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Tracing a Plan in Kreyol by Irene Brisson

Q: How does creolization affect the architectural process?

A: Writer and literary critic Édouard Glissant described creolization as an open process with unfixed outcomes, characterized by adialectic between oral and written discourses. Kreyòl architecture,like that of a house in Leyogann, results from such a dialecticprocess. In the narrative to follow, dialogue and images aretransmitted through the hand-drawn plan into a Kreyòlarchitecture resultant from transnational encounters of people,technology, and media.

Bòs Thomas is a bòsmason (masonry contractor) who designed the house considered here under construction in the Gran Rivyè section of Leyogann, Ayiti (Haiti). In an interview Bòs Thomas described how his training prepared him to read plans and to trase or draw plans, but he distinguished this from how an architect conceives of plans. He did not elaborate on what ineffable difference there was between his and an architect’s plan, but a division in design and trade education is implicated. Nonetheless, in a building culture almost entirely dominated by concrete masonry block construction, it follows that bòsmason come

to function in many ways as architects in practice, if not in profession. Outside of some upper-class residential, commercial, and civic structures, most buildings in Haiti are built—and de facto designed—by engineers, contractors, or homeowners. When they draw floor plans, they enact a Kreyòl architecture which weaves distributed and diverse influences together.

The house in question was commissioned by a diasporic client living in the United States. Bòs Thomas and his client were both born in Leyogann and had lived abroad. The client who commissioned the house was living in the United States and brought the aesthetics of US suburban housing to bear on his retirement home in Haiti.

It fell to Bòs Thomas to integrate the imagery of a US suburban home with a Haitian domestic program, infrastructure, and building culture. He translated certain formal features from the illustrations into the floor plan including a covered entrance way flanked by columns and a bay in the sitting room with a large picture window. The model designed for light-wood framing was rendered instead in concrete block. In tracing the plan, Bòs Thomas negotiated construction methods, cost estimating, space planning, and aesthetics. In executing the construction, implicit details were resolved in conversation between him and the foreman and construction crew. In short, he designed a house.

Tracing these physical and conceptual trajectories through the design of a house reveals an on-going process of creolization of domestic space outside the strictures of the profession of architecture. Technical, material, and aesthetic resources from North America and the Caribbean combine in Bòs Thomas’ Kreyòl architecture.

Irene Brisson, assistant professor of architecture, (they/their) is a scholar and designer of built environments invested in the cultivation of just and sustaining places for people. Their research and pedagogy centers historically marginalized narratives of building culture and designers in Haiti and the Afro- Caribbean diasporas of the Americas in pursuit of a radically expanded field of global architecture.

Their current book project, Kreyòl Architecture: Design in dialogue in Haitian house building, theorizes Kreyòl architecture as a design process which has continuously emerged from the interlacing of liberatory, (neo)colonial, vernacular, industrial, and diasporic spatial practices and which exceeds any fixed historical creole style. Based on extended ethnographic research with architects, bòsmason, NGOs, and residents involved in housebuilding in Leyogàn, this work consider how intimate desires, global influences, and collective politics of domestic environments reproduce and challenge the status quo of building culture. A new research project focuses on the transnational linkages and parallels between building cultures, racial capitalism, and environmental risk in the greater Caribbean and Gulf Coast regions.

Brisson’s research has been supported by the US Department of Education Fulbright-Hays program, the Institute for the Humanities and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.