Simplifying the Past: Willemstad’s Historic and Historicizing Architecture

Abstract

Willemstad, the Dutch western trading capital on Curaçao in the Caribbean, has always been a global city, with the influence of the city’s early mixed population of Dutch settlers, Iberian Jews, and enslaved Africans. The city’s resulting architectural heritage of Dutch-gabled townhouses, sprawling classicizing villas, and uniquely Curaçaoan color and curves, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage City for precisely this multiculturalism. These global aspects, however, have been increasingly eroded as twentieth- and twenty-first-century architectural developments have emphasized the Dutch contributions. This chapter questions the selective preservation and promotion that seem to revise the global past of the city in favor of an overwhelmingly Dutch past and proposes the townhouse as Dutch vernacular architecture’s enduring form.