• 1 The term “Caribbean” includes Guyana and British Guiana. As a mainland country within the Caribbea (...)

1Charles Eric Wilkinson (fig. 1) was an architect-builder involved in major building and infrastructure projects in British Guiana from the 1930s to the 1970s. He is also my grandfather. In the era when he began his building practice, British Guiana was still a colony of England, and would remain so until 1966, when British Guiana became a republic renamed Guyana. In 1954, during the colonial period, Wilkinson undertook the construction of a concrete house that has become a point of reference and source of family pride in his design and construction abilities. That house provides the axis for my own exploration about architectural design in former British colonies, and the extent to which the documentation of Caribbean architectural heritage considers the contributions of black builders like Wilkinson. The work of these building professionals ranges from colonial development work to ambitious personal projects. While architectural historians have increasingly explored colonial impacts and legacies, there are still voids in both what we know and where we know. Wilkinson’s example reveals the multiple architectural genealogies operating in settings like British Guiana. As the only English-speaking country in South America, it becomes peripheral even within architectural studies focused on Latin America and the Caribbean.1

• 2 Robert Home, “Knowledge Networks and Postcolonial Careering: David Oakley (1927–2003),” ABE Journa (...)
• 3 Itohan Osayimwese, “Caribbean Architectures from Emancipation to World Heritage,” panel for Societ (...)
• 4 Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2012.

2In the 1940s, the British government sent architects to the Caribbean, as well as to Africa and Asia, with the goal of attending to building needs in the British colonies. Robert Home has noted that for these architect-planners, “[t]he Caribbean was seen as a test-bed for colonial development initiatives” and pilot projects.2 Scholar Itohan Osayimwese writes that within Caribbean architectural history, “[t]he circulation of development experts from the erstwhile metropole in the 1940s and the tropical vernaculars they developed is yet to be fully understood.”3 To better understand the engagement between the colonial architectural teams dispatched to work in the British Caribbean and the native builders they encountered, I draw from archives at home and abroad to illuminate discrepancies and characterizations of the era. In recovering the perspectives of local architect-builders like Wilkinson, my work seeks to bring to light what writer Kevin Young has called the “shadow book”; that is, the parallel or alternative universe of facts relevant to a dominating narrative.4 In providing space for the testimony of the unheard, we can arrive at a more accurate assessment and interpretation of this complicated era.

• 5 John Michael Vlach, By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife, Charlottesville (...)
• 6 Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson (eds.), Race and Modern Architecture: A Crit (...)

4The official archives and the collection of documents, images, and interviews compiled from my family members reveal not only the social and historical context in which my grandfather lived and worked as an architect-builder, but also the machinations of history in which one story becomes the national narrative and another is relegated to “the shadow book.” The materials in my family’s possession, and now my own, were this shadow book, haunting the National Archives in Guyana and England. As such, my methodology involves retrieving a multiplicity of source material, including oral history and family stories. Just as scholar John Michael Vlach advocated for “written documents, oral testimony, and buildings and building sites”5 to be used in recovering the histories of black builders in the American South, I employ a similar array of sources in examining the architectural heritage in Guyana, South America. I follow the lines of critical inquiry posed in the recent volume Race and Modern Architecture, edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, which explores how urbanism, nationalism, and colonialism intersect with race and representation.6 My writing takes inspiration from black women scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies and bell hooks, who have included their own voices as witness or expert in their texts, making explicit the subjectivity and auto-ethnography we all bring as narrators.

• 7 On the early era of “self-help,” see Richard Harris, “The Silence of the Experts: ‘Aided Self-Help (...)
• 8 The architectural heritage of Guyana is informed by Dutch, British, Portuguese, African, and Ameri (...)
• 9 Georgetown (Guyana), National Archives of Guyana, Folder on Housing, Housing Report, circa 1981. C (...)

5A further context for my investigation is the backdrop of modernism at mid-century and the rise of foreign-aided building schemes across the Caribbean.7 In locales like Guyana (British Guiana), transnational aesthetic influences, overseas investments, and local self-help comingle in the 1950s. Importantly, 1954 is the year that Wilkinson endeavoured to build a concrete house for his family in a community where all the other homes were constructed of wood, with several on stilts.8 His undertaking coincided with the beginning of a national self-build campaign, a government-directed enterprise that was very distinct from Wilkinson’s passion project. British Guiana spent $15 million [Guyana or British West Indies dollars] on 3,500 prefabricated houses from 1954 to 1959,9 involving assistance from both British and U.S. architects. Howard Mackey, a Black American professor at Howard University, was on a team contributing to the “Aided Self-Help” project. Mackey’s status as an outsider expert complicates ideas about “experts,” and introduces provocative questions about diasporic connections that may hide under the guise of foreign aid. What changes when the expertise is black American, instead of white English? In triangulating the discussion of architectural aid and influence to encompass England, Guyana, and the United States, my analysis moves toward a more holistic and realistic assessment of the era. The racial dynamics at play in creating British Guiana’s archival records and in documenting Guyana’s architectural history beyond its colonial period makes the experiences of individuals like Wilkinson invisible, illegible, and largely inaccessible. The absence of their names and identities in historical documents is a function of imperialistic and paternalistic frameworks that relegated non-whites to the shadows. Thus, my work aims to position the voices, practices, and motivations of black and brown builders at the center of the architectural heritage of Guyana and the Anglophone Caribbean. A goal of this approach is to expand the scholarly conversation by documenting histories that had not been recorded and preserved in official repositories. Instead of exploring the era and the region through the broad category of “tropical architecture” and its related colonial lens, scholars drawing upon today’s decolonial frameworks might survey instances of self-help and self-sufficiency before countries were granted “independence.”

• 10 David Morton, The Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambiqu (...)

7And finally, the type of concrete home examined in this study does not figure prominently in the scholarly literature of architectural history or historic preservation, though some works such as David Morton’s Age of Concrete poignantly address “ordinary homebuilders.”10 My writing has been a way to do the work of intellectual preservation that is missing in the scholarship, and to critique the historic preservation that is missing for the era.

• 11 Michelle Joan Wilkinson, “V is for Veranda: ‘Architecting’ in the Americas,” (paper presented at S (...)

8This inquiry takes up competing, contrasting, intersecting, and overlapping ideas. National Archives vs Family Records. Tropical vs Caribbean. Expert Architects vs Skilled Craftsmen. Foreign Aid vs Self-Help. Concrete vs Wood. These are not just juxtapositions, but keywords that provide clues to the experience of architecting while black in British Guiana. In 2013, I defined “architecting as an expressive practice of designing and making informed by the broader contexts of a living culture, and not confined solely to the licensing conferred by architectural schools and examinations.”11 Considering Wilkinson’s architecting as a mode of (shadow) work—work done in the shadows of professional spotlights—complicates ideas about training and expertise, and provides a way forward to examine how racial dynamics and colonial processes shape the architectural expression and legacy of a black Guyanese builder.

• 15 Thomas C. Hubka, “Just Folks Designing: Vernacular Designers and the Generation of Form,” in Dell (...)
• 16 Ibid. p. 28.
• 17 Ibid.

10Wilkinson gained expertise through both architectural training in his community and knowledge acquired through specialized coursework. In some respects, Wilkinson began like the builders Thomas Hubka writes about in “Just Folks Designing,” whose exposure to vernacular building practices tends to be “non-literary” and local to their environment and community.15 But through his commitment to self-education, formal instruction, and exploring building practices further afield, Wilkinson accumulated more knowledge and know-how, bringing him closer to the profile of the modern architectural designer,16 despite his not having the licensing credentials that some of his European contemporaries may have had access to. In distinguishing between the modern designer and the folk or vernacular builder, Hubka makes the point that architectural historians have largely overlooked the design expertise of the latter: “folk designers have seldom been granted design method because most researchers have failed (or never attempted) to place a human designing mind behind these structures and failed to see folk architecture as the real product of real people making design decisions.”17 To register his expertise and the decisions of his design mind, Wilkinson left evidence of his practice of architecting through personal letters, technical drawings, and built structures.

• 18 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape, London: John Wiley and Sons, 1975. Appleton uses the “p (...)

13I was born in 1971 in Brooklyn but went to live in that house as an infant. I grew up there until age five, when I moved back to the United States. The spaciousness and comforts of the house on Public Road—its large veranda, its dedicated living and dining areas—stayed with me into adulthood (fig. 6). As a draftsman and builder, Wilkinson was attuned to how space works emotionally, socially, and practically. In a 1972 letter to my aunt, he describes my reaction as an infant to the space and its sights: “… I find her amusing every morning I take her to the verandah [sic] and she keeps enjoying herself with the different scenes, from cart to car to bus, to man to dog and every imaginable thing…” (June 10, 1972). I still have that fascination with the veranda (and the American balcony); they fulfil a desire for both “prospect” and “refuge,” as scholar Jay Appleton has described the human attraction to the duality of veranda-like spaces.18 As the veranda is typically a roofed area, it allows one to look out onto a landscape while being protected from some of the environmental exposure of being fully outdoors. Thus, it provides coverage and access.

• 19 See John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery, Chapel Hill (...)
• 20 As Jay Edwards writes: “The highly dualistic nature of social life in West Indian society requires (...)
• 21 Black American writer bell hooks has described the function of verandas and porches on Black south (...)

14The veranda is a common feature in the architecture of tropical British colonies, where due to climate, the need for shade from sun, shelter from rain, as well as access to breeze, was paramount. The veranda also has historical and social significance within the post-slavery landscape. During slavery, it was a space for potential surveillance. On the large plantation homes, a veranda could serve as a site for oversight—for “overseeing” the work of enslaved laborers19 brought from Africa and later the indentured workers sent from India—from the comforts of inside the home. In the broad literature on verandas, scholars within and beyond architecture have discussed the varied functions of the feature, from ventilation to observation to socializing.20 These coveted spaces for controlled social visibility allow inhabitants to assert their autonomy and a public presence, despite the restrictive conditions that may exist outside these boundaries.21 Wilkinson’s veranda occupies prime real estate in his architectural drawings—a 26x7-foot expanse allotted for the home’s black occupants to make themselves comfortable, with regard to both climate and community.

• 22 University of Liverpool Library (United Kingdom), Special Collections & Archives, D396/4/9/3 - Col (...)

16A few factors precipitated the architects’ arrival in the British West Indies. First, the global economic downturn in the 1930s sparked severe unemployment and “disturbances” in Trinidad in 1938, which were followed by similar events in Barbados and Jamaica. These uprisings threatened British governance of its colonies during a vulnerable period—just as it prepared to enter World War II.22 In response, the British government passed the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 (and another Act in 1945), which provided funding to address social service needs in the colonies, including improved housing. Under the auspices of these “colonial development” policies, UK-trained architects and town planners began arriving in the British West Indies in the early 1940s.

• 23 Iain Jackson’s work on Gardner-Medwin has been useful in illuminating this era. Iain Jackson, “Tro (...)
• 24 Sir Frank Stockdale, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, op. cit. (note 22). Relatedly, in (...)

17Among the architects sent to the Caribbean was Robert Gardner-Medwin, appointed Town Planning Adviser in 1944, and stationed in Barbados.23 Four architects—Joan Burnett, Leo De Syllas, Gordon Cullen, and Leslie Creed, were dispatched to work with Gardner-Medwin by the end of 1944. “Locally recruited draughtsmen were also appointed as from June” according to archival records.24 From their home base in Barbados, the crew of architects spent time in Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, the Leeward Islands, and so on, conducting “building research” pertinent to issues in the Caribbean, and also observing, advising, or designing local projects. One of Gardner-Medwin’s projects was to provide a plan for reconstruction of central Georgetown (the capital of British Guiana), which had suffered a devastating fire in 1943. Of his time in the Caribbean, Medwin reported that:

• 26 Leo De Syllas, “Recent Planning and Developments in the Caribbean,” RIBA Journal, Feb. 1948, p. 14 (...)

18Colleague Leo De Syllas expressed that, “The West Indian craftsman is highly skilled in the use of a few simple tools. Outstanding are joiners and carpenters... The lack of any form of craft training means that even the most skilled is completely unfamiliar with a drawing in any form, technical or otherwise.”26

• 27 Sir Frank Stockdale, Development and Welfare in the West Indies, op. cit. (note 22).

19Sir Frank Stockdale, Comptroller for Development and Welfare in the West Indies, reported in 1944: “There are highly skilled craftsmen in the West Indies, particularly in carpentry and masonry trades, but most of these lack theoretical knowledge of their craft…Building in the West Indies is still virtually regarded as handicraft and it is rare to find wood-cutting machinery.”27

• 28 Robert Gardner-Medwin, “Recent Planning and Developments in the Caribbean,” op. cit. (note 26), p. (...)
• 29 According to Ralph Walker, an American architect who was part of a firm commissioned to design in (...)

21For the architects abroad, their new environments were opportunities for experimentation and learning. Exposure to tropical and sub-tropical climates led to architectural innovations produced through engagement with local populations. For example, Building Research Officer Joan Burnett “made a special study of West Indian craft building, and started a number of building experiments and tests of local materials, including the less familiar homegrown timbers.…”28 The teams’ “tropical experiment[s]” in architecture sought to identify “solutions” to climatic conditions in locales across British Empire. Innovations in tropical building design were also driven by the need for providing comfortable housing for British soldiers stationed in the West Indies. The architectural decisions that went into developing military housing in the tropics came to typify ideas about best practices in tropical architecture.29

• 30 Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature, and Technoscienc (...)
• 31 Further framing the colonial situation, in that same document Chitty continues, “There is in Briti (...)

22Because issues such as overcrowding or poor sanitation could impact the health, longevity, and productivity of colonial subjects, the British benefitted from attending to colonial welfare. The “mother country” needed their overseas colonies to be governable and “loyal” during wartime. Scholar Jiat-Hwee Chang writes about this in his book, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature, and Technoscience, noting that by the 1940s a “concern for the welfare of ‘natives’ did not merely arise from the ‘benevolence’ of the British imperial government. Rather welfare was seen as an antidote to the ‘disorder’ in many colonial territories. After all, the CDWA [Colonial Development and Welfare Act] was formulated primarily to deal with what the British called ‘disturbances’—both labor unrests and anti-colonial nationalist movements” especially across the West Indies.30 In addition, Chang surmises that British concerns and research about climatic conditions in the colonies resulted in displacing the knowledge of “tropical” architecture from local populations to the metropole. Chang’s reading of this circulation of knowledge was forewarned by Anthony Chitty, the Comptroller for the Development and Welfare in the West Indies who wrote in 1941 that “the mass of this information [about experimental work done in the building field] and the balanced conviction that is growing out of it, is not to be found in technical journals and trade literature. It can only be conveyed at first hand.”31 Yet, the internationalization of local genius was imminent, as publications reported on the developments abroad.

• 32 In addition to Chang, see Hannah le Roux, “The Networks of Tropical Architecture,” The Journal of (...)

23In the West Indies, tropical building experiments were hinged upon local needs for new housing stock, British desires to quell wartime disruptions by attending to local grievances with funding for social services, and a combined attention to designing for climatic conditions that both permanent residents and temporary military personnel would have faced. Notwithstanding this multifaceted context, tropical architecture in the mid-20^th century came to describe a field bolstered by colonial networks32 in which the inhabitants of the tropical climates could be consultants and informants, but not yet experts, about their built environment.

• 33 A relative recalls the Stampa project also involved cutting trees down and converting wood to buil (...)

24By 1946, British Guiana would establish a Central Housing and Planning Authority, made up of government appointees as well as private individuals from the building industry. During that period, Wilkinson was actively working as a building contractor. By chance, in 2012, I recovered a stash of old mail and papers at the house Wilkinson built. The documents included two small notebooks where Wilkinson recorded mostly financial matters from 1944 to 1950 (fig. 7). He lists payments from November 1944 [9/11/44; 21/12/44; 19/1/45; 16/2/45; 16/3/45; 30/3/45, and so on] up to as late as 1948 [1/17]. He recorded supplies needed and purchased. He documented accounts paid and owed. One book recounts costs for articles of clothing; steamer passes (3/8/45); and charges for a project that had a main building, water towers, and wharf piles. A few poems he transcribed from other sources are there as well. The other book has entries as early as August 1944 [24/8/44]. Several pages focus on a project in 1950 detailing his tasks: “driving piles,” “cutting piles,” “erection of manager house,” “erection of lighting plant house,” and “clearing site for Boiler House.” This work is seemingly related to his lead role for an industrial facility that the Colonial Development Corporation (est.1947, CDC) financed at Stampa Island in Guyana. Pages later, the book notes a task for “Sir Alfred,” presumably a reference to Sir Alfred Savage who became the Colonial Governor of British Guiana in 1953.33

• 34 Wilkinson’s lineage likely includes a white English forebear who carried the same surname. On the (...)

26There is an old saying that many black people are familiar with: “If you’re white, you’re right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back.” In the context of British Guiana, this meant that a white man was entitled to enforce his way of doing things on black and brown people. For Wilkinson, being black in Guyana was a matter of fact, not an indication of his ability, his skills, or his knowledge. And if the belief was that white is right, Wilkinson resorted to playing a “race card” that his challenger didn’t see coming.34 In mocking the purity of white authority, Wilkinson disrupts its performance of racial superiority and refuses the deference expected from him. But what about the black builders who could not, or would not, claim to have white in them?

• 35 C.L.R. James “The Case for West Indian Self-Government,” in Anna Grimshaw (ed.), The CLR James Rea (...)

27Caribbean anti-colonial thinker C.L.R. James writes that beginning in slavery “people who are a varying combination of white and black” in the West Indies “have always claimed superiority to the ordinary black, and a substantial majority of them still do so (though resenting as bitterly as the black the assumptions of white superiority).”35 Given this context and conditioning, was it too revolutionary, too dangerous, for Wilkinson to assert that he was both black AND right?

• 36 Interview with one of Wilkinson’s sons, 2017.
• 37 This quote is from the United Kingdom’s response to a 1960 questionnaire developed by the UK’s Roy (...)
• 38 Ibid. As a result of the questionnaire, which was reported on at the September 19, 1960 Commonweal (...)

29According to a son who worked on building projects with him, Wilkinson was not preoccupied with titles or what people called him, instead “he wanted the work that he did to speak for him.”36 Judging by his work on the family house, Wilkinson was practicing architecture. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) recognized a distinction between individuals who were architects and individuals who practiced architecture. In 1960, the RIBA noted that in the UK, “The title ‘architect’ is protected under Section I of the Architects (Registration) Act 1938, whereby it is an offence for any person who is not registered to practise or carry on business under any name, style or title containing the word ‘architect.’”37 However, the RIBA continues: “The right to practice architecture is not protected. Anyone may practice so long as they do not improperly call themselves ‘architect’”—a requirement that applied to UK practitioners as well.38 This distinction between being an “architect” and practicing architecture (or “architecting”) speaks to the space local practitioners like Wilkinson might have occupied. By family recollections, Wilkinson did engage directly with architects and engineers sent from abroad. Given the mention of “Sir Alfred” in his notebook, it is possible that the names of foreign architects like Gardner-Medwin and De Syllas were documented among Wilkinson’s papers which did not survive into the 21^st century.

• 39 Catherine W. Bishir, “Good and Sufficient Language for Building,” Perspectives in Vernacular Archi (...)
• 40 Interview with one of Wilkinson’s sons, 2017.

30It is unclear to what extent Wilkinson was an anomaly or whether his architecting would have been typical shadow work—anonymized but not anonymous. As Catherine W. Bishir explains, “the present anonymity of most traditional artisans stems from a lack of documentation, which springs in turn from their being so well known, so un-anonymous, in their community at the time. If a craftsman did not need to advertise his skills in newspapers to get work or need to sign written documents with clients, he might leave no documentary record of a long and productive career.”39 Despite the limited evidence of Wilkinson’s practice in public records, a son confirms that Wilkinson “was very notorious in the country with regards to building.”40 Wilkinson’s built projects and business records speak to the parallel path of his professionalization, in which his labor and ingenuity contributed to colonial development initiatives, and likely helped cover the costs for erecting the family home. Unlike the government-led, prefabricated housing schemes that were forthcoming, Wilkinson led his own team of family and friends in the construction process, just as other local builders would have had to do.

• 41 Georgetown (Guyana), National Archives of Guyana, op. cit. (note 9). “The Interim Government... cr (...)
• 42 Ibid. For a discussion of the early, and often neglected, history of aided self-help housing, see (...)

32By the 1950s, architects were no longer dispatched to British Guiana as development officers. Instead, self-aided building was in the local newspapers and gaining steam in British Guiana.41 The National Archives in both the UK and Guyana document that “‘Self-Help’ was formally introduced during 1953-1954 when the Government and the Caribbean Commission had sponsored seven projects” on the East Coast of the country—the region where Wilkinson lived and built his concrete home in 1954.42 The self-help housing scheme involved delivering pre-fabricated sections of homes to areas under development. There, they could be easily assembled and a home constructed by a small team. 3,500 homes were added over a period of five years. “Self-Help” signalled Britain’s plan for a gradual disinvestment from its colonies in the Caribbean, by transitioning its so-called dependencies to self-sufficiencies. The pull toward self-help was, however, already ingrained in traditions of communal work and investment for Afro-Guyanese populations who pooled resources to build their own communities after emancipation, given that they had limited access, if any, to forms of aid from banks and other entities.

• 43 Washington DC (United States), Howard University, Howard H. Mackey Sr. Papers, Collection 172-1 to (...)
• 44 Washington DC (United States), Howard University, Howard H. Mackey Sr. Papers, Collection 172-1 to (...)
• 45 Kew Gardens (United Kingdom), National Archives, “Special Housing Supplement of the British Guiana (...)
• 46 A folder at the National Archives in Kew Gardens discusses the merits of 13 different self-help ho (...)

34The archives reveal that Mackey taught “teams of local draftsmen architectural and planning techniques. The teams developed drawings for more than 4000 housing units.”43 In Guyanese documents from the era, Mackey is listed as a “US expert” and he is thanked among the other foreign experts who served in similar roles. As a 1957 letter in Mackey’s papers states, “the fund of knowledge which Mr. Mackey has brought to bear on our Housing and Planning problems and his patience and human understanding have left an indelible mark which must be reflected in those associated with him in training.”44 Evidence of Mackey’s work also appears in multiple archives in the United Kingdom, including a “Special Housing Supplement of the British Guiana Bulletin” from 1954, in which he and his fellow US team members are described as having been “a tower of strength in the Housing Department.”45 The National Archives at Kew Gardens in England document the variety of house designs (figs. 11-13) that Mackey and his group worked on for the self-help program.46

• 47 National Technical Association, “About Us page.” URL: https://ntaonline.org/about-us/. Accessed 20 (...)

35Upon return to the U.S., Mackey published articles on “Training in Architecture and Planning for Technicians in Developing Countries.” One of his articles was published in the journal of the National Technical Association (NTA)—a US-based organization founded in 192547 comprised of black engineers, black architects, and other professionals of color in the building sciences and technical fields.

• 48 In my research I also found reference to the low cost, self-building projects employed at Tuskegee (...)

36I point out Mackey’s involvement in the foreign aid project because he landed in Guyana due to his “expertise.” In a stratified racial climate in which Wilkinson, as a black Guyanese, was not expected to be an expert, Mackey’s association with Howard University, an HBCU, and his publishing and engagement with the National Technical Association—with its own deep black history—complicates who and how “expertise” was assigned and read across locales.48 It is Mackey’s foreignness that conveyed his expert status, not his blackness, per se. However, within Mackey’s archive at Howard University we find evidence not only of documented black architectural expertise, albeit from overseas, but also a racially attuned perspective about the world in which black builders like Wilkinson would have found themselves.

• 49 Georgetown (Guyana), National Archives of Guyana, op. cit. (note 9), p. 13.

37Did aid help? A retrospective report in the “Housing” folder at the National Archives of Guyana explains that the house designs used during the foreign aid period between 1954-1964 “proved inadequate, not having fully taken into account local habits and customs. These designs were modified in the light of past experience and the particular environmental context in which the houses were to be constructed.”49 Owning up to the missteps of the initial designs, the report suggests that insufficient consultation with the local population—builders and users—yielded structures that required continued revision.

• 50 George Anthony Atkinson, “British architects in the tropics,” Architectural Association Journal, v (...)

38Likewise, the dispatched architects acknowledged that only “through consultation and partnership with architects to whom the tropics are home”50 could foreign architects make significant, sustainable contributions in the Caribbean. So too in the Guyanese reports on the self-aided schemes of the 1950s, the officials acknowledged that the designs most informed by environment and local knowledge yielded the best results. Inclusion was key to the aid being beneficial.

• 51 Michelle Joan Wilkinson, “Concrete and Filigree,” in Grace Aneiza Ali (ed.), Liminal Spaces: Migra (...)
• 52 Martin Carter, “This Is the Dark Time, My Love,” in Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, Londo (...)

40British soldiers arrived in the colony in 1953 seeking to quell the political alliances between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese that were perceived as Communist and therefore threatening. The British government also feared the interethnic alliance would challenge Britain’s ability to control its colonial subjects.51 It was a “dark time,” the Guyanese poet Martin Carter wrote: “It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears. / It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery” with a “strange invader / watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.”52 Wilkinson decided to build the home for his family during this tumultuous epoch.

• 53 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Beyond Postcolonialism: New Directions for the History of Nonwestern (...)

42But some years on, that would change. As Kathleen James-Chakraborty writes: “Inexpensive, easy to construct concrete that bore the imprimatur of Le Corbusier was more often the preferred alternative in Beijing or Bombay than in Baltimore or Bruges. Yet we still know too little about what technologies were imported where and when, about how they were disseminated to builders who may never have heard of Le Corbusier, and why they were and remain so popular with clients.”53 Wilkinson was moving toward a more modern, “international style” with the concrete house. He would build other concrete houses for clients also.

• 54 Gustavo Luis Moré (ed.), Caribbean Modernist Architecture: Archives of Architecture Antillana AAA0 (...)

43Among the scholars and architects who have made a case for modern Caribbean architecture are Mark Raymond in Trinidad, L. Mark Taylor in Jamaica, Mervyn Avon in Barbados, and Jackson Burnside in the Bahamas.54 For many others, however, the advent of concrete was seen as the beginning of the end to the “specialness” of the wooden homes, many in the gingerbread house style, with their intricate ornamentation and picturesque appearance.

• 55 Rory Westmaas, “Architecture... Building Under Our Sun,” Stabroek News, 2010. https://www.stabroek (...)
• 56 On barrack housing and the “warehousing’ of laborers, see Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning, o (...)

44Today, I find it unfortunate that the wooden, Victorian houses constructed during the colonial era are valued as Guyana’s premier architectural heritage, while preservationists disregard the concrete homes local builders designed during the transition to independence. The older houses are beautiful and Afro-Guyanese “craftsmen” contributed to the design and labor that made them possible. However, in shunning concrete as some have, we lose the initial significance of this sea change in building design. Wilkinson’s concrete house asserts its independence as an idea and a reality in the direction that Guyanese architect Rory Westmaas would later describe as “reinforced concrete structures of anonymous architectural style and little relevance to the past in our culture.”55 For Wilkinson, that break in genealogy was intentionally drawn from the immediately local wooden heritage of barrack-houses and cottages built for plantation estate workers and the broader plantation estate community from which he moved to the Public Road with his family in 1954.56

• 57 On the appeal of concrete, permanence, and building as a public act, see David Morton, The Age of C (...)

45Westmaas, like others, cautioned against concrete displacing the distinctive timber architecture styles characteristic of Guyana (fig. 14). But, I can speculate that Wilkinson wanted concrete vs. wood on his family’s home because he wanted something that would be long lasting, or “everlasting” as one his trainees noted. As scholars writing about the “age of concrete” have explained, in periods when a nation is transitioning from colonial rule to independence, construction in concrete is a public performance of aspirations for permanence—whether for individual homebuilders or emerging governments.57

• 58 Rory Westmaas, “Architecture... Building Under Our Sun,” op. cit. (note 55).
• 59 Caribbean Wooden Treasures, Proceedings of the Thematic Expert Meeting on Wooden Urban Heritage in (...)

47Even Wilkinson’s veranda was a design departure. The verandas accessible by external stairs that were common on Guyana’s colonial-era wooden homes differ from the enclosed veranda on the upper level of Wilkinson’s concrete house; his elevated version blended in more with the “faceless international style”58 of modernism creeping into Georgetown than with the ornate, tropical vernacular styles that UNESCO seeks to protect as “Wooden Urban Heritage.”59

• 60 Iain Jackson, “Tropical Architecture and the West Indies,” op. cit. (note 23). Similarly, Bruno St (...)
• 61 Ibid.

50Focusing on native builders through oral history, family records, and archival research illuminates the British Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s as a locale of pre-independence architecture. Localized research and diverse methodologies are necessary for a fuller and deeper understanding of building practices in the mid-century moment where the terms “tropical,” “modern,” and “international” leaped off the pages of architectural journals and new fields of study were established. As scholar Iain Jackson explains: “[d]espite Gardner-Medwin talking on the West Indies and others discussing the Far East at the [1953 Tropical Architecture] Conference, tropical architecture thereafter was consolidated, focusing on West Africa…”60 The British Caribbean, and in this case, Guyana, South America, does not register significantly in the recording of this history, though these locales contributed lessons to building research in the “tropics.” As Jackson has further advanced, “[s]tudies of the tropics need to build on the idea of transculturation, looking at the influence of the colonial on the modern, the local self-build on the scientific and so on. It is overly simplistic to view the work of the late colonial period and early tropical works as being somehow ‘imported’ or ‘new knowledge’ fabricated independently of the military work or tropical medicine.”61 Thus, to rewrite the architectural history of this era is also to question the use of terms such as “tropical” as a generic descriptor, and to opt for language that is more specific and sensitive to the regional and national architectures emerging in the Americas, especially in Guyana and other Circum-Caribbean locales, in the mid to late 20^th century.

• 62 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science, vol. 2, no. 1- (...)

51In tandem, the perspective of individuals like Charles Eric Wilkinson and the first-hand account that his records provide are a substantive corrective to the limited impressions of West Indian building found in colonial archives. As Ann Laura Stoler has noted about colonial archives, “Some students of colonialism are rereading those archives and doing oral histories with people who lived those archived events to comment on the colonial narratives of them.”62 My work has been in this vein, recording interviews not only with family members but also with individuals who worked with Wilkinson. Yet, Wilkinson’s anonymity in national archives is also in keeping with the limitations placed on those seen as non-professional—skilled but not expert.

• 63 Georgetown (Guyana), National Archives of Guyana, op. cit. (note 9), p. 16.

52Noting Wilkinson’s achievement as an independent building contractor predating the Self-Help era is important. As with the kinds of construction projects Wilkinson took on, the nationwide government-sponsored self-aided work included dams, bridges, shops, drainage and irrigation systems, as well as homes. Reflecting on the period, the same Housing report cited earlier from the National Archives in Guyana states that by 1968 Self-Help had been institutionalized, thereby “enhancing the ‘small man’s’ capability of gaining access to his own house”; “for the first time in Guyana, the ‘small man’ had been given a real opportunity to contribute to the economic growth of the country and to his own development.”63

• 64 Wilkinson’s occupation is listed as “carpenter” on the 1974 Deed to the concrete house he had desi (...)
• 65 When asked about Wilkinson’s service on the Central Housing and Planning Authority, one of Wilkins (...)

53This idea of the “small man’s” relationship to self-actualization through land, property, and self-building can be magnified to frame Wilkinson’s story. He is the type of non-deferential, West Indian “self-seeker” that CLR James describes. Wilkinson’s practice of “architecting” afforded him decision-making roles not only in his family and local community (fig. 16), but also brought him into decision-making circles for the nation. Despite his continued classification as a “carpenter” on official documents into the 1970s,64 I would come to learn that by that decade Wilkinson had indeed become a member of the Central Housing and Planning Authority, the CHPA being the same entity that was established in 1946 to include local professionals alongside governmental appointees. While reading a 1972 letter Wilkinson wrote to one of his daughters, I was astonished to see in his own handwriting the mention of his reappointment to the group.65 That letter, along with the trove of recovered documents and his built work, serves as evidence of his architectural and business prowess. The letter is also a genealogy of sorts—the documentation that ties him explicitly to the spatial project of nation-building through his own professionalization and expertise in design and construction.