IF THE most popular Guyanese opinions today about the historical foundation of their country is a retrospective opinion, concerned mainly with long past lifestyles of slavery, indentureship, and political rivalry among those who form post-colonial governments, then nothing worthy of emulation or continuity might be visualized by an extremely one-sided and unrealistic vision of Guyana’s early constructive roots as a civilized nation and society.

For example, if the stereotypical term, ‘Colonial architecture’ becomes accepted as more ‘real’ than the proven, daily practical value of forms of such architecture long rooted in Guyana as a colony, then centuries of Guyanese constructive history will have gone to waste as nothing more than ‘oppression’, where nothing of useful positive value is seen as intentionally inspired by examples of labour and enterprise in the first hard pioneering centuries of Guyana’s social origin.
This, of course, is far from true, as minds are no longer obsessed with negative retrospection, but rather appreciative of the continuity of Guyanese practical traditional wooden architecture realize.

The constructive desire
The growth of local architecture in Guyana is based on a desire to, at first, enjoy one’s natural surroundings, then, as the local population grew, the need to enjoy one’s neighbourhood, street, town, and city also grew as an opportunity for constructive beauty and order.
Without this desire, architecture will mean nothing much to citizens, and a callous, even rude ‘don’t-care’ attitude to the routine of everyday living can stealthily creep into the social life citizens must share with each other.
Contrary to stereotypical views of the lifestyle of colonial Dutch pioneers in 16th, 17th and 18th Century Essequibo, Berbice, and Demerara, such people were far from wealthy overlords here, living in grand, comfortable buildings while only African slaves and indigenous tribes lived in sheds and primitive huts.
Apart from the first rustic wooden fortress compounds constructed by Dutch sailors on the Guyanese ‘wild coast’, and later Governors’ brick residences, many early White settlers lived in Native Indian huts with thatched roofs; slept on beds stuffed with dry leaves, etc.
This is substantiated by early travel writers like Bolingbroke, Van Berkel, Pinchard, Dalton, and even Governor Storm van Gravesande, who, in his diary, recorded a letter to his Dutch West India employers in Holland to send him glass for windows so he could see the tropical surroundings as it rained, and green paint for his house, which was certainly not of stone, but of the abundant variety of timber around him, and the natural choice of most early Guyanese architects who emerged with time.
The later wooden house raised on wooden or stone pillars to accommodate Guyana’s watery lowland terrain is both a tradition learnt from Warrau Indian reed and bark huts raised above river banks and interconnected with narrow bamboo walkways, as well as the early wooden architecture of the lowland Netherlands and early Venice, but also the firm input of Scandinavian settlers from Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway, all of whom brought conducive wooden architectural skills still evident in their countries today.
Indeed, we know of other vital skills lost when the succeeding British Guiana authorities in 1802 vetoed the Dutch administration’s intention to settle 500 Swedish dairy farmers in 19th Century Guyana.
Mud, mosquitoes, insects, harsh rain and sun, tropical diseases, reptiles, and jaguars in abundance greeted White settlers for centuries, and we can visualize the frustration of such a raw, untamed environment influencing an equally crude and paranoid White reaction to feared slave labourers.

Venetian influence
European and educated Creole knowledge of Palladio’s conducive estate architecture was introduced to early 17th Century Dutch-ruled Guyana as a way of citizens nurturing maximum enjoyment out of their surroundings, the landscape and its patriotic potential.
Palladio’s interest in villas constructed to last as part of agricultural estates in inland Venice became a harmonious structural and aesthetic value beyond the easy stereotype of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ class relations. The value is organizational and practical.
For instance, the abandoned estate buildings decaying across the Guyanese coast today can continue to function as renovated spaces and structures for libraries, study rooms, social clubs with cultural and sports events, weekly classic film programs, etc.
Those four compass-sided flights of stairs found at Palladio’s inland Venetian Villa estates like Badoer, Chiericati, Piovene, and Rotonda, as well as certain of Portugal’s early architecture, became familiar white wooden stairways to attractive, often small, wooden houses with raised floors against flooding in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, coastal villages like Kitty, and the countryside by the mid-19th Century onwards.
Special curved tin canopies, painted in stripes over porticoes, and east and west bedrooms with veranda doors towards sunrise and sunset, are Venetian. Two great Latino-European, or Italian architects during British Guiana, César Castellani and Baron Siccama, in precious wooden structures like Castellani House and the Victoria Law Courts, carry on, in new environmental spaces, the wooden sumptuousness of Venice’s past, conducive to Guyana’s local wealth of various timbers.
We are reminded of the Venetian painter, Canaletto’s 1765 painting: ‘Architectural Perspective’, in Siccama’s grand wooden flanking hallways at Georgetown’s Victoria Law Courts; and Canaletto’s ink-wash drawings of Venetian river banks spawned numerous 18th Century British ink drawings of similar Guyanese river-bank scenes.
The windows of the St George’s Cathedral are Venetian, as are those of the Town Hall, its arched verandas, and floors separated by pillars. The so-called ‘Demerara shutters’ are distinctly Venetian in origin, as is the humped ‘Kissing bridge’ in the Botanical Gardens.
The high ceilings and four-door entrances to Castellani House’s lower floor is Palladian. The beautiful pale pastel pink, yellow and violet serial oblong reliefs on the outside walls of countless Guyanese wooden houses and doors are timeless structural references to rural Venetian villas like the Dolphin-Bolduc and Monza-Mangili.
The once famous white-washed stone pillars with relief oblongs which held up even quite humble wooden Guyanese houses are part of numerous aspects of Palladian and Venetian architecture, ingeniously redistributed to tropical Guyana well over two centuries ago.
These houses and their various aspects were not only of fascinating interest to industrious Guyanese children who drew local architecture as fun, but captured the interests of quiet citizens, emigrants, and visitors to British Guiana, at least up to the1960s, after which various destructive influences descended upon the society and nation and distracted from such constructive values.