The Essence of Puerto Rican Historic Architecture

THE ESSENCE OF PUERTO RICAN HISTORIC
ARCHITECTURE
Arq. Jorge Ortiz Colom
Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña
Ponce, Puerto Rico
0. Introduction
Puerto Rican historic architecture has been a victim for decades of a vile though unintended
reductionism into its merely Spanish colonial aspects. Though by itself not unimportant, the
creolization of southern Spanish building traditions has been quite felicitous especially in the
unique geographical and climatic siting of the walled city of San Juan, Outside this compact,
elegant ensemble, Puerto Rico s historic buildings take on multiple and varied personalities to an
extent 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, which
is true at least dimensionally, that it is also the largest of the Lesser Antilles. The southeast
quadrant 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 building
traditions of down-islanders. Half-hipped roofs, shingle-covered cabins, tray ceilings, wood
structures built with the precision of a shipwright s, 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 up
into the numerous harbors and inlets through which agricultural raw material - like muscovado
sugar 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 and
agro-industry going. San Juan also was an administrative and military center with the requisite
public buildings and fortifications, also executed with the same technical vocabulary of the civilian
structures.
1. San Juan
Despite its superficially Spanish ambience, San Juan architecture displays very climate- and
socially-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. The
comfort problem is to channel these winds to render the living spaces habitable. This is largely
realized by very high ceilings 4 to 6 meters (13 to 20 ft) is the norm. The patios act as ventilation
shafts for air exiting the inner spaces. The use of materials is crucial. Walls are near-always made
of brick, dried by the sun or low-temperature wood or coal fires or of mampostería (i.e.:
rubblework, the terms will be used alternatingly), a mixture of calcareous rock, whole or broken
bricks, mud, lime and other inorganic fillersE1. The mampostería system defines structurally
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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 or mampostería, the wall material
is very susceptible of quick erosion by wind and rain-borne water, so it is preventively plastered
with 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 sun s heat evaporates absorbing heat and effectively cooling the walls. To increase
cross ventilation inside, openings between spaces are invariably doors, which take on numerous
functions. 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 like
openings whether arched or flat on top and the only aisle like connectors are seen in the stair
halls and the galleries that open to the yards. To make a window, a door is made with a protective
open 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 climate
regulation system that transcends its original purpose as an access regulator for people. Invariably
set 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 = 1½ in) jalousies that can be operated by opening a small access
door (postigo) and frequently glass in the upper panel or in a transom. Transoms are also made of
fretwork or horizontal fixed narrow shutters, and there are also simpler ones made of straight or
turned 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 available
until 1897), San Juan houses have invariably flat - actually, very slightly sloping roofs known as
techos de azotea ( terrace roofs , henceforth mentioned here as azotea roofs). A covering of
hydraulic cement made out of lime, sand and either ashes or ground clay (usually taken from
broken 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 in
pockets on the walls. However, until the end of the 19th century there also existed some houses
with gable and hip roofs covered by the more traditional barrel clay tiles. [The shape of these is
determined 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 Old
San Juan houses. Floors are covered with clay or marble tiles, the latter in random or checkerboard
patterns. If not on ground floor, they have the same structural system as roofs. Walls are almost
always plastered, and following some found evidence, in the better houses they were commonly
painted with geometric and naturalistic motifs, probably as exuberantly as the known practice in
Cuban townhouses.
San Juan houses are generally very austere; their beauty is more akin to their proportions and to
the quality of interior spaces with their subdued lighting and vertical amplitude. The main
ornaments seen are cornices, both inside to bolster the bullet wood beams, and inside to splash
water outside from the walls and thus protect them. Cornices are first roughed by projecting
normal and thin bricks in their general outline, and finished with lime plaster and the use of wood
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© Jorge Ortiz Colom, Arquitecto Conservacionista Preservation Architect I.C.P. January / Enero
2003
Guayama / Ponce, P.R.
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or cut metal molds. Some can include garlands, dentils, or Greek inspired geometric motifs. Wall
opening surrounds are also projected and express the inside reinforcement of the openings, which is
brick. Opening lintels include straight arches quoin shaped bricks sustained by gravity and
their peculiar shape, and arched lintels, half-round more frequently in San Juan but some elliptical
or segmental ones are also seen.
Blocks are built fully to the street line, and being these streets relatively narrow the tall house walls
shade them. Projecting second or third story balconies with brick-on-wood floors and an
independent small roof known as a tejadillo serve as a means of contact between the private and
public realms and as an efficient way to shade walls. Their balustrades are made of turned pieces
with wooden base panels, and the evident inspiration is similar balconies seen on Canary Island
and some mainland Spanish towns.
Inside sheer walls on the simpler houses sometimes ring courtyards, but more common is the use of
arcades and projecting inside balconies, in a few cases covered with panes of jalousie shutters but
mostly open. The inside balconies act as galleries to link rear rooms of the houses. In more
substantial places like Fortaleza, the governor s residence, shuttered galleries are further enlivened
by the use of colored glass pieces.
This architectural style was so successful that it also influenced the early-20th-century concrete
row houses, which had to assume the proportions, height and even details of their older neighbors.
Some exceptions stand out like the former González Padín building with its ribbon windows and
open concrete frame, and the 10-story Banco Popular art deco tower with its oceanlineresque
curves and massing. A few more modern intrusions in the old blocks also were erected before 1950
and modern austerity and asymmetry can be found next to the traditional houses. But the pre-1900
houses make up about two thirds of the total of nearly 900 buildings of the Old City, in fact
making 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 flanking
houses. 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 in
slate-covered steps. Canary Island slate is used for sidewalks, plazas and some private courtyards
in the city. Other outer surfacing materials are brick, concrete obviously a 20th century response
and argamasa, a mixture of cement, brick dust, stone and clay fragments. The latter is easy to
set 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. Though
old iron water mains and brick sewers run beneath the streets, electricity and telephone are strung
on short poles jury-rigged to parapet walls on top on houses. The aerial landscape complicates
with satellite TV dishes (cable doesn t want to install here), domestic accessories like heaters (solar
and 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 myriad
boats. Some of these penthouses (called miradores) are original, others have been sanctioned by
the 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 to
its 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 city s main civic square fronting City Hall. The massive protecting walls made the
city grow up inside, first filling in and then up. At the close of the 19th century, the ½ 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 won t go in detail in the fortifications and civic buildings that have been described
and reviewed in other scholarly and popular essays and descriptions. It should suffice to say that
the latter category was built in the same technique that was used in private homes, albeit with more
classical decoration and large, generous inside patios that could perform ceremonial functions. The
early 19th century Intendencia (General Staff) fronting Plaza de Armas, even after being victim of
a slipshod restoration in the early 80s, is probably one of the better examples. The former infantry
barracks known as Cuartel de Ballajá (1845) are also important, but the original upper floor and
roof 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 St
Thomas Aquinas convent (now Institute of Culture offices). The originally 16th-century building
also 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 among
the very few buildings in the Western Hemisphere that include authentic late-Gothic structural
systems. These are visible only from the inside and consist of impressive stone stairs, not
accessible 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 previously
mentioned and simpler half-round vaults and domes usually reinforced by massive brick-and-stone
buttresses. There are three other churches in the old city, all of them vaulted: St Anne s on calle
Tetuán, the conventual church of St. Francis of Assisi in calle San Francisco - there was an
adjoining parish church, razed in the first decade of the 20th century - and the interesting Christ
Chapel (on the intersection of calles Cristo and Tetuán. A few houses and buildings have small
private chapels, usually only readable by the presence of domes on the roofs, as with the house in
calle O Donnell and calle Fortaleza (actually art-decoed on the outside, but indeed it s from the
1800s).
Fortifications are massive stone and mampostería works usually roofed with vaults and which
derive their protective functions from their adaptation to the city s hilly geography and the sheer
height of the walls. Though hardly tested in battle and turned obsolete by the advance of post-1850
military technology, these walls are the most memorable element of San Juan s panoramas, and
they 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 exuberant
palace made with the traditional domestic vocabulary of the city. To the back, overlooking the
walls, it morphs into a medieval castle with twin crenulated towers and a near-blank wall, much
like a transplanted castillo of El Cid s time. On the roof of one tower there s a stone sundial still
used to tell time.
Summing up: San Juan tells in its architecture a stimulating history all the way from the 1500s of a
Spain 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 when
the outside-the-walls harbor warehouse district of La Puntilla did fall victim to a grandiose plan of
ersatz-Sanjuanero apartments, partially executed most of the area is nowadays a parking lot.
However the old, neoclassical Arsenal complex of one-story warehouses and a chapel still stands
fronting 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 the
International-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 this
quarter. Many government offices make their home here, specially the Instituto de Cultura
Puertorriqueña, overseer of the correctness of Old City (and elsewhere in Puerto Rico) restoration
and heritage-recovery work.
2. Outside San Juan: Archidiversity
Neglected by Spain because of its lack of gold, but kept because of its strategic location, Puerto
Rico survived for 300 years making ends meet. The 300-mile-plus coastline was ideal for pirates
and smugglers, and in fact contraband of spices, ginger, tobacco and foreign manufactures was a
way of life in most of the island. Its geography a large mass of limestone or volcanic-origin
mountains ringed by narrow valleys made Puerto Rico turn outward to other Caribbean
countries, making it a veritable carrefour of influences. PR s mixed blood population, even if
somewhat whiter than its neighbors, is a typical Caribbean mélange of all nations of Europe,
Africa and some indigenous Arawak (Taíno) remnants. Aspects range from Nordic-type blonds to
jet 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 Mayagüez and Guayama) and
common nouns like batey (a yard, also the usual name for plantation villages), macana (a club or
baton), or guaraguao (a type of tree famous for its quality wood, also a large eagle like bird), or
guayacán (the lignumvitæ 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 or
bone, burials, pottery shards, and rock engravings or paintings. Some built stuff has surfaced: the
holes of old grass-and-stick huts called caneyes (square, for the chieftains) or bohíos (rounded, for
the others); fortunately described by early Spanish chroniclers - and several impressive ceremonial
parks where a ritual game superficially similar to soccer was played by contending yucayeques
(towns).
The Institute of Culture s 13th-century Caguana Complex west of Utuado consists of several
rectangular plazas framed by oblong stone monoliths, many engraved with images of nature or
fecundity. One of these plazas, the largest, points to a limestone hill in the shape of a cemí
(triangular-shaped votive statue representing a god). The whole complex descends to the clear,
swift waters of the Tanamá River. Caguana is now an open-air museum that draws tens of
thousands of visitors yearly.
Two miles north of the city of Ponce there is the Tibes complex, about seven centuries older than
Caguana. 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 center
to the plazas, there is a simulated Indian village of rounded bohío huts.
Indian building techniques were appropriated by the early jíbaros (peasants) and until circa 1950,
square, hip-roofed bohíos on stilts could be found at every bend in the countryside. Rustic trunks
made the framework, broad intertwined leaves like the banana s and some grasses clad the walls
and the roof thatch was made of a grass with long, lustrous leaves - known as the enea - and which
grows 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 and
hardscrabble way of life that was the stuff of daily rural existence for so long. Easily erectable,
wholly biodegradable, and nearly free, the bohío was a viable solution for landless peasants: if they
had to move, they packed and left the house to return to the soil. Where they moved, they would
find the same building materials all over!
b) - African Influences
From 1520 to 1850 inhabitants of West Africa were dragged involuntarily to the balmy Caribbean
shores to work in agriculture, construction and manual labor. Puerto Rico was no exception: most
of its black population came from an assortment of countries along the Gulf of Guinea E5. They
were diverse their identity was defined by their condition of servitude. They were anyway able to
recover signs of identity. With goatskins on discarded rum barrels, and covert messages of revolt
and conspiracy on body movements, the bomba dance is one of the better-known influences of
Afro-Puerto Ricans. Root crops, bananas, and many dishes are clearly African pig s feet stew,
pigeon peas, mofongo (mashed plantains, in itself an African word), okra, etc. In fact, Puerto
Rican gastronomy is largely shared with the Afro-Caribbean countries, and many concoctions will
be recognizable to natives of other larger or smaller islandsE6.
Though the full form of African building vernacular did not make the Atlantic crossing, some
vestiges diluted with European technique - were retained: these include the use of gable or hip
roofs, compact rectangular shapes of residences, the use of broad verandas for shade and
protection, the inclination to paint and embellish in strong colors, and most strikingly the tendency
to group houses in compounds based on proximity and family links instead of the more
property-limit-influenced regular arrays favored by Europeans. These compound groupings
subsist, appropriately, the northeastern township of Loíza; where over 80% of inhabitants are of
African descent, mostly descendants of free blacks. Though the houses themselves are now the
boxy modern vernacular with some older ones mixed in, several groupings in the Medianías
(middle points), an area of sandy grounds and palm groves bordering the Atlantic coast east of the
town, 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 has
prevented the growth of large compounds though much smaller ones can be found amongst the
former cane fields. In many cases the compounds have had to rescue unclaimed lands alongside
rivers 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. The
emphasis is in Europe, not Spain. As a neglected agricultural backwater, 17th- and 18th-century
freebooters and smugglers from Dutch, Danish, English and French islands would frequent the
island s unguarded Caribbean coast and establish relations with the old estanciero (estate owner)
families. The estancieros farmed family operations with some outside help, cultivating easily
marketable raw materials such as tobacco, ginger, and hides without paying taxes or duties to
Spanish authorities.
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Many of the estancieros were poor emigrants from southern Spain or the Canaries, disinherited
children of impoverished grandees, usually deeply religious in a popular way and with no formal
schooling or culture. Some came as military in transit. All intermingled with the remnants of
aborigines and escaped African slaves, creating the rustic jíbaro (an Indian word that eventually
became synonymous with peasant ). And then some of these jíbaros or emigrants secured
Spanish 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 the
building of the first generation of rural houses. Still, despite neglect and unsympathetic changes, at
least two of these houses stand near the town of San Germán, PR s second-oldest settlement. These
are raised high in hardwood stilts, are roughly square in shape with a squared array of hewn posts
serving as structure. The roof is a solid pyramid of Spanish half-round tiles, still in serviceable
shape. 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 fact
weekend homes for rural agriculturalist dwellers that descended on town to be able to go to church
or to the markets (also generally on Sundays after mass). The town squares were unkempt open
spaces that were used to place market stalls or to stage volunteer militia drills. In them or facing
them would be the Catholic parish church - generally the only building in many towns at least
partly 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 the
function of Casa del Rey ( King's House ), that is, seat of the government's representative, usually
a 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 lowland
valleys. 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 timid
attempts at colonization. Coffee reached PR's shores in 1757 and proved an ideal match with the
rain-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 Rican
sugar exports, and the lack of adequate infrastructure for irrigation and cultivation, had hamstrung
efforts for its development. Even in 1800 sugar production in Puerto Rico was insignificant and
most 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 life
forever. Shorn of most of its empire, Spain tried to make do with the remnants. In PR, this meant
its reinvention as an agricultural colony to provide tropical products to Spain - and North America,
for hard currency. The 1815 Real cédula de gracias (Royal Decree of Grace) established generous
land grants and incentives to moneyed emigrants that came to the island to develop agricultural
estates 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 traders
looking for new investment opportunities, ambitious young Spaniards and other Europeans with no
job prospects in their countriesE8 - all came and set up large estates dedicated mostly for sugarcane
production. Then dozens of sugar mills with their distinctive towers and chimneys, navigating in a
sea of green cane, would rewrite PR's rural landscape. A fresh round of slaves and free laborers
would 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 local
hardwoods and tiles, later of tin as it could be imported cost-effectively. The use of hard wall and
structural materials had a double rationale: the valleys had a dearth of hardwood trees but a surfeit
of good stone and clay; and since part of the sugar making process involved heat steam for the
engines 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 some
places of North-Central and South-eastern Puerto Rico truncated conical towers identical to others
found in nearby islands like St Croix and Antigua stand on windswept elevations. And the
freshly-squeezed guarapo (cane juice) was heated in rows of coppersE10 (pailas), ladled by obliging
slave or free laborers, solidified, dried in large closed warehouses and exported in cone-shaped
loaves, or in barrels, as muscovado for the American and Spanish markets.
Some early central factories were built at this time- also using the
masonry-with-gabled-wood-and-tin-roof system then prevalent. New machinery was brought from
the USA but Puerto Rico-based planters favored mostly British equipment. Well-known Scottish
machine 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 also
American manufacturers like the West Point Foundry in upstate New York, and French ones, like
Caill & Cie. of Paris.
Thirsty sugar cane needed irrigation to be cultivated in the semiarid southern region. Thus, the first
plantations gathered by the region s few permanent rivers. Diversion walls were built inside the
water to channel it to brick channels to the fields. In some places the channels bridge secondary
streambeds, often with the majesty of Roman aqueducts like a fragment of the Río Jacaguas
system in the Luciana estate in Juana Díaz.
Estate houses increased in size and importance. Normally utilitarian though elegant responses to
climate, many were built of wood or mampostería and brick. Hard materials were more common in
the wood-scarce coasts, but in the coffee mountains these buildings became poems to the structural
potential of native hardwoods. As with the former estanciero residences, they were lifted by
columns 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 was
modified for the tropics. This hall became a large living space, often two with a more private and
familiar one on the back (known usually as the antesala or anteroom because it used to be the
access 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 partition
known as a mediopunto ( halfway point ), made with different details of lathed, moulded, or jig
sawed 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 to
the back there is an ell-type extension named the martillo or hammer , for service spaces,
kitchens, storage and occasionally baths.
Verandas as discontinuous extensions of gable roofs were standard-issue on both front and back
sides wraparounds, hip roofs, and continuous roofs over verandas were apparently more of a
Lesser Antillean (or US) influence in the east and southeast. The rear veranda became generally a
gallery for connecting service spaces, and could be partially closed by fixed and operable shutters
in the sun-rich South. Also a distinct component also of probable down-island influence is the
freestanding cookhouses found on some South-eastern estate houses most extant estate house
kitchens in PR are inside the martillo. Baths in estate houses are usually 20th century alterations;
if in any case they were inside they d be placed as far back as possible as the latrines in Lares s
Torres 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 pins
was 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 shipbuilding
were 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 cane
estates these were known as bateyes from the Taíno name for yards; in coffee plantations these
yards would be square or rectangular and made of brick and stone, surfaced with hydraulic plaster.
These were called glacis and would be used for drying coffee beans resting on tarps, unless it
rained. The production and warehousing buildings would also present gabled roofs and solid
post-and-beam work, same as the adjoining planter s houses.
The coffee processing machinery, much of it impressive in its size and inventiveness, was also
mostly built on-site with available quality woods, and much of it has resisted wood-eating pests
long after its abandonment. All this was roofed from the 1850s onward with imported corrugated
metal ( tin ), which for decades was the only nonlocal material used in these structures. By the late
19th century American and Canadian resinous pine was appearing mostly as a cladding material. It
was brought undressed and finished locally.
Now the towns acquired the historic persona that defines them to this day. A complex hierarchy of
agricultural exchange centers intertwined by minimal dirt roads, usually passable only on
horseback, opened the hinterland and mountains to the new investments. Nearly 40 of the 70 towns
in Puerto Rico were established in the 19th century. Export was barely legal most
agriculturalists made revenue by selling directly to the St. Thomas traders, and Charlotte Amalia
City in fact became Puerto Rico s de facto trading center. Doubtlessly, as evidence shows,
architectural influences were also traded between the islands. The use of arched openings in VI
houses, and the use in PR of high hip and half-hip roofs, continuous verandas, and the similarities
in woodwork detailing show the level of architectural exchange between the bustling ports of the
Spanish colony and the Danish enclave.
Rural laborers either lived precariously in straw bohíos scattered amongst the fields or in small
boxlike 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 find
employ. (This has been seen in most Caribbean islands, for example, like the Barbadian chattel
houses). These had minimal architecture: the siding was shiplap and the doors and windows were
made of planks. Furniture was limited to folding cots, hammocks, and possibly a few rustic chairs
and a table. In contrast the hacendado (estate owner) houses exhibited native furniture with woven
cane 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 regular
layout 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 a
radial 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 a
European-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 and
continuous balconies serviced from the inside by several paired doors. Those on each end opened
to the most important bedrooms, and the center doors to the living space frequently the dramatic
medio punto exposed to view by the curious passer-by. The distribution is like of the previously
mentioned estate houses, including the frequent existence of ell-type martillo extensions. A few on
narrow lots will have the living rooms to one side and the bedrooms to the other. To get privacy
these houses are lifted at least 1 m (3 ft) from the street, so both privacy and street borne dust were
controlled. Besides the rest of the house was lifted from the ground to improve ventilation and
avoid vermin. This was done with hardwood or brick-pillar stilts, or with brick or rubble walls. At
the front façade, this elevation was sealed off by a wall, almost always of hard material and
sometimes decorated with mouldings and ventilation holes. In some situations, these bases acquired
considerable height and could become veritable basements. The now-demolished Piazza house in
Yauco had a base of nearly 6 ft (1.8 m) where wine was made with grapes grown on family
property.
Many times around, these houses became the second stories of mixed commercial and residential
structures. The owner habitually resided on top of his business. The lower floor could be of brick,
or mampostería, or in later examples concrete (to fireproof the first level with its combustible
merchandise). The second living floor will usually open into a second-floor balcony overhanging
the public right-of-way. The regular rhythm of lower floor doors and the general symmetry of the
buildings helped facilitate construction and layout of the structures and also provided a clear
facade 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. One
common variation is those houses built out of brick or mampostería with a parapet roof
descending 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 Lorenzo s protected Machín House have
Spanish half-round tile roofs.
Balconies, the visible image of these houses, are quite varied in their treatment. In smaller and
mountain towns, like, for example, San Germán, turned wood posts and balusters are common. In
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regional centers, iron substitutes wood, sometimes reaching a flowery exuberance as in Yauco s
Césari house, also a protected property. (There the balconies were in fact prefabricated in France.)
Mayagüez is defines by numerous brick casas with imposing balconies in brick arches closed off
by iron balustrades. Ponce has much iron balcony work with classical trim. More fanciful
gingerbread is (now rarely) seen in the Southwest region, and also in the Anglo- Franco Nordic
Antillean 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 still
have the label of their manufacturer usually British, but there were also local foundries to meet
demand.
Wood cladding can be quite varied. Clapboards aren t merely the single-round-cut shiplap; some
can have quite complex beaded or variable-width profiles. As told previously, wood was shipped in
bruto to the island and local sawmills or wood traders would profile cladding planks to order. Until
the last quarter of the 19th century, structural wood was normally native hardwood, but the
growing scarcity of this material would make imported posts and beams a niche. It is also known
that 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 not
the norm everywhere, for example in Lares, two-thirds of the downtown was made out of wood
until 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 the
structures in San Juan, with regularly spaced double doors of solid wood planks or metal plate, but
the proportions, detailing and roofs were different. Many had geometric or neoclassical details
sometimes with some flair, and roofs were frequently of wood frame. On the upper portions of the
wall, yeux-de- ufE11, small ventilating holes often detailed with mouldings and decoration, helped
move stale air out of the warehouses. Imported cast-iron internal columns were used in some of the
larger buildings, and it is known that the Mayagüez 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 in
the same manner of building, limited processing facilities were constructed in the major trading
centers. Coffee roasting plants existed near harbors; however, sugar was not further refined but
shipped as muscovado brown outside the island where European or American refiners would
whiten 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. (And
some of the molasses was used for building, craftsmen found out its superior quality as a cheap,
easy-to-blend consolidator for mortars or mampostería, 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 town
square, 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 miniaturised
versions of the typical urban side-gable houses, one or two rooms wide with a generally
rectangular plan. Sometimes they were so narrow that the shotgun arrangement (rooms linked
enfilade 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 same
climate 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 of bohíos could be found where the partially employed occasional
and 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 urban
zones) and the women could do household jobs for the ladies at the town houses. There were cases
in the larger towns where adjoining agricultural estates were subdivided for urban growth several
estate houses in Ponce are seen imbricated within the urban fabric. There was no concept of
establishing 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 or
extensions to the towns were platted by the city on former farms. They may even have, as in Juana
Díaz, Lajas and Yauco, their own squares supplementing the older plaza. The practice of growing
towns by addition of new blocks, continuing the grid layout, persisted until practically 1948 when
the first new post-war subdivisions were constructed on the old San Patricio farm southwest of San
Juan. From then, it s a wholly different story...
Traditional landmark and civic buildings generally reflected all these years an extension of civil
building traditions, possibly with better quality of the commanding authorities had resources to
build well. The Catholic parish churches, lying on or in front of the squares, show different
solutions to the problem of congregating large numbers of people. Mostly built out of
mampostería, many use wide bullet wood-beam (ausubo) roofs, in some cases extending interior
spaces by employing 3-nave layouts. There are also impressive vaulted spaces in others. Poorer
parishes 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 were
in front of, or close to the town squares. These were of conventional construction, their civic
function 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 the
overhangs of second story balconies.) The squares as such were multifunctional and in many towns
fully open spaces. The volunteer militias would drill here, and they were also the venue of weekly
markets for produce and consumer goods. In the cooler nights, they would be used for socializing
in promenades where the dainty ladies of the town would march one way and the bachelor
gentlemen the other way. In some coffee towns the plazas doubled as drying floors for coffee
beans! The one in Isabel Segunda (Vieques Island) has a huge cistern beneath to store water for the
citizens of this riverless island. By the 1880s and later, some civic amenities sprouted up like
fountains, bandstands and benches. Trees were added to define small park like spaces. The best
kept example of these early squares is the one at Humacao, which acquired its present
configuration before 1920 and it presents two portions: an open esplanade in front of the
quasi-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 after
intense rains) and at a time human threats, especially privateers and foreign invaders. Even when
after 1820 Caribbean territorial claims were largely settled, latent instability in Europe made
colonial authorities quite wary. Many larger towns had nearby large stone forts near the entrance
to 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 rectangular
one-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 satellite
harbor settlement connected by a road. Ponce is located 3 km (1.85 miles) inland and Mayagüez
about 2 km (1.25 miles). Both of these cities developed separate harbor settlements usually known
as Playa ( Beach ), with large 1-or 2-story warehouse buildings made of fireproof brick, stone or
rubble. These were the economic hearts of the cities: cane, coffee and other agricultural export
goods were dispatched in exchange for imported goods like manufactures, equipment, clothing, and
many foodstuffs not produced locally. Passengers bound either for another Puerto Rican
harborside town, or for other Caribbean, European and American destinations, also sought board
on ships.
The cavernous warehouses would have massive hard-material walls on the outside, inside there d
be 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 large
wooden 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- uf proliferated and decorated them.
Houses of all kinds for people linked to the harbor trades would sprout close to the warehouse
districts. These were of an architecture similar to the houses in town but usually wood was the
prevalent building material here.
One of these harborside towns, Arroyo in the southeast, separated from its mother town
Guayama in 1855. As a gateway to the Lesser Antilles, especially St Thomas, during the second
half of the 19th century it evolved from a harborside settlement, like the one described above, into
a peculiar charming small city with substantial houses with American, Anglo- and
Franco-Antillean influences, some still standing with some criolla houses also thrown in. These
houses 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 rich
sugarcane estates bolstered the town s wealth. Chroniclers remarked that Arroyo was a sort of
Little Paris where the planters cruised on their carriages while the descendants of black slaves
toiled the cane fields. The Lind family s Enriqueta estate, where Samuel Morse did the first
experiment with the telegraph outside America, is today an exuberant overgrown ruin 2 miles (3
km) to the northeast. A one-story, 3-opening Lind warehouse, with yeux-de- uf and curiously
wavy 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 as
Lafayette honoring the French (actually Corsican) blood of its founders. Lafayette in the early
1900s threaded a railroad spur paralleling Morse St. up to the docks, and Arroyo s importance as
a 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 of
this system and some remnants of Lafayette s former prosperity still lie scattered around this
picturesque settlement.
There were several second-order harbor settlements like those at Cabo Rojo and Fajardo that were
mainly 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 day s catch would be sorted and prepared for selling in
the nearby main towns.
Two major cities San Juan (previously described) and Aguadilla on the northwest were directly
on the waterfront. Aguadilla occupies a very narrow coastal shelf hemmed in by large calcareous
hills riddled with sinkholes and caves. Aguadilla s elongated blocks run north to south, and upon
them, a mixture of brick, concrete and wood buildings mostly made out in a simple vernacular
with geometric detailing (but sometimes very ornamented on the inside) holds fast to the
pressures of development and severe neglect. In the north side of town there is a large formal park
where a spring (ojo de agua) pours water forth. The seaside street used to be lined by large
warehouses, but ill-advised urban renewal schemes have obliterated them and their potential for
civic and commercial use.
In many other towns building types, even when founded structurally on the vernacular explained
previously, would take specific variations given cultural influences by emigrant groups. Yauco s
Corsicans would prefer ornate neoclassic detailing, while Ponce would reflect variations from
Catalan-inspired modernisme, a French penchant for overly ornate fronts, or Anglo-Caribbean hip
roofs 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 or
Danish islands (but, unfortunately, nearly all lost by now). Isabel Segunda in Vieques Island is a
showcase for a small number of remaining houses and buildings some protected - that reveal a
definite influence from the nearly islands. The hip roofs of many have the precise skill of a
shipwright s work.
Transportation infrastructure was very crude until the early 1800s, limited to a few short
acceptable roads with a couple of bridges of wood or masonry close to San Juan. Elsewhere the
roads were of dirt - narrow, abrupt and strewn with puddles, rocks, and cracks. In some
agricultural zones some stretches would be stabilized with rocks, limestone or brick. Through the
limestone hills of the north, however, some narrow horse-and-mule paths are impressively cut
directly 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 from
1870 onward, different regions. The first interurban road, the Central Highway (124 km), was
begun in 1875 and finished in 1886 (only missing one bridge). It runs between San Juan and
Ponce, winding itself through the mountainous interior up to 2500 ft at times. This road, plus other
segments elsewhere, totalled no more than 350 km by 1898. The rivers originally were crossed by
fording them or crude wooden ferry bargesE13, later on wooden bridges would be built. Iron bridges
were first brought to cross the Ponce Ponce harbor road in the 1870s, later on other similar
bridges would be made on the Central Highway and other pre-1898 stretches. These box- or lattice
side frame bridges were made in France or Belgium; some of these are still in service. The
macadamized surface was much better than what was used before, but didn t take kindly to
overloaded ox carts loaded with sugar or rum barrels. To facilitate repair, road keeper s houses
generous rectangular (with small extensions for kitchen and baths) azotea-roofed buildings of
traditional masonry construction, built of sometimes-exposed (a novelty) brick or mampostería,
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 wayward
drivers 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 travel
hazardous by road. It was preferable to use an interurban steamer that covered PR s major
harbors. Though there were already substantial wharves and (wooden) docks in San Juan, other
destinations had to use tenders to embark and disembark. The concomitant growth of the
import-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 a
14-lighthouse system around the island beginning in the 1880s. Eleven of these lighthouses were
rectangular, 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 Eiffel
workshop; the H-plan one in remote Culebrita Island; and the one integrated with El Morro fortress
in San Juan. As with the road keeper houses, sometimes the rubble or brickwork was left exposed.
Inside were the keeper s quarters and the tower could be climbed through steel spiral staircases
without stepping outside, an advantage in the frequent foul weather seen during the hurricane
season .
Between 1892 and 1908 a 260-km passenger railroad was built along the north, west and
southwest 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 passengers
until October 1953, and until 1957 for freight. It has left a legacy of remains like: traces of
rights-of-way through remote passages; steel and concrete bridges - only a very few extant; three
concrete-lined tunnels: two in the Guajataca Valley between Quebradillas and Isabela in the
northwest, another in the Cabo Rojo countryside; and about a dozen hip- or flat-roofed concrete
wall stations, most of them waiting for somebody to rescue them. San Juan s dazzling 1912
French-Renaissance heap of a terminal was razed in the late 1960s. And save for a single steam
locomotive with a tender and a couple of cars, rusting away in the Camuy Caves Park, all the
rolling stock was sold abroad or destroyed.
6. Twentieth-Century historic architecture
After the momentous change in sovereignty caused by the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico s
Spanish-speaking, agrarian society was in the hands of a culturally and linguistically foreign
entity. The US government and capital flooded the island with infrastructure that converted
Borinquen into a military bastion for modern warfare - and a vast sugar latifundium. Cane shot up
the slopes and was cultivated even in highland towns like Adjuntas and Jayuya. Harbors and roads
were vastly improved while the carless peasants looked in amazement. Two years of direct military
occupation (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 sugar
operations 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 and
these are inactive pending resolution of ownership issues with the government.
Most central factories were massive buildings constructed in steel and the newly introduced
concrete, with parts in more traditional brick techniques. Heat from boilers, used for the clarifying
and 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 the
lowland 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 the
Indian word for outside yard . Three settlements became veritable self-contained towns: Central
Fajardo (notwithstanding its proximity to Fajardo City), Ensenada in Guánica municipality, and
Aguirre in Salinas municipality. The first one has been partially rehabbed as a posh gated
subdivision and another part is a campus of a private university; the second is quite mutilated and
may lose the remains of the mill if a mega-hotel project is proposed in the site; only Aguirre retains
a 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 recognisable

by their netting-enclosed verandas. They do retain many tropic-adequate response like the lifting of
the floor on stilts, relatively high ceilings, and the frequent use of wind-resistant hip roofs. Many
were 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 houses
shared 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 estate
houses of the preceding era with generous livable verandas and accesory buildings for garages and
domestic service. There were simpler, smaller and narrower houses in smaller lots for technicians
and 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 for
the ordinary sugarmill maintenance workers, rectangular, balconyless boxes on stilts, that in fact
could be transported as they could be given as a retirement benefit to their occupants. These
weren t too different from those used by the field workers. At least, however, like other company
town 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 workers
that had their homes serviced. There was an annual closed-tarp fumigation for each house and
every three years the structure would be revised and termite-ridden or otherwise unserviceable
parts 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: the
lower-tier houses would be painted gray in Aguirre and yellow-ochre in Ensenada. Middle and
upper staff would get white clapboard houses. Unfortunately, when these corporations changed
hands 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 including
several 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 vast
irrigation systems developed before 1915 and that serve hundreds of square miles in Southern PR
have scarcely been researched, they are a major component of the region s cultural landscape, not
to mention their continuing use for irrigating other crops like vegetables, and for supplying water
to some communities and industries along the way. The irrigation dams at Santa Isabel, Guayabal
in Juana Díaz, and the earthwork dike in Patillas are integral parts of this system.
With the availability of relatively cheap concrete and importation of American lumber, domestic
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and commercial buildings began a transformation. Commercial structures in towns followed the
traditional model of multiple-door façades with parapet walls, but the thinner walls gave them
away. Concrete was also favored for stilts and pilings even if the superstructure of houses was
wooden.
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 dwellings
with rectangular floor plans, low gable or hip roofs, concrete balconies and sometimes walls and
floors, though most were clapboard-sided with plank flooring except in the balconies. These houses
not only appeared in towns and as modern homes in plantations, but many were built as
weekend-retreat villas. Car-accessible places like Aibonito, Barranquitas and the Jájome sector
south 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 the
all-reinforced-concrete era of the 1950s, many of the newfangled houses built from 1910 used a
long front-to-back corridor to link rooms. It was frequent to place the dining room and kitchen in
the back. Many of these houses were set back from the street with front yards of varying
dimensions. Erecting tall towerlike extensions in the back expanded others.
Though apparent austerity and geometricity was the apparent rule in these houses, the use of wide
windows with fixed colored-glass geometric inserts and pieces of turned or shaped wood actually
gave many of them great elegance. Climatic and technical lessons were not lost: they were lifted
from the ground and the ceilings maintained a comfortable height, albeit not as high as in the
Spanish era. Unfortunately by the 1930s as a weight-saving measure much lumber to build these
houses was dry and thus susceptible to fast termite infestation. Much of the later wood frame
houses (1930 to 1960) have been demolished and substituted for concrete for this reason. During
this period, both as new construction and retrofits to existing work, pressed cement hydraulic tiles
with complex, multicolored geometric and floral patterns became very popular. This has been a
very hardy flooring system: 80-year-old tiles have been reconditioned to near-new state, even in
long-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 with
the same technique. Though up to 1915 brick was commonly used, later on a large quantity of
concrete structures with tin or flat parapet roofs became institutional foci of everyday life.
Especially schools vehicles of an intense though failed attempt at Anglification and
Americanisation of boricua life were erected usually on the outskirts of towns in watered down
Neoclassical or Spanish Revival. A spate of intense civic building surged in the 1930s with
post-Depression government subsidies, replacing older venues wrecked in the violent hurricane of
1928. The same situation occurred with private institutions like churches, Catholic and now also
Protestant.
American hegemony introduced Puerto Rican architecture to swift transformations. Metric

building, already the norm by 1900, backtracked into the archaic Anglo-Saxon foot and inch
system. US pattern books and standards were circulated amongst architects, civil engineers (the de
facto architects outside the major cities) and contractors. Stateside training by either going there or
by 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 à la Bauhaus-De Stijl were unthinkable in this colonial
contextE16. Bungalow, neoclassic and later on Spanish revival actually a combination of
Moorish-romantic and American-Southwest mission vocabularies - became defining styles in
residential 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 institutional
buildings, also planner of the UPR Río Piedras campus and chief architect of the neoclassical State
Capitol. 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 would
work largely in the matured Spanish Revival and also did Art Deco work, nearly reaching early
Modernism before dying in an air accident in 1937.
c) Manuel V. Doménech, who studied engineering in Pennsylvania, designed great Neoclassical

heaps like the Armstrong House (1899) facing Ponce s cathedral. This house has several building
innovations like the use of a brick vault on steel beam structure and a sophisticated
ceiling-ventilation system. In the early American régime Domenech would head public-works
efforts 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 20th
century.
e) Martínez & Lázaro, trained in Venezuela with Beaux-Arts fundamentals. Executors of many
institutional and private projects in evolved Beaux-Arts and French Romantic styles between
1910-1930.
f) Pedro Méndez, possible Puerto Rico s finest Art Deco architect. His masterworks are the actual
façade of the old Ponce marketplace and the protected Miami apartments in San Juan s Condado
district. He also built several movie theatres.
g) Antonín Necho[j]doma, a Czech trained in the US who evolved from the late Arts-and-Crafts
bungalow style and historicism to Wrightian prairie-school forms; by his death in 1928 he was
beginning to show evolution into a more tropical, idiosyncratic style. His work was split between
large residences and institutional buildings for government and churches. uvre by him includes
houses like the restored Roig house in Humacao, a dead ringer for a Wright design (minus the
chimney, redundant in the tropics); schools with characteristic band windows and geometric
glass-inlay details, and the English Gothic style Methodist temples.
h) Francisco Porrata-Doria, another Ponce native whose long career would span from academic
neoclassicism (the banks at Ponce, 1924-27) to the exuberant eclecticism in the
hurricane-replacement parish churches in Ponce Diocese in the 1930s, art deco, early Modern
Movement and even neocolonial pastiche, a mindset akin to the much-later Postmodern school.
E16
E17
2003
19
i) Francisco Valines, mostly influenced by Romantic and Arts-and-Crafts design. A major player
in early-20th-century residential architecture, also credited with the implementation and detailing
of Bennett, Parsons and Frost s scheme for the Parque Muñoz Rivera (1920).
j) Alfredo Wiechers, the Ponce-born son of a German immigrant, who studied in Paris and later
practising 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 traditional
techniques to a developed new conscience of space and detailing.
As expounded before, town planning followed by most part the extension of gridded plats began in
the Spanish period. Not all though: Aguirre company town in Salinas (since 1900) was planned on
Picturesque and garden-city schemes, while Neoclassical axiality defined the main quadrangle at
the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. Santurce, San Juan s main suburb, was to be built as
a grid influenced by the ocean to the north; bays and lagoons to the east and west; and the
mangrove-studded Martín Peña Channel to the south. This grid only was realised at some areas
like 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 done
by placing streets in the midpoint of the road frontage of the small farms that historically belonged
to the area s ancestral free-black population, snapped up from the 1890s by savvy speculators.
Small rectangular lots were platted and soon bungalow- and châlet-type houses filled them. Later
larger commercial buildings rose on the road frontage, movie palaces for the increasing population
of the area (further increased with enormous, unsanitary channelside slums), and an ephemeral
business center in the 1950s and 60s.
7. Current problems
After the 1930s worldwide economic cataclysm, things would change in Puerto Rico for the
prelude to Modernism. By the 1940s experimental Minimalist concrete boxes, designed by a
government 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 middle
class, extenden from 1946 to the early 1970s. A new crop of architects serviced the increased
process 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 its
side . By 1950 they had drawn plans for the minimalist, somewhat Corbusian Supreme Court. By
the century s halfway point, their style was acceptable as an image of the new modernisation and
several important institutional and residential commissions followed.
Other major player at this time was Heinrich (Henry) Klumb, a native of Cologne (Germany) and
also 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 commissions
until the recent appearance of Ken Yeang s bioclimatic skyscrapers . He also had a diverse
practice, but his recognised masterworks are the buildings made for the University of Puerto Rico
in Río Piedras, set in parklike settings outside and in contrast to the main neoclassical quad. These
include the Museum, the Library, several classroom buildings, student and faculty residences, the
Student Union and the Faculty Club (this much altered to accommodate the present School of
Architecture, may be taken to its original shape once the School moves to new quarters). Klumb
also did houses, office buildings, apartments, and even a shopping mall in Bayamón, a suburb 8
miles (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 in
Puerto Rican soil.
2003
20
Outside architects also played a reduced, though significant role. Edward Larrabee Barnes s El
Monte apartments (1963) two curving 16-story strips outside Río Piedras - are considered to this
day a model of reconciliation between collective housing, the provision of social space, and the
demands of a tropical climate. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was the author of the 15-story 1966
Chase Manhattan Bank Building (now BBVA) in the Hato Rey business sector, facing T&F s
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 minimises
the hotter, sunnier southern exposure.
Though scientific planning principles were implemented by the establishment of a Planning

Board in 1942, population growth, the decline of agriculture, a sharp increase on consumer
spending, and a mindless modernisation of much physical and intangible aspects of culture and
technology, have outstripped this Board s ability to plan . PR has over half of all automobiles in
the insular Caribbean, which hardly fit its highways, streets and roads. Car-dependent suburbs and
shopping complexes, many made in spec builders utilitarian design, fill the landscape of old cane
estates and dairy pastures. Since the year 1949, when the old San Patricio farm south of San Juan
Bay 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 Puerto
Rico was sealed and destined to become a tropical travesty of American edge-city anomie. Only
now the more perceptive professionals are searching for solutions that may recover, among other
elements, the lessons of the past, without a nostalgic return to what is already obsolete. But its
conservation is an imperative as it gives an unavoidable reference that can be a beacon for
intelligent spacemaking in the future.
January 24, 2003 / revised American version July 2004
jo
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 in
mortars. This is more common where the raw material is readily available (cane plantations or dry zones
in the southwest quadrant of Puerto Rico). Source: information on author s personal records and
correspondence.
(endnote 2) Spanish names: cedro, capá blanco, capá prieto and algarrobo, respectively. Biological
names in the same order: Cedrela odorata, Petitia domingensis, Cordia alliodora, and Hymanæa
courbaril. LITTLE, Elbert ; WADSWORTH, Frank H.; and MARRERO, José, Arboles comunes de
Puerto Rico e Islas Vírgenes, San Juan: University of Puerto Rico, 1967, pp. 217,308, 627, and 648.
(endnote 3) Spanish ausubo, biological name Manilkara bidentata or Manilkara balata. Ibid., p. 593.
(endnote 4) Curiously, this tree s biological name is not lignumvitæ, but rather Guaiacum officinale, in
other words, a derivation of the aboriginal word used in Spanish and French (gaïac). Ibid., p. 264.
(endnote 5) There was no discernible national or tribal origin in Puerto Rican slaves, unlike in Cuba
where 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 migrated
to Puerto Rico, with an emphasis on language, see ALVAREZ NAZARIO, Manuel: El elemento
afronegroide en el español de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1982, chapters
1 and 2. Another historical study of note is SUED BADILLO, Jalil with LOPEZ CANTOS, Angel: Puerto
2003
21
Rico Negro. San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1986.
(endnote 6) For example, PR s gandures (pigeon peas) are a staple in Barbados, while Antiguans may
eat white rice with red peas , exactly the PR arroz 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 carne
mechada, 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 in
other islands and curry is not used (Indian immigration here was negligible), but fruits and vegetables are
widely shared, not to mention PR s highly rated coffee and liquors. A recent, good reference on
Afro-Puerto Rican gastronomy (from the Loíza area) is: RIVERA RODRIGUEZ, Carmen Lydia: Holy
Broth / Caldo Santo, San Juan, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña Promoción Cultural, 2003.
(endnote 7) Some of these chroniclers were the late 18th-century Benedictine friar Íñigo Abbad y
Lasierra, Alexander O Reilly, an Irishman in the service of Spain at that time; and there are several 1823
drawings (the text of which they were part was never found) by a French naturalist, Auguste Plée,
archived in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. See: ABBAD Y LASIERRA, Íñigo, Historia natural,
civil y geográfica de la isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (with endnotes by chapter by José
Julián ACOSTA Y CALBO and a foreword by Gervasio GARCIA). Madrid, Doce Calles, 2002. Part of
the O Reilly document is in: TAPIA Y RIVERA, Alejandro, Biblioteca Histórica de Puerto Rico, San
Juan, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1970. The Plée illustrations have been reproduced on the
Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña s magazine.
(endnote 8) These emigrant investors had to be Catholics. This didn't faze natives of part- or fully
Protestant countries like Britain, Denmark, Germany or the Netherlands. They favoured conversion of
their ancestral beliefs to be able to secure their investments. Cf. ACOSTA Y CALBO, José Julián, third
endnote 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 suggested
are MORENO FRAGINALS, Manuel: El Ingenio, complejo económico social cubano del azúcar.
Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 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 information
applies 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. Croix
Landmarks Society, 1966.
(endnote 10) A copper is, 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 juice
in preparation for crystallization. Frequently numbers or specific names were assigned to the different coppers
used in an array for sugar clarifying. The three-to-seven copper arrays were set over a low or sunken
vaulted brick structure with a ventilating, tapered square-section chimney on one end. On the other end
heat was applied by burning wood, charcoal or bagasse. The smaller copper where the sugar began to
crystallize was known as a teache or tacho in Spanish. The whole single-furnace copper-based sugar
clarifying system was called in Puerto Rico, curiously, a tren jamaiquino or Jamaican Train . There was
also the archaic tren español or Spanish Train in which each copper was individually heated. A typical
damning 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 of paila. See LEWISOHN, F. op.cit., and
BROWN-CAMPOS, Richard and VAZQUEZ SOTILLO, Nelly, La influencia de la mecanización en las
haciendas azucareras de Puerto Rico en el siglo xix. Mayagüez, P.R., Richard Brown-Campos, n.d.
(endnote 11) French word, literally ox eyes . The singular term is il-de- uf. In Spanish the words
ojo(s) de buey are used. A Latin synonym also used in English is oculus (plural oculi), though it refers
mostly 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
2003
22
Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 2000. It has been, however, exceedingly hard to obtain a copy so it is only
mentioned as it has not been perused or reviewed. Also, the Linds had a substantial house in Charlotte
Amalie (St Thomas) in Nørregade, 6, in the Kongens Kvarter. It is now Bethania , the meetinghouse for
the adjacent Frederik Lutheran Church. Note that modern St. Thomians usually write the street name as
Norre Gade in two words and without the slash in the Danish letter ø. GJESSING, Frederik and
MACLEAN, William: Historic Buildings of St. Thomas and St. John. London-Basingstoke: Macmillan
Education Ltd., 1987, pp. 67-69.
(endnote 13) The last ferry-barge (ancón) was operated over the Río Grande de Loíza next to Loíza
town up to 1980. Its final incarnation was made in steel plate with wood reinforcement and was moved by
hand pulling it on a cable stayed on both banks of the river. Source: author s personal information and
recollections.
(endnote 14) Thirteen of these lighthouses still stand the one at Rincón was wrecked in the 1918
earthquake and what remained disappeared in the hurricanes of 1928 and 1932. A concrete tower was
built in 1935 in their place. Adjacent there was a wood frame keeper s house, since disappeared. Cf.
NISTAL MORET, Benjamin: Thematic Nomination: Lighthouses of Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto Rico
State Historic Preservation Office, 1984 (unpublished).
(endnote 15) Several well-known architects up to 1930 studied architecture by correspondence, such as
the Cayey painter Ramón Frade, who built extensively there; and another well known residential and
institutional architect like Francisco Valines (Frenchman s House in Vieques, Muñoz Rivera Park in San
Juan). About Frade, see: DELGADO MERCADO, Osiris: Ramón Frade León, pintor puertorriqueño
(1875-1954). San Juan, Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y del Caribe, and the Ramón Frade
(RFr) collection in the University of Puerto Rico s Architecture and Building Archives (aacupr).
(endnote 16) This doesn t mean necessarily that there was absolute conformity to the norm of tradition
or emulation of known American models. Buildings inspired by Wright, the Greene Brothers, the
Neoclassicists and the Arts and Crafters exist; but there were attempts at ruptures to create a more
idiosyncratic type of building. Several of the Wiechers buildings in Ponce (1910s) and Nechodoma s
Cott-Larrauri house in Coamo (1926) are examples of new syntheses pointing to specifically Puerto Rican
solutions. On Nechodoma see MARVEL, Thomas S., Antonin Nechodoma: The Prairie School in the
Caribbean, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1986; and on Wiechers: RIGAU, Jorge: Puerto Rico
1900, New York, Rizzoli, 1993, pp.107-114.
(endnote 17) Brevity doesn t permit the author at this time to elaborate on this latter style. Critical
views 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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THE ESSENCE OF PUERTO RICAN HISTORIC

2. Outside San Juan: Archidiversity

4. Consolidation of agricultural towns

5. Urban variants, harbor settlements and transportation

6. Twentieth-Century historic architecture

20th-century sugar mill houses are clapboard-on-imported-pine constructions usually recognisable

American hegemony introduced Puerto Rican architecture to swift transformations. Metric

c) Manuel V. Doménech, who studied engineering in Pennsylvania, designed great Neoclassical

d) Adrian Finlayson, an American in government service, steeped in institutional Neoclassicism,

Though scientific planning principles were implemented by the establishment of a Planning

January 24, 2003 / revised American version July 2004

THE ESSENCE OF PUERTO RICAN HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE - ENDNOTES

Rico Negro. San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1986.

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