BARBICAN HOUSE
KINGSTON
This compact 4 bedroom house was designed to blend into the Barbican Neighborhood, a 1950's (then Suburban) expansion of Kingston. Surrounding houses are on large lots and tend to be single storied. In answer to them, this house, organized "symmetrically" around an axis gives the impression of being single storied with the high pyramidal roof of traditional Jamaican homes. Its two storied split leveled nature is only revealed on its garden facade.
The house is a exercise in the use of the decorative concrete language which has dominated popular architecture in Jamaica since the 1960's and although it is rendered with cement plaster, employs a totally systematized concrete block structure beneath that skin.
In similar reference to its neighbors, it employs a modern version of the concrete tiles which were popular in the early Barbican homes.