A Declaration of Place: African Influences in Vernacular Architecture in South Florida
Leaflet for the exhibition, A Declaration of Place: African Influences in Vernacular Architecture in South Florida, at the Miami-Dade Cultural Center, February 2 – 30, 2002. The second page of the leaflet reads: Enslaved West Africans brought traditions and vales with them to the New World. One of their cultural legacies is a simple, honest wooden structure that we know as the shotgun house. Basically, it is one room wide and two or more rooms deep. The name may have its roots with the Yoruba people of West Africa who use the word “shogun” meaning God’s House. In Haiti, by the early eighteenth century, the Africans’ building techniques and philosophy of space had been creolized with European and indigenous construction to give birth to the shotgun house, an environmentally suitable and sociable dwelling.
Copyright Barbara Young