Patricia Green | Embrace vernacular architecture for climate-resilient structures

Riddle-mi-dis/riddle-me dat, guess me this riddle and paraps not. “… A man mek him house an’ him sleep outside …”. Or say it another way, “… A man build a fine upstairs house, and he have to sleep outside …”. What is the answer? Axe, or machete, or saw. Recall the experience during and after the October 28, 2025, Hurricane Melissa? What is happening now?

Jamaica faces unique social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities severely impacted by climate change. Is there architecture that can make a difference for resilience and adaptation? Resilience is the ability to cope with a crisis and/or return to pre-crisis status quickly. Adaptation is the process of change by which to become better suited to an environment over time yet able to exist or adjust. Simply put, in Jamaican, resilience means ‘stan-up’; adaptation, ‘bounce-back’.

A creative definition for Jamaica post-Hurricane Melissa architecture should be integrating the natural environment and its landscape to benefit all people, socially sensitive designing, nurturing people-friendliness, within the Jamaica SIDS context to stand tall and elegantly as an engineered symbol of resilience and adaptation. This new definition would fulfil sustainable development goals, generate community income, and appropriate critical local knowledge and expertise needed for climate adaptation. Yes! Jamaica has done this before and can do it again!

Identifying historic layers that defined sustainable vernacular and early Jamaica-modern architecture, urban morphological growth, and traditional strategies can redress vulnerability. Many buildings have been erroneously attributed as ‘architecture’. However, architecture comprises issues of form, elements, methods, and theory of architecture. Nineteenth-century architect Louis Sullivan defined architecture as “… form follows function …”. Others identify architecture as the art of conceptualising ideas into reality that caters and adapts to the people of its surroundings and environment. Others believe architecture is a complexity of culture, politics, and problem-solving transformed into a designed object. Another said it is everything at once, tracing history and cultures, demonstrating design and engineering, urban and natural landscapes, and social ways of living.

In Jamaica, architecture should stem from a respect for the past, honouring those who paid the price to develop a nation and a product – Brand Jamaica. So, why is there a flood of so-called ‘architecture’, masquerading without aesthetic appeal across the Jamaican landscape, insensitive to the culture and the natural environment of hills, valleys, rivers, and the sea?

Look what happens when the rain falls in Kingston and St Andrew, purportedly resulting from recent ‘architecture’ developments. The nation stops. Countless persons are trapped, including school children marooned from concerned family members. Business operations become disrupted.

The complexity of culture in architecture is critical. Caribbean history at emancipation showed that over 90 per cent of the population comprised freed and enslaved Africans. The Caribbean must reclaim its architecture as totally being “fi-wi”, versus “fi-dem”. Dr Jenny Bulstrode of the University College London revealed that a pivotal iron-making technology of the British Industrial Revolution was developed by enslaved black metallurgists in St Thomas, Jamaica but patented by British enslaver Henry Cort in the 1780s. Likewise, Caribbean architecture has received such misappropriation of its design intellectual property and technological development across the centuries and must be reclaimed as ‘fi-we’ versus ‘fi-dem’.

Jamaica must stop calling the historical architecture “slave buildings”. This is Jamaica vernacular architecture, a decolonised term meaning locally born with origins in Jamaica and the Caribbean. This architecture became prolific after the 1834 Emancipation of British slavery as timber-framed designs with ornate decorative and practical ‘fretwork’. This vernacular delivered sound climatic principles; natural ventilation, hurricane and earthquake resilience, and climate adaptations. Global architect Paul Oliver defined vernacular buildings as part of the moral climate of the culture that may relate to ancestry and lineage, social and family structures, dependence on and nurturing of the environment, among others, including the accumulated knowledge and the transmission of skills to meet sociocultural needs.

Hurricane Melissa brought many arguments. Are wooden buildings appropriate after so many were destroyed when it hit? It must be emphasised that on close examination, many of those buildings were suffering from termite infestation, were long neglected, and had become structurally unsound. Others lacked foundations without being securely anchored in the ground. Many questions abound. Should hurricane-resistant reconstruction include wood architecture? The emphatic answer is yes! Use termite-resistant lumber, especially Jamaican hardwood exposed in the forests of Jamaica, some of which have been wantonly destroyed and bulldozed instead of being deployed into the Hurricane Melissa reconstruction exercise.

Critically, Jamaica has promulgated various pieces of legislation after natural disasters.

Following the 1907 earthquake, the Colonial Government of Barbados sent my grandfather, master-builder John Henry Green, to Jamaica to help rebuild the town of Falmouth. This coincided with Jamaica amending its Building Law to incorporate the prolific traditional timber-framed nogg architecture, which proved hurricane and earthquake-resilient during the 1907 Post-Disaster Needs Assessment.

Will the 2026 promulgation of the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority Act (NaRRA) deliver architecture that respects the Jamaican culture and its overall natural environment? In its interpretation, the act must undertake development and redevelopment following the catastrophic consequences of the passage of Hurricane Melissa. Yet the act also gives the NaRRA additional authority to engage in any other activity designed to promote the development of any area. What seems to be missing is any linkage to any existing legislation, e.g., the 1958 Town and Country Planning Act or the 2018 Building Act.

Will the NaRRa override the 2023 Confirmed Development Order for Kingston, St Andrew, and the Pedro Cays, or the 2018 St James Provisional Development Order, or the designated Montego Bay Marine Park? NaRRA promises to respect heritage, but will it engage wooden vernacular architecture?

Br’er Anansi was out with Br’er Goat in the plantain field, and said, “… as I’m so fat, sprinkle some ashes on the groun’ an’ when I drop I won’t mash …”. Goat did as Anansi asked. Then Anansi dropped into the ashes, which immediately flew up into Goat’s face and blinded him.

Thereafter, Br’er Nansi kept the plantain trees for himself, and when they bore, he ate the plantains. Jack Mandora, mi nuh choose none!

Patricia Green, PhD, a registered architect and conservationist, is an independent scholar and advocate for the built and natural environment. Send feedback to patgreen2008@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.