JAMAICA AN NEW ARCHITECTURE

Trevor Burrowes The problem with celebrating the new is coming up with a sensible notion for what IS new. Building (supposedly) in the international style is not new. It is in every ambitious country in the world. It was one thing when Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created the international style in architecture. I was taught in a program created by Josef Albers, a colleague of "Mies" at the Bauhaus who also emigrated to the US. These masters were indeed original, highly educated, idealistic, visionary, thinking for the first time about an architecture for the industrial age that they hoped would bring in a better way of life for humankind. 

It didn't do that, unfortunately, and instead degenerated into a banal formula that every builder can generate. It was very common in communist countries, but just about everywhere else too. It is by now nothing new or creative. It has become ANTI creative, forestalling new thinking. Now, people are waking up to the fact that the ubiquitous concrete box is not what they want, is a mistaken direction, and must be replaced by a renewed examination of past heritage. Paradoxically, to look to the past IS new. It is not what we've been doing since the war, and the influx of super abundant cheap oil to make those bad designs work, to power the air conditioners, to manufacture the cement, is now coming to a close. These buildings show no sign that they understand that. They are behind the times, clinging to a reality that is slipping away. 

All the choices for the parliament building show the same sickly lack of new thinking. All are formulaic and banal. All say nothing distinctive or aspirational about Jamaica, or about the new direction it must take.. None of this is new.