Ruskin Lane Consulting Autumn 2013 | Page 54

MY FAVOURITE BUILDING

Iron Market, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
y connection with Haiti
goes back a number of
years and I’ve grown to
love this beautiful but
ravaged country, whose
dignified and resilient people have suffered
so greatly over the years. My favourite
building there is Port-au-Prince's historic
Iron Market, which I was privileged to work
on as part of the international team that
restored the building following its
destruction in the cataclysmic 2010
earthquake. My lasting memories of the
building include my very first walk round.
The looms thundered, the floors vibrated
and it was impossible to carry out a
conversation with anyone within touching
distance. A striking feature of the interior
was that the floors within the building
joined the façade at almost random
intervals, with the floor planes cutting
across window openings at unexpected
locations.
There is something extraordinarily
gripping about iron-framed 19th-century
structures. Quite apart from their cultural
value as historic architecture, the best are
fundamentally obdurate and enduring. This
genre of structure often seems eternal.
Whether they still stand or have been lost,
they remain imprinted in our collective
cultural memories, radiating their areas of
boldness and optimism.
For well over a century, the Iron Market
– Marché en Fer – in Port-au-Prince has
been a bold symbol of Haiti’s
independence and ambition. It engages,
creating an emotional connection. Like all
great structures it has a striking physical
presence and subtler qualities that speak of
time and change, culture and community.
When the French engineers, Baudet
Donon & Cie, shipped the structural
elements of the Iron Market to Port-auPrince in 1889, what took shape on the
Boulevard Jean Jacques Dessalines was a
startling semblance of what would now be
called an aspirational future. Exported 19th
century structures were grandly scaled and
often exquisitely detailed precursors to
today’s flat-pack kit buildings. These
buildings were intended to be deliberately
impressive and highly functional European
implants, yet the Iron Market was erected
some eighty-seven years after
independence and rapidly became a
symbol of cultural and commercial
continuity. It has always had a special social

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Image © John McAsla