The Betty Black Blog

So here we are in the twenty-first century building our twenty-first century houses. We’ve come a long way…but have we?

Look at the houses in Cherry Gardens or Mona or Portmore. Concrete blocks sitting on the ground. Locked up from the rain or the heat or the wind. Air conditioners blasting in the Cherry Gardens ones and some of the others too.

Now take a drive through some of the older areas. Vinyard Town is a great example. Look at even older houses like Devon House or Harmony Hall; the Georgian and Queen Anne Victorian styles What do you see? Houses built for our climate not the modern “international style” we started to build in the sixties.

Devon House

So, how do we build a house for our climate? Look to the past. Use “green” air conditioning. Old houses were a marvel of air circulation. Firstly, the house was build off the ground, allowing air to circulate underneath. Quite often this area, or “cellar,” was enclosed with lattice of some sort to prevent animals from getting under the house. The larger homes, great houses or town homes, would have an actual cellar. The poorer homes, like farm-worker cottages, would just rest on blocks of limestone. This feature would also serve to keep the damp out during the rainy season.

The second, and possibly more important element, was the roof vent. This allowed the hot air trapped between the ceiling and the roof a means of escape. Windows were often sash windows with shutters: louvers or jalousies. The jalousies were opened and the windows closed to let in the light or, more often, the jalousies were closed and the windows opened to let in the air. Should a hurricane be imminent windows and jalousies were closed and barred. No time wasted in the days before satellite imagery when the only warning of a hurricane was a bell ringing at the coast when the storm made landfall!

And then, of course there were those wonderful verandahs on two or three sides of the house. Besides being the perfect place to gather, the verandah kept both heat and rain out. If you look at some of the former homes in downtown Kingston or in towns across the island, you will notice than many of these old houses have upstairs verandahs completely enclosed with lattice or jalousies. This allowed the householders privacy to leave all their bedroom windows and doors open in hot weather. In fact, I remember my grandmother telling me that as a child they would actually move their beds out and sleep on the upstairs verandah in very hot weather!

Headquarters House

Many of these old houses also had internal door lights or transoms, small latticed or louvred openings above the internal doors and, on occasion, even interior windows! This didn’t do much for privacy but it certainly allowed air and light to circulate within the house.

I grew up in a house built in the 1940s with a crawlspace, a roof vent, jalousies and internal lattice transoms and I can state quite definitely that it was a great deal cooler than my cousins’ brand new 1960s built on the ground, slab-roofed unventilated house.

So here’s my point. Why don’t we bring back some of those old features. The houses may cost marginally more to build but, in the long run, wouldn’t we have a substantial savings in air conditioning costs? And those of us who can’t afford air conditioning would be a damn sight cooler and more comfortable!

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