Haitian Gingerbread House

Haitian gingerbread houses are ornate houses built in Port-au-Prince between about 1885 and 1925, mainly in the districts of Bois Verna, Pacot and Turgeau. They adapted French architectural styles and building methods of the period to Haiti's climate, materials and culture, and are known for steep roofs, tall turrets and bright colours.

Origins

The style is linked to three young Haitians who went to Paris in 1895 to study architecture and returned to adapt Parisian and Victorian Gothic styles to the Caribbean, adding local motifs such as Vodou vèvè symbols. After several destructive fires, Port-au-Prince banned wood construction in 1925, the year usually taken as the end of the gingerbread period; concrete and concrete block became normal for later additions and neighbouring buildings.

Roof

• Pitch: roofs are steep, often steeper than 1:1 (45°), shedding heavy rain quickly.
• Turrets and tall roofs: draw hot air up and out of the living rooms, a passive cooling strategy.
• Framing: timber, often braced in the attic, joined with mortise-and-tenon joints and wooden pegs.
• Covering: almost all roofs now have corrugated steel over spaced (skip) sheathing. A few keep their original thin slate on more closely spaced sheathing. The turrets of Le Manoir are covered in decorative pressed-metal shingles.

Walls

Construction includes timber frame, colombage (timber frame with masonry infill) and load-bearing masonry, sometimes with iron tie rods.

2010 earthquake

After the magnitude 7.0 earthquake of 12 January 2010, the World Monuments Fund and ICOMOS, with the Haitian foundation FOKAL, surveyed about 200 gingerbread houses between 18 and 24 April 2010. Timber-frame and colombage buildings generally performed best, masonry buildings less well, and concrete and block additions worst, often damaging the older houses by pounding against them. Wood rot and termite damage increased losses. Fewer than 5% of gingerbread houses collapsed completely, compared with an estimated 40% of modern conventional buildings. The findings led to preservation manuals, an exhibition and the restoration of a house as a conservation centre.

Significance

The houses show how a light, steep, well-ventilated roof on a flexible frame suits a hot, wet, seismic and hurricane-prone island, in contrast to the heavy concrete slab roofs that failed in 2010.