Note of the Living Deb

After we came back from the cruise, I looked for a book on Jamaican architecture. I wanted something that showed the whole range of architecture, not just rich people's houses, and I wanted lots of pictures and was hoping to find clues about how to properly build in an area with a lot of sun and a lot of storms.

I found something much closer than I ever expected to find: Caribbean Style by Suzanne Slesin, Stafford Cliff, Jack Berthelot, Martine Gaume (e has accent), and Daniel Rozensztroch. It's mostly pictures and it shows a wide variety of houses from lots of Caribbean Islands.

I only saw a few building hints:

* Broad roofs protect the building from rain and sun - I already knew that extending the eaves far beyond the exterior walls provides you with a lot more shade, but these guys often make this shaded area just as big as the indoor area and do a lot of their living out there.
* Maximize air circulation - I first noticed this at one of Lyndon B. Johnson's houses that is open to the public which was built with rooms sticking out so that they had windows on three sides. These guys use a different strategy: they may have windows on only two sides, but the covered porch is open to breezes, and then they use a lot of shutters on the windows and have openings in the walls that look like fancy vents to let air circulate.
* It's common to use stone floors on the first story, because they resist fire, and wood floors on the second story, because they resist earthquakes.
* Some houses are built over stone bases and are meant to be moved. Originally this allowed workers to live near whatever part of the field they were working. I wonder what they do during hurricanes.

After a while, I started noticing that they used several different words for porch. I wondered if this was just to keep from using the same word over and over or if there were some subtle difference in meaning I could learn from. After some re-reading and a look in the dictionary, I decided it was some of both. Here are the terms I found in order by how often they were used.

* gallery - emphasizes length. Generally refers to a porch that extends for the entire length of the house. This was the word most commonly used in the book.
* veranda - a pretty generic term.
* balcony - emphasizes railings or balustrades and being above the ground floor.
* terrace - emphasizes being raised. These were usually on a second floor, otherwise raised from ground level, or in one case cantilevered over a slope. This term also refers to what I call a patio, or just a slab of something hard that could be attached or detached from the house and might or might not have any kind of built structure overhead for shade.
* porch - used in this book only for covered entrance approaches. I have these on my house, and they are good for standing in out of the rain while fiddling with your key to unlock the door.
* portico - emphasizes columns or supports.

Two related terms:

* gazebo - a cute little detached porch, really
* pavilion - these just looked like buildings to me.

Sadly I suspect all of these porches and shutters and louvers and vents are of less use when one has central air conditioning. Getting a good breeze is just a lot less important. I couldn't even tell if they had screens on their windows or glass or both. All I could make out were various kinds of shutters. I did see mosquito netting over the beds, so maybe shutters are all there are.

I'm also not sure how to mix shutters, glass, and screens. Plus, some shutters open to the outside and some to the inside. It's nice to control them from the inside. But having them on the outside could make them very handy in a bad wind storm. I've read a bit about protecting your windows in hurricanes and tornadoes, and the common options are to either cut a piece of plywood the size of your window and find some way to attach it to your house, or you can buy something called storm shutters that are expensive and metal and considered ugly and problematic. It seems like one could attach regular real shutters that would look fine and also work easily and well.

Magical Interlude

At the open house last Saturday, I had a little time after checking out the yurt before my next session so I went over to the HRC to check out cartoons from the 1920s. Just outside the building was a magician doing both original and historic tricks. The first one I saw was great. He had a cassette tape playing instructions on how to do magic, and he acted like he was following the instructions. Except he misheard "banana" whenever the speaker said "bandana." And of course it was the kind of instructions where they don't tell you everything in the right order. "But of course you have palmed the bandana," as he looks up at us, surprised. "And it is now hidden in your left hand," as he opens his left hand and finds nothing in it. But in the end, the banana that he had squished up inside the bag isn't really in there after all. Ta da!

Cartoon Interlude

Then I slipped in for a bit of cartoon watching. It's not always obvious in new art forms which techniques were invented earliest. I am here to tell you that creative laws of physics were already being thoroughly explored in the 1920s. Just in case you were wondering.

Tour (Intro)

Finally it was time to go to the classical tour of the university "beginning at the Tower, through the Roman-style 'six-pack' and ending at the Greek amphitheater behind Jester Hall." That's pretty much all he covered. Still, I learned a few interesting things.

Alphabet History

In the back of the base of the tower, there are a lot of letters from various alphabets. Our tour guide gave us an interesting story about those letters. First are some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, examples of some of the first writing. Wikipedia's alphabet entry explains that some hieroglyphs were syllabaries used to transliterate foreign words and such.

Then there is the entire Phoenician alphabet, from which all current alphabets are derived except Korean, which was invented by a King. According to the wikipedia entry on Hangul, it was created to be easier for Koreans to read than the Chinese characters and it succeeded. It says this writing system has been in and out of favor ever since and is now used in both North and South Korea.

Next is Hebrew and then Greek, which both came directly from the Phoenician. The Greeks invented vowels.

Next is the Roman alphabet, which I am using right now!

There are also the names of a lot of famous people inscribed all over that building chronologically from right to left on the two sides of the base (that aren't the front or back). There are also the crests of important universities such as Harvard (duh) and the University of Mexico (oldest in the Americas), but of course not our rival state school.

Domes

The tower faces the capitol with formal gardens between. Our capitol building has the now ubiquitous dome, made from metal. Before the 1900s, the two largest domes were the Pantheon in Rome and the Sophia in Constantinople, made of concrete. They kept the domes from caving in on themselves by making the concrete lighter as you go up. I can't imagine.

Seal

The seal of UT shows an open book floating over a star, which is the pictorial version of the Latin words below the graphic: "Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis" or Learning is the Bulwark of the State. (And here I thought it was taxes or maybe production.)

I also learned that "gymna" means "naked," so a gymnasium is a place where you run around naked. Someone said they thought that's what a dorm was. The tour guide explained that no, "dormitory" comes from "dormir," to sleep.

Amphitheatre

At the cute little amphitheatre I learned a little more about ancient Greeks and the beginning of theatre. I'd heard recently that the Greeks had invented plays. Our tour guide said they invented tragedies and comedies. The platform at the bottom of the amphitheatre he called the orchestra. This comes from "orche," to dance, so "orchestra" is the dancing place. This is where the chorus would dance.

If you make a sound while at the center of the orchestra, it sounds like you have a microphone (a good one with no static) and is really cool.

One or two actors would separate from the chorus and eventually the actors gained in importance and the chorus became less and less important until now it has disappeared. And that is the history of theatre!

And here's a little more. Stadiums began being the length of races. There would be rows of people on each side of the raceway. Then the Romans built coliseums which allowed many more people to watch races. And now we can have huge stadiums with really big scoreboards.