Island Village
During the first part of our stay in Jamaica, our path led us to what is known as the Island Village. The Island Village is equipped with a pier for cruise ships and is located at an artificial beach in Ochos Rios in the north of the island. It was designed and built to fulfil a particular function. The restaurants and shops might be open daily but the place only comes alive when a cruise ship anchors. These then each anchor for one day and deliver their human cargo to the village. The mostly Western tourists then encounter a decent ensemble of Caribbean architecture put together by the architect Ann Hodges. She surveyed and researched current and historic Jamaican and Caribbean architected for the construction of Island Village. That’s why Island Village resembles an essay on the endemic architecture and was built with traditional materials and techniques. We became aware of Island Village thanks to sociologist Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, whose brilliant indexical work on Jamaican architecture should be emphasised at this point. In an interview, the professor for architecture at the University for Technology in Kingston told us, among other things, about her observations on the to date unappreciated architecture of the Rastafarians, which through certain traits always indicates a mystical, absent place.
