Irene Brisson

Haitian architectures have been produced by the interlacing of colonial, industrial, and diasporic spatial practices, but while historic creole styles are lauded as valuable patrimony, contemporary creolized practices—and practitioners—are frequently demeaned. This book argues for a holistic understanding of design as a social and discursive project that crosses geographic, classed, racialized, and linguistically marked divisions. Based on extended ethnographic study of residential construction in western Haiti, the book uses the concept of Kreyòl architecture to describe the open-ended process of creolization in design which is both rooted in Haiti and a product of centuries of transnational circulation of people, technologies, images, and materials.