On bad architecture

I was driving into Port of Spain this afternoon from the east, off the Beetham. When you get past the dirty-concrete "twin towers" of the Central Bank, and the ramshackle dockfront, and Wrightson Road curves round towards the weirdly-coloured Crowne Plaza hotel, you suddenly hit a couple of hundred yards of truly sinister cityscape. On both sides tall buildings loom over you, a government complex on the right and the new Hyatt and an unfinished office tower on the left, and the road spreads out grandiosely into a six-lane highway for a few seconds. The buildings are dramatically out of scale and out of style with the rest of the city, and they speak of money, power, and facelessness, a truly ominous combination. They say that someone in this mad little island aspires to make us like Miami or New York by building skyscrapers; someone has the wild idea that development can be represented by size.

And have you really looked at the architecture of these buildings? It is so bad, so impersonal and anonymous, that truly these buildings could be set down in any city in the world, and it really wouldn't matter which. There is not a shred of Caribbean in them, not the faintest echo of Trinidadian-ness: no awareness of a tropical, almost equatorial climate, no thought of energy saving, no anxiety about the sea rising and spilling over the waterfront. They are just big, blank, anonymous, unimaginative, uncreative. In a word, gross. Without taste, without elegance, without grace. Just big. Just expensive.

At the same time as these monstrosities are going up, private citizens are getting together to implore the prime minister to intervene and rescue the famous Boissiere "gingerbread house" by the Savannah, which is up for sale and likely to be smashed up and turned to rubble by some greedy developer if the sale goes through. What will the PM do, I wonder? Will he ask himself, is there any political mileage in this? Can I score points by positioning myself as a champion of conservation and heritage? Or is this just a group of middle-class nutters and tree-huggers who can safely be ignored or publicly put down? Shall I wring my hands and say this is a private matter, and wait for the ruckus to quieten down, and then have the satisfaction of seeing a nice developed-nation apartment tower rise up on the site to confound the doubters?

I don't know what he will do, assuming he thinks it's necessary to do anything at all. But that's the point: this sort of thing is left entirely up to the politicians of the day and the political requirements of the day. No government has instituted a serious policy on conservation, on protection of heritage buildings, on the planning of the urban environment: so nobody is obliged to do anything if they don't happen to feel like it. All this talk of 2020 vision and "developed country status" — but one of the essentials of serious development is to develop a national policy on matters of importance, a position to which governments must refer when taking decisions. But the fine art of politics is not to have a stated policy on anything. Or if a policy is inescapable, to have some way of circumventing it or ignoring it or stalling the implementation of it. In this respect, we have many geniuses on our political scene.

So much could have been done with that dock area without turning it into a farcical mini-Miami. Anyone who has visited San Juan (the Puerto Rican one, not the Croisee) or Havana will have been struck by what can be achieved if you are serious about preserving and restoring the old part of the city and its characteristic buildings and architecture. Old Havana and Old San Juan are places of imagination and beauty, places which make you hopeful, places Puerto Ricans and Cubans can feel proud of. But what happens in Trinidad? You turn old Port of Spain into a slum, you block off the city from the sea (you leave the sea in such a mess that no one would want to be exposed to it anyway), and you build enormous faceless towers, and you call it development.