5 - Simplifying the Past: Willemstad’s Historic and Historicizing Architecture

Summary

Abstract: Willemstad, the Dutch western trading capital on Curaçao in the Caribbean, has always been a global city, with the influence of the city's early mixed population of Dutch settlers, Iberian Jews, and enslaved Africans. The city's resulting architectural heritage of Dutch-gabled townhouses, sprawling classicizing villas, and uniquely Curaçaoan color and curves, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage City for precisely this multiculturalism. These global aspects, however, have been increasingly eroded as twentieth- and twenty-first-century architectural developments have emphasized the Dutch contributions. This chapter questions the selective preservation and promotion that seem to revise the global past of the city in favor of an overwhelmingly Dutch past and proposes the townhouse as Dutch vernacular architecture's enduring form.

Keywords: historic preservation, creole, vernacular architecture, Dutch architecture, Hybrid

The city of Willemstad, Curaçao, splashes its primary view, the row of colorful houses on the Handelskade (trading quay), across tourist advertisements and postcards, t-shirts and tote bags. (plate 8) This view has come to embody what the island offers: a unique Caribbean experience, celebrating urban architecture over beaches and palm trees. The focus on this view is not new or unique to modern tourist promotion—in fact the city's buildings have been celebrated from the very first images circulating of the city, in drawings and watercolors showing the city and shoreline as marginalia on maps dating to the early eighteenth century. Photography studio Soublette et Fils captured city views, including the Handelskade, from the end of the nineteenth century, selling directly to consumers as postcards or collectable prints, and also to publishers of travel guides, demonstrating an enduring local interest in promoting the cityscape. The architecture of Willemstad is unique—a combination of European styles, accumulated over time, adapting to changing tastes and needs and the local environment, that reflects the history of this island through its colonization and settlement by Europeans.

Taken as a whole, Willemstad's architecture tells a story of dynamic and multicultural city. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, however, there is a palpable shift towards a singular narrative expressed in this cityscape, a narrative that reflects the Dutch “Golden Age.