influenced by Romantic and Arts-and-Crafts design. A major playerin early-20th-century residential architecture, also credited with the implementation and detailingof Bennett, Parsons and Frosts scheme for the Parque Muoz Rivera (1920).

j) Alfredo Wiechers, the Ponce-born son of a German immigrant, who studied in Paris and laterpractising in Barcelona learned the ropes of Catalan modernisme. His work, built in the 1910s

mostly in his hometown, is considered among the most perceptive adaptations of traditionaltechniques to a developed new conscience of space and detailing.

As expounded before, town planning followed by most part the extension of gridded plats began inthe Spanish period. Not all though: Aguirre company town in Salinas (since 1900) was planned onPicturesque and garden-city schemes, while Neoclassical axiality defined the main quadrangle atthe University of Puerto Rico in Ro Piedras. Santurce, San Juans main suburb, was to be built asa grid influenced by the ocean to the north; bays and lagoons to the east and west; and themangrove-studded Martn Pea Channel to the south. This grid only was realised at some areaslike Condado and Miramar to the west and north. Most of Santurce is made of long streets,perpendicular to the main roads, and at the beginning many of them with dead ends. This was doneby placing streets in the midpoint of the road frontage of the small farms that historically belonged

to the areas ancestral free-black population, snapped up from the 1890s by savvy speculators.Small rectangular lots were platted and soon bungalow- and chlet-type houses filled them. Laterlarger commercial buildings rose on the road frontage, movie palaces for the increasing populationof the area (further increased with enormous, unsanitary channelside slums), and an ephemeralbusiness center in the 1950s and 60s.

7. Current problems

After the 1930s worldwide economic cataclysm, things would change in Puerto Rico for theprelude to Modernism. By the 1940s experimental Minimalist concrete boxes, designed by agovernment design committee - with input by Modern-influenced architects like Richard Neutra -were being built. The postwar economic development strategy based on foreign industrial capital,

government subsidies and tax breaks, and putting more spending money in a newfangled middleclass, extenden from 1946 to the early 1970s. A new crop of architects serviced the increasedprocess of urbanisation. Osvaldo Toro and Miguel Ferrer designed the Caribe Hilton hotel in 1948,it was put up the next year to considerable criticism some called it a soda pop bottle box on itsside. By 1950 they had drawn plans for the minimalist, somewhat Corbusian Supreme Court. Bythe centurys halfway point, their style was acceptable as an image of the new modernisation andseveral important institutional and residential commissions followed.

Other major player at this time was Heinrich (Henry) Klumb, a native of Cologne (Germany) andalso a Wright alumnus. He put the Modernist vocabulary of simple forms in concrete to work for,not against, the climate a vision that for decades was derided in major commercial commissionsuntil the recent appearance of Ken Yeangs bioclimatic skyscrapers . He also had a diverse

practice, but his recognised masterworks are the buildings made for the University of Puerto Ricoin Ro Piedras, set in parklike settings outside and in contrast to the main neoclassical quad. Theseinclude the Museum, the Library, several classroom buildings, student and faculty residences, theStudent Union and the Faculty Club (this much altered to accommodate the present School ofArchitecture, may be taken to its original shape once the School moves to new quarters). Klumbalso did houses, office buildings, apartments, and even a shopping mall in Bayamn, a suburb 8miles (13 km) southwest of San Juan. On the latter part of his career, until his tragic death in 1976,Klumb specialised in buildings for pharmaceutical multinationals then establishing themselves inPuerto Rican soil.


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Outside architects also played a reduced, though significant role. Edward Larrabee Barness ElMonte apartments (1963) two curving 16-story strips outside Ro Piedras - are considered to thisday a model of reconciliation between collective housing, the provision of social space, and thedemands of a tropical climate. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was the author of the 15-story 1966Chase Manhattan Bank Building (now BBVA) in the Hato Rey business sector, facing T&Fs

landmark Banco Popular, built the year before. Though a typical prestige-tower project of its time,it recognises climate with its deeply recessed glass panes and elongated plan shape that minimisesthe hotter, sunnier southern exposure.

Though scientific planning principles were implemented by the establishment of a PlanningBoard in 1942, population growth, the decline of agriculture, a sharp increase on consumerspending, and a mindless modernisation of much physical and intangible aspects of culture andtechnology, have outstripped this Boards ability to plan. PR has over half of all automobiles inthe insular Caribbean, which hardly fit its highways, streets and roads. Car-dependent suburbs andshopping complexes, many made in spec builders utilitarian design, fill the landscape of old caneestates and dairy pastures. Since the year 1949, when the old San Patricio farm south of San JuanBay began seeing the earthmovers and concrete trucks place row upon row of identical

900-square-foot houses in postage-stamp lots, the destiny of urbanity and collective life in PuertoRico was sealed and destined to become a tropical travesty of American edge-city anomie. Onlynow the more perceptive professionals are searching for solutions that may recover, among otherelements, the lessons of the past, without a nostalgic return to what is already obsolete. But itsconservation is an imperative as it gives an unavoidable reference that can be a beacon forintelligent spacemaking in the future.

January 24, 2003 / revised American version July 2004

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THE ESSENCE OF PUERTO RICAN HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE - ENDNOTES

(endnote 1) In some walls molasses or agave sap have been found used as consolidating agents or inmortars. This is more common where the raw material is readily available (cane plantations or dry zonesin the southwest quadrant of Puerto Rico). Source: information on authors personal records andcorrespondence.

(endnote 2) Spanish names: cedro, cap blanco, cap prieto and algarrobo, respectively. Biologicalnames in the same order: Cedrela odorata, Petitia domingensis, Cordia alliodora, and Hymanacourbaril. LITTLE, Elbert ; WADSWORTH, Frank H.; and MARRERO, Jos,Arboles comunes dePuerto Rico e Islas Vrgenes, San Juan: University of Puerto Rico, 1967, pp. 217,308, 627, and 648.

(endnote 3) Spanish ausubo, biological name Manilkara bidentata orManilkara balata.Ibid., p. 593.

(endnote 4) Curiously, this trees biological name is not lignumvit, but ratherGuaiacum officinale, inother words, a derivation of the aboriginal word used in Spanish and French (gaac).Ibid.,p. 264.

(endnote 5) There was no discernible national or tribal origin in Puerto Rican slaves, unlike in Cubawhere a substantial group of slaves came from present-day Nigeria, and where the Yoruba religion,disguised as Catholic saint-worship, still exists. On general African cultural characteristics that migratedto Puerto Rico, with an emphasis on language, see ALVAREZ NAZARIO, Manuel:El elementoafronegroide en el espaol de Puerto Rico . San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquea, 1982, chapters1 and 2. Another historical study of note is SUED BADILLO, Jalil with LOPEZ CANTOS, Angel: Puerto


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Rico Negro. San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1986.

(endnote 6) For example, PRsgandures (pigeon peas) are a staple in Barbados, while Antiguans mayeat white rice with red peas, exactly the PRarroz con habichuelas. Fish is common; funche (fungi,boiled cornmeal), or boiled root crops known as viandas will be eaten alongside bacalao (salt fish or cod,popular in Jamaica). Cubans and Puerto Ricans share an affection with pot roast ( boliche and carnemechada, respectively) and fried pieces of pork. There are Puerto Rican equivalents of pepper pot(sancocho) and what Jamaicans call escovitch fish (pescado en escabeche). The food is not as spicy as inother islands and curry is not used (Indian immigration here was negligible), but fruits and vegetables arewidely shared, not to mention PRs highly rated coffee and liquors. A recent, good reference onAfro-Puerto Rican gastronomy (from the Loza area) is: RIVERA RODRIGUEZ, Carmen Lydia:HolyBroth / Caldo Santo, San Juan, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquea Promocin Cultural, 2003.

(endnote 7) Some of these chroniclers were the late 18th-century Benedictine friar igo Abbad yLasierra, Alexander OReilly, an Irishman in the service of Spain at that time; and there are several 1823drawings (the text of which they were part was never found) by a French naturalist, Auguste Ple,archived in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris. See: ABBAD Y LASIERRA, igo,Historia natural,civil y geogrfica de la isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (with endnotes by chapter by JosJulin ACOSTA Y CALBO and a foreword by Gervasio GARCIA). Madrid, Doce Calles, 2002. Part ofthe OReilly document is in: TAPIA Y RIVERA, Alejandro,Biblioteca Histrica de Puerto Rico, San

Juan, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquea, 1970. The Ple illustrations have been reproduced on theInstituto de Cultura Puertorriqueas magazine.

(endnote 8) These emigrant investors had to be Catholics. This didn't faze natives of part- or fullyProtestant countries like Britain, Denmark, Germany or the Netherlands. They favoured conversion oftheir ancestral beliefs to be able to secure their investments. Cf. ACOSTA Y CALBO, Jos Julin, thirdendnote to Chapter 26 of ABBAD Y LASIERRA, op. cit., p. 382.

(endnote 9) For details on the sugar making process in the pre-central factory days, references suggestedare MORENO FRAGINALS, Manuel:El Ingenio, complejo econmico social cubano del azcar.Barcelona: Editorial Crtica, 2001 (new edition of the original Spanish-language text), Chapter 5, pp.143-211, and Appendix 2, pp. 591-656. Though this book focuses in Cuba, much of the informationapplies to situations seen in Puerto Rico, and the descriptions are very explicit and documented. Also see

LEWISOHN, Florence:Divers information of the Romantic History of St. Croix, Frederiksted: St. CroixLandmarks Society, 1966.

(endnote 10) A copperis, in sugarmaking lingo, a half-spherical iron or brass bowl of several feet diameter,mounted in such a way that it can be heated from the bottom. Coppers are used for heat-clarifying cane juicein preparation for crystallization. Frequently numbers or specific names were assigned to the different coppersused in an array for sugar clarifying. The three-to-seven copper arrays were set over a low or sunkenvaulted brick structure with a ventilating, tapered square-section chimney on one end. On the other endheat was applied by burning wood, charcoal or bagasse. The smaller copper where the sugar began tocrystallize was known as a teache ortacho in Spanish. The whole single-furnace copper-based sugarclarifying system was called in Puerto Rico, curiously, a tren jamaiquino orJamaican Train. There wasalso the archaic tren espaolorSpanish Train in which each copper was individually heated. A typicaldamning expletive in Puerto Rico is quemarse en las pailas del infierno to burn in the coppers of hell,

still used today by people that never have seen this kind ofpaila. See LEWISOHN, F. op.cit., andBROWN-CAMPOS, Richard and VAZQUEZ SOTILLO, Nelly, La influencia de la mecanizacin en lashaciendas azucareras de Puerto Rico en el siglo xix. Mayagez, P.R., Richard Brown-Campos, n.d.

(endnote 11) French word, literally ox eyes. The singular term is il-de-uf. In Spanish the wordsojo(s) de buey are used. A Latin synonym also used in English is oculus (plural oculi), though it refersmostly to this element in cultured architectural traditions.

(endnote 12) There is major recent historical study made about the Lind estate in Arroyo: Overman,C.T.A Family Plantation: History of the Puerto Rican Hacienda La Enriqueta. San Juan, Academia


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J O ti C l A it t C i i t P ti A hit t I C P J / E

Puertorriquea de la Historia, 2000. It has been, however, exceedingly hard to obtain a copy so it is onlymentioned as it has not been perused or reviewed. Also, the Linds had a substantial house in CharlotteAmalie (St Thomas) in Nrregade, 6, in the Kongens Kvarter. It is now Bethania, the meetinghouse forthe adjacent Frederik Lutheran Church. Note that modern St. Thomians usually write the street name asNorre Gade in two words and without the slash in the Danish letter. GJESSING, Frederik andMACLEAN, William:Historic Buildings of St. Thomas and St. John. London-Basingstoke: MacmillanEducation Ltd., 1987, pp. 67-69.

(endnote 13) The last ferry-barge (ancn) was operated over the Ro Grande de Loza next to Lozatown up to 1980. Its final incarnation was made in steel plate with wood reinforcement and was moved byhand pulling it on a cable stayed on both banks of the river. Source: authors personal information andrecollections.

(endnote 14) Thirteen of these lighthouses still stand the one at Rincn was wrecked in the 1918earthquake and what remained disappeared in the hurricanes of 1928 and 1932. A concrete tower wasbuilt in 1935 in their place. Adjacent there was a wood frame keepers house, since disappeared. Cf.NISTAL MORET, Benjamin: Thematic Nomination: Lighthouses of Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto RicoState Historic Preservation Office, 1984 (unpublished).

(endnote 15) Several well-known architects up to 1930 studied architecture by correspondence, such as

the Cayey painter Ramn Frade, who built extensively there; and another well known residential andinstitutional architect like Francisco Valines (Frenchmans House in Vieques, Muoz Rivera Park in SanJuan). About Frade, see: DELGADO MERCADO, Osiris: Ramn Frade Len, pintor puertorriqueo(1875-1954). San Juan, Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y del Caribe, and the Ramn Frade(RFr) collection in the University of Puerto Ricos Architecture and Building Archives (aacupr).

(endnote 16) This doesnt mean necessarily that there was absolute conformity to the norm of traditionor emulation of known American models. Buildings inspired by Wright, the Greene Brothers, theNeoclassicists and the Arts and Crafters exist; but there were attempts at ruptures to create a moreidiosyncratic type of building. Several of the Wiechers buildings in Ponce (1910s) and NechodomasCott-Larrauri house in Coamo (1926) are examples of new syntheses pointing to specifically Puerto Ricansolutions. On Nechodoma see MARVEL, Thomas S., Antonin Nechodoma: The Prairie School in theCaribbean, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1986; and on Wiechers: RIGAU, Jorge:Puerto Rico

1900, New York, Rizzoli, 1993, pp.107-114.

(endnote 17) Brevity doesnt permit the author at this time to elaborate on this latter style. Criticalviews of it can be seen in in RIGAU, Jorge:Puerto Rico 1900 (in English), New York, Rizzoli, 1993, p.177-209. (chapter titled Spanish Revival as Spanish Denial)and in VIVONI FARAGE, Enrique, ed.,Hispanofilia / Hispanophilia (Spanish and English texts), University of Puerto Rico Press, 2000.

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