MARK LYNDERSAY
Brian Lewis's visual survey of Port of Spain gets off to a stumbling start with a foreword by mayor Joel Martinez that is startling in its cluelessness.
Martinez considers a city of "structures which symbolise power and force " alongside "quaint gingerbread homes," both of which "transform into a Carnival spectacle at the drop of a hat."
It’s probably unfair to pillory the mayor, who might have been saddled with a metaphor-prone speechwriter, but it's long been a city management strategy to laud its beauty spots while stepping gingerly over its effluvium.
While the book, Port of Spain: An Architectural Record, is long on words, offering up a diversity of opinions and perspectives on Port of Spain's history and potential, it is the photographs that sit front and centre as a document, narrating a history of development and aesthetic conflict.
[caption id="attachment_928371" align="alignnone" width="812"] Architect and photographer Brian Lewis. - Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
The photography of the book is Lewis's usual considered, architecturally correct work, carefully timed for optimum light on the structures’ facades. Faced with subject matter that might be considered occasionally dreary, he declines dramatic angles and considers it with a relentless perspective: that of a viewer facing the building from across the street.
There are few angles on these structures, and those that exist emphasise some aspect of the subject building that isn't immediately clear from that direct, face-on contemplation.
Asked about these challenges, Lewis responded: "These images are records, not heroic architectural photographs.
[caption id="attachment_928370" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Port of Spain typologies: These graphics created for the book describe the use of land
throughout Port of Spain. -[/caption]
"Yes, hedges, walls, cars, wires were a constant challenge – some districts were more challenging than others – Belmont for cars, St Clair for walls.”
This assembly of buildings gathers the many architectural designs that make up Port of Spain, from those crafted through historical inspiration and religious aspiration to works that can only be described as the result of design whimsy. The brutalist and the ornate sit alongside each other cheerfully, every creed of architectural design finding an equal, if not always harmonious place.
Of the houses that are recognisable as Port of Spain buildings of ancestral provenance, some are dramatic commercial refurbishments that offer a nod to their original design concept; others are in marginally contained disrepair, their history showing in rotting wood and rusting galvanise.
One quaint and well-maintained gingerbread building is bracketed between a faux modernist blue wall and the insistent echo of modernist architecture as social aspiration as a tower of One Woodbrook Place looms like a photobomber behind it.
In another image, an ageing wooden house sits on fl
