5 Featured Architects from the Caribbean

# 5 Featured Architects from the Caribbean *By TropMod Editorial* The Caribbean has produced architects of genuine originality whose work remains undervalued by the international press. The five practitioners profiled here span the region from Cuba to Barbados, from the post-independence building programmes of the 1960s to the contemporary luxury market of the 2020s. What unites them is a shared predicament: each has had to answer the question of what it means to build modern architecture in the hurricane corridor, on islands shaped by colonial extraction and tropical abundance, where materials and labour are constrained by geography and economy. Their answers differ radically, and each one is worth studying. --- ## Wilson Chong — Kingston, Jamaica Wilson Chong (1923-2001) was a Chinese-Jamaican architect born in Santiago de Cuba who shaped the built identity of independent Jamaica more decisively than any practitioner of his generation. He studied at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois, returning to Jamaica as the country approached independence in 1962. The new nation required stadiums, ministries, and schools — the physical infrastructure of sovereignty. Chong delivered them. Chong understood reinforced concrete not as a brutalist material but as a plastic medium capable of sweeping curves and daring cantilevers. He has been described as the master of the shell-shaped concrete curve, capturing both his structural ingenuity and his grasp of how built form meets Caribbean light. His signature elements include thin-shell concrete canopies, mast-like vertical elements that read as abstractions of palm trunks, and an insistence on the open concourse as civic space. His defining project is the **National Stadium** in Kingston (1962), completed for the Central American and Caribbean Games and awarded the first Governor General's Award for architecture. The cantilevered concrete canopy shading the main stand is a gesture of extraordinary confidence: a young nation announcing its arrival through structural daring. Its open form — the absence of enclosing walls, the uninterrupted flow from concourse to seating — encoded a political vision of democratic gathering. The **Ministry of Education** building in New Kingston deployed a crisp modernist block of rhythmic concrete brise-soleil, embodying the technocratic optimism of the decade. The **Post and Telegraph Headquarters**, designed with partner Karl Thorne, extended his language into a taller urban typology while maintaining the climatic intelligence of his lower buildings. Chong became the most prolific designer of churches in Jamaican architectural history. He was a founder of the Jamaican Society of Architects, later the Jamaican Institute of Architects, and his career established the template for architectural practice in the Anglophone Caribbean: technically proficient, civically engaged, and conscious of its lineage from the colonial veranda to the independence-era monument. --- ## Colin Laird — Port of Spain, Trinidad Colin Laird (1924-2018) was born in North Shields, England, to a family of Scots origin, and arrived in Trinidad as a serviceman during the Second World War. He stayed. Over a fifty-four-year career as a sole practitioner, he designed more than two hundred public and civil buildings and over two hundred private homes, making him the most prolific architect in Trinidad and Tobago's history. Laird's architecture was disciplined, reticent, and deeply attentive to climate. He described his aspiration as adapting a relatively austere European modernism to Caribbean conditions — and the operative word is adaptation. His Scottish origins, the cast-iron tradition of Glasgow and the stone restraint of the Borders, inform a language that is structural rather than ornamental. His signature elements include the deep shadow line — the eave extended beyond functional necessity to create a band of shade that reads as a compositional device — and an almost tactile use of cast iron as balustrade, grille, and screen. His roof forms, expressed as floating planes detached from the walls below, provide the ventilation stack effect essential in the humid tropics. Laird won the Caribbean-wide competition for **Queen's Hall** in 1956, and the completed building, opened in 1959, became his most celebrated work. The radical roof form — a striking folded plane that appeared to hover above a fully glazed lobby — announced a new architectural ambition for the young nation. The **National Library** (NALIS) on Abercromby Street demonstrated his capacity for urban presence: a civic facade addressing the street with dignity while internal courtyards brought light and air deep into the plan. The **Jean Pierre Complex**, a multi-sport facility, applied the same principles to athletic programme. The **Brian Lara Promenade**, designed in the 1990s, transformed a traffic-choked corridor into a linear public garden that reconnected the city to its harbour. Laird restored over twenty heritage buildings across the region, designed sixty-five houses for Grenada's government, and served as President of the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of Architects from 1961 to 1962. His contribution is the architecture of nation-building itself — not spectacle but institutions, the patient construction of a civic realm a young country could recognise as its own. --- ## Neil Hutchinson / Studio Blue Architects — Bridgetown, Barbados Neil Hutchinson founded Studio Blue Architects in 2002, establishing the most visible exponent of contemporary tropical modernism in the Eastern Caribbean. A chartered architect registered in Barbados and the United Kingdom with over twenty-seven years of professional experience, he studied at the University of Nottingham and is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Studio Blue's work occupies a productive territory: the contemporary luxury villa, designed for an international clientele but rigorously rooted in Barbadian climate and craft. Hutchinson's approach is definitively modern but with an ecological slant — a formulation pointing toward the practice's central preoccupation with building performance in the hurricane zone without sacrificing spatial drama. His signature elements include the deep overhang deployed as a spatial device, the operable timber screen that modulates between privacy and panorama, and a material palette drawing from the Barbadian vernacular — coral stone, local hardwoods, and a restrained white render. Water features double as microclimatic devices, cooling breezes before they enter living spaces. The **My Love** villa (2023, Freights Bay) is the practice's most accomplished residential work. Perched on a clifftop on Barbados's south coast, the house fuses minimalist geometry with bohemian texture: white volumes intersected by timber pergolas, an infinity pool extending toward the Atlantic, a spatial sequence moving from shaded arrival court through a double-height living space to an open terrace suspended above the surf. **Palm Trees Villa**, within the Sandy Lane Estate, adapts the same principles to a five-bedroom holiday home — bedrooms organised as private pavilions connected by covered walkways, a material language of coral stone and teak simultaneously luxurious and climatically appropriate. **Inch Cubed** (2022), on the rugged southeast coast, demonstrates tighter-budget discipline: a compact geometric volume oriented to capture trade winds, elevations alternating between solid and screen. Hutchinson's contribution is the proof that the luxury villa market — so often a vehicle for imported, climatically inept architecture — can produce work of genuine local intelligence. His buildings belong to Barbados. --- ## Ricardo Porro — Havana, Cuba, and Paris, France Ricardo Porro Hidalgo (1925-2014) was born in Camagüey, Cuba, and graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of Havana. He spent the late 1950s in exile in Venezuela, having fallen afoul of the Batista regime, and returned after the revolution to receive the commission that would produce the most radical architectural project in the hemisphere's twentieth century. In 1961, Fidel Castro, driving past the former Havana Country Club, decided on the spot that its golf course should become Cuba's National Art Schools. Porro, given two months to produce a design, brought in the Italian architects Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi. Together they conceived five schools — Modern Dance, Plastic Arts, Dramatic Arts, Music, and Ballet — that abandoned orthogonal rationalism for an architecture of Catalan vaults and terracotta, organic forms evoking Gaudí and an imagined Afro-Caribbean vernacular. Porro rejected the machine aesthetic as inadequate to the Cuban condition. His buildings were conceived as organisms, not machines. Brick, terracotta, and ceramic tile — materials produced by Cuban craftsmen — replaced imported steel and glass. The vault, rather than the frame, became the primary structural unit, generating spaces that swelled and contracted, that opened to gardens and enclosed courtyards, that followed topography rather than imposing upon it. His signature elements include the thin-shell Catalan vault, locally produced terracotta tiles in rhythmic patterns modulating light and air, and a formal vocabulary drawn from organic forms — seed pods, upturned petals, the swell of a wave. Porro designed two of the five schools. The **School of Modern Dance** exploded into interconnected, fragmentary vaults recalling the ruins of Piranesi rendered in brick — a building that seems to have grown from the earth. The **School of Plastic Arts** coiled through palm trees as a surreally organic village, its undulating roofscape a labyrinth of light and shadow. Both represent a conception of architectural space as fundamentally sculptural — the building not as container but as inhabitable form. The schools were never finished. The political climate turned; the project was condemned as ideologically suspect, too individualistic, insufficiently aligned with Soviet-influenced prefabrication. Porro left Cuba in 1966, settling in Paris. He died in 2014, having seen the National Art Schools placed on the World Monuments Fund watch list and their restoration begin. His contribution is irreducible to any single building. He demonstrated that the Caribbean could generate work of world-historical importance — an argument for architecture of climate, craft, and conviction over system and standardisation. --- ## Antonio Segundo Imbert — Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic Antonio Segundo Imbert represents a generation of Caribbean architects for whom tropical modernism is not a historical period to be referenced but a living language to be deployed and extended. A graduate of the Universidad Pedro Henríquez Ureña (UNPHU) in Santo Domingo, Imbert founded Simples Arquitectura and has built a practice spanning hospitality, residential, commercial, and infrastructure projects across the Dominican Republic, concentrated in the Punta Cana corridor. Imbert's architecture might be described as Caribbean minimalism — clean volumes, extended horizontal planes, a restrained palette of local stone, timber screens, and white stucco — always in service of the tropical condition. His work understands that Caribbean luxury is not thermal sealing and mechanical control but the opposite: natural air movement, deep shade, a space that dissolves its boundaries when the weather permits. Each project begins with analysis of prevailing winds, solar orientation, and the specific character of light at that latitude. His signature elements include brise-soleil deployed as compositional grids across entire façades, deep loggias functioning as outdoor living rooms, and an insistence that circulation should be an architectural experience. Water — pools, canals, reflecting surfaces — is positioned to cool incoming air and register the passage of Caribbean light. The **Sublime Samana Hotel and Residences** (Las Terrenas, Samaná Peninsula) is his most complete hospitality work. A low-rise resort of individual pavilions within a mature coconut plantation, the project achieves rare integration of architecture and landscape: buildings placed among the palms rather than palms planted around buildings. The material language — local stone plinths, timber pergolas, white cubic volumes — is recognisably modernist yet entirely relaxed. The **Zemi Miches Resort** (Punta Cana, 2025), part of the Curio Collection by Hilton, extends his language to a larger scale while maintaining climatic intelligence. The **Punta Cana International Airport** terminal expansion demonstrates his capacity at infrastructure scale — vast roof canopies, layered screening devices, and an open-air spatial organisation that makes the terminal feel like a covered plaza rather than a processing facility. Imbert's contribution lies in demonstrating that the region can produce architects operating at international scale without importing international solutions. His work proves that the principles forged by the mid-century generation — orientation, ventilation, the primacy of shade — remain not merely valid but commercially viable. --- These five architects — Chong, Laird, Hutchinson, Porro, and Imbert — represent distinct moments in Caribbean architectural history, from the independence era through the contemporary market. What connects them across decades, islands, and political contexts is a shared conviction that architecture in the Caribbean must be invented here, not imported. The climate, the materials, the social conditions, and the cultural inheritance demand it. Each has answered in a different register, and the Caribbean built environment is immeasurably richer for it.