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For this reason, its effect on our personal sense of belonging to a place, a location, a neighbourhood, and pride in the overall appearance of our cities, towns, villages, can strengthen our belief in civilized values, and influence how we think and behave socially. But such an expectation in nations founded on a history of colonial biases, forced labour and economic exploitation can seem, at best, unrealistic or idealistic if local populations are aware only of such a history of deprivation to their presence, and begin to concentrate all their future social efforts on the possession of crude physical, political or economic power at the expense of mental stability and contentment nurtured by internal structural order, and the simple external visual beauty certain forms of architectural design and arrangements can promote and bestow on the pleasure of their everyday lives.
Practical wooden architecture
One surviving essential social value left by colonial administrations and immigrants, such as Guyana’s Netherlandish, Scandinavian, French and English founders, is a tradition of predominantly brilliant wooden architecture, that while outgrown in expanding European towns that needed warmth in winters, miraculously proved itself conducive both internally and externally in transferal to tropical Guyana from the 16th Century onward.
Such an appropriate or relevant transferal of architectural skills to tropical colonies like Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara became the practical and constructive flipside to the social abuses of imperialism, since, obviously, most European colonials had no intention of living without the proper application of their architectural and other skills brought to the tropics.
This example became shared over time by its sheer visual presence, beauty and practicality attracting the evolving colonial labour force which inherited the ownership and rule of whole ex-colonial geographical territories.
In upkeeping the continuity of such a founding architecture , the criteria used by Guyanese professionals and informed citizens is obviously based on recognizing the practical constructive beauty of such conducive architecture over the negative historical residue left by European colonialism. In other words, obsessive social ideological and ethnic definitions of evolving Guyanese national culture can diminish our collective civilized self-worth with one-sided regressive reasoning derived from negative historical experiences.
Venetian/Netherlandish/Guyanese roots
The influence of Palladio’s and other Venetian architectural qualities first arrived in 17th Century Guyana via the influence of pioneers from Flanders and Holland, recently freed from Spain’s 16th Century (Charles The Bold) imperial dominance over the Netherlands.
Nevertheless, colonial Europeans, like later non-White or non-Western colonials in early Guyana, advanced educationally by learning from the more progressively organized Latin cultures of Rome and Venice from the 19th Century back.
Many of the leading early thinkers, writers, and visual artists of the Netherlands adopted Latin names in homage to the intellectual tradition they were nurtured on. Later in Guyana’s history, many local historians would become confused as to the origin of the resulting hybrid original style of Guyanese wooden architecture, which really showed the influence of Palladio’s Venice on local builders during Dutch, French, and English rule in Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice.
All these transferred European influences on emerging Guyana is miraculously rooted in the conducive geographical similarity of Lowland Dutch and Venetian landscapes to the Guyanese ‘Wild Coast’; and it is dubious that any other European culture other than the Southern and Northern Dutch could have become the initial colonisers of Guyana (eighty years before Suriname became Dutch-associated in 1665), since nature provided the opportunity for the transferal of necessary skills such as landscape gardening, canal irrigation, kokers, land reclamation from the sea, dams, dykes, and seawalls, which the Dutch, with slave labour, applied to the long, flat coastal landscape of Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice in order to develop its fertile productivity and future economic prospects.
Proof of similarities
The proof of such conducive similarities between the landscape of Holland and Venice with Guyana exists in the amazing paintings of Venetian painters like Georgione, Canaletto and Guardi, and 17th Century Dutch landscape painters like Jan Van Goyen, Van Ruisdael, Esais Van de Velde, Hobbema, Potter, Aert Ven der Neer and Albert Cuypt.
Because of inland Venice’s development of irrigated agricultural farms and estate villas in the fluctuating economic prospects of Venice’ economy in the late 16th Century, Palladio’s adventurous Venetian estate architecture, via various European colonials, also became of additional relevance to the Guyanese landscape and climate as Guyanese society emerged.
